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“When the secular was sacred”

“When the secular was sacred”

Last updated on: June 7, 2017 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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“When the secular was sacred” 2017-06-06T22:06:24-04:00 Gene Veith

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I grew up in a liberal mainline denomination in the 1950s and 1960s, going to the conventions and participating in the youth conferences. Reading Kenneth L. Woodward’s account of this phase of church history in Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama explains a lot of things that I witnessed and had to go through. (See my earlier posts on Woodward’s book here and here.)

Woodward, the religious editor for Newsweek, tells about the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on mainline Protestant pastors and church people. In addition to giving them a truly righteous cause, it introduced them to the black church, which seemed to be a truly socially relevant institution, unlike their own church bodies. The excitement soon extended to other kinds of social activism. And then came the Kennedy euphoria.

It seemed to many mainline Protestant theologians that the secular world–not the church–was where the real action is. Also the real virtues, the real meaning, the realm where God was truly working.

As Woodward puts it, “the nation’s liberal Protestant leadership came to embrace the secular as sacred: that is, to assume that if God is to be found anywhere, it is in the secular world, not the church” (p. 96).

He quotes an evangelism executive, who said that the question facing Protestants was not “whether the church can convert the world, but whether God can convert his church” (p. 105).

Thus we had the slogan of the National Council of Churches: “The world sets the agenda for the church.”

Seminarians were analyzing Simon & Garfunkel: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. And tenement halls.” The lectionary readings in church would include an “epistle from the world”: a newspaper article or a rock song lyric.

Theologians busied themselves with throwing out the traditions and the doctrines of the church, all in an effort to make it more secular.

I remember as a teenager reading a book someone had given me: The Secular City by Harvey Cox. I found it even at the time confusing and upside down.

This best-seller, published in 1965, praised the anonymity and autonomy of the vast urban centers. I wondered, what’s so good about anonymity and autonomy? (Woodward says that shows just how Protestant the book was, despite everything. As a Catholic growing up in Cleveland, Woodward recalls the city as a place of neighborhoods and community.) Cox lauded the advent of the “technopolis” and the apotheosis of the pragmatic. His saint was JFK.

“Secular or technolopolitan man does not waste time pondering the meaning of life,” summarizes Woodward: “he is a problem solver.”

The Christianity that was left had to do with “following Jesus” into the secular city, working alongside him as society progresses to ever greater heights.

By the 1970s, of course, Cox’s optimism about the secular city seemed pretty misplaced. Martin Luther King and JFK were assassinated. Riots tore cities apart. Crime was rampant. So was poverty. The Vietnam War bogged down America’s “can-do” attitude that Cox so admired, and the secular city degenerated into protests, conflict, social discord, and sheer ugliness. And Neil Postman would show how “technopoly” brings problems of its own: dehumanization, ignorance, and woes.

What once seemed so exciting now seems merely naive. What seemed so sophisticated now seems childishly simplistic. What seemed so formidable–the victory of modern theology over hidebound orthodoxy–now seems weak and shallow and ephemeral.

That can be said of much of liberal theology in its many fads and varieties and movements, as well as many of the passing trends of the secular city. I needed the sacred, and so did the city. We all needed the City of God.

Photo by Derek Jensen, Urban blight and Urban renewal in Cincinnati, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

mainline Protestantism

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