The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, by George M. Marsden. New York: Basic Books, 2015, xxxix + 219 pages, $26.99.

George M. Marsden once laughed when I suggested, almost twenty years ago, that he write a memoir. He did not think his experience was worthy of the genre. With The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, Marsden comes the closest yet of his many thoughtful historical inquiries to reflections on his own past. Granted, it is a window with a small opening—the mid-twentieth-century decades of his youth. But the book’s introduction has the ring of nostalgia for an America that has now been lost:

I remember well how, in the spring of 1949, when I was ten years old, the fields near my home where we used to roam were suddenly marked off with patterns of stakes. A building project was launched with some fanfare… . By the next spring, our town had a full-fledged suburb, where I would soon be delivering newspapers. In such places, more and more young families could participate in the American dream of owning their own homes endowed with up-to-date modern conveniences. (ix)

In those new suburbs, father went to work, mothers reared children, children rode bikes, families watched television and went to church on Sundays. “There was little reason not to believe that,” Marsden recalls, “if peace could be maintained, progress would continue.”

That sense of optimism and how it failed is the subject of Marsden’s book. In it he analyzes the assumptions of mainstream American culture in the 1950s, the ones that tempted Americans like Marsden to think peace and prosperity might be the wave of the future, where religion figured in those assumptions, and what the collapse of the post-war consensus meant for Christianity in America.

The 1950s recipe for the consensus that Marsden explores was two cups Enlightenment and two tablespoons liberal Protestantism. The origins of this concoction went back to the American founding and the belief that reason was an adequate basis for fair government and individual rights, along with a recognition that a free society depended on virtuous citizens who needed religion to underwrite a sense of moral duty. Americans in the 1950s could read lots of public intellectuals who worried about the fragility of this consensus. Some, like the literary critic Dwight MacDonald, lamented the effects of mass culture (television, radio, and other such middle-brow expressions) on American character. Some, like the op-ed writer and political advisor Walter Lippmann, feared that the American consensus lacked an adequate philosophical basis. Others, like the sociologist William Whyte, fretted that the application of science to the nation’s organizations was destroying American individualism and the ideal of personal autonomy. Even so, Americans were still united in defending individual freedom, free speech, civil rights, equality before the law, due process, economic opportunities, and civic-mindedness.

Marsden does not observe that most if not all of these ideals are still in full force though applied differently. What he does point out, which may explain the differences between the 1950s and today, is that the consensus after World War II rarely included minorities and women. American attachment to political liberty also assumed sexual restraint and the value of families as part of the social order. The sexual experimentation that surfaced in the 1960s seriously undermined that part of the 1950s consensus. Another segment of the American population that mainstream society in the 1950s neglected were religious conservatives—fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Roman Catholics. These believers did not necessarily experience discrimination, but they were clearly outside the American consensus. The Protestantism of the mainline denominations did enjoy a place at the table, whether the moralistic optimism of Time magazine’s Henry Luce who promoted an American exceptionalism rooted in belief in God, or the haunting pessimism of Reinhold Niebuhr who reminded Americans of the selfishness that afflicted all humans thanks to original sin. Even so, the mainline churches achieved their centrist status by avoiding statements and actions that might look dogmatic or intolerant.

The 1960s witnessed the collapse of this consensus and in response the rise of a militant Christianity to clean up the debris. With only a pragmatic justification for political liberty and reliance on science, the Christian Right tried to fill the vacuum that the sexual revolution, civil rights movement, and anti-war protests exposed. Marsden detects in much of the Christian Right’s agenda nostalgia for the pro-family and patriotic 1950s. With Francis Schaeffer, evangelicals were reading a leader who sought to supply America with an adequate foundation—a Christian one. But Marsden faults Schaeffer for offering a Christian outlook that was fundamentally divisive and partisan. It alienated and threatened non-Christians and failed to provide an inclusive pluralism.

That phrase, “inclusive pluralism,” is in fact the point of Marsden’s narrative. It is the subject of his last chapter and even the last two words of the book. Unlike the 1950s synthesis of the Enlightenment and liberal Protestantism or the Christian Right’s blend of fundamentalism and partisan Republican politics, Marsden regards Dutch Calvinism as a better alternative. How different that alternative is is not immediately apparent by the time that Marsden explains what a genuinely pluralistic society looks like. Post-World War II American liberals, according to Marsden, were “passionately committed to principles such as individual freedom, free speech, human decency, justice, civil rights, community responsibilities, equality before the law, due process, balance of powers, economic opportunity …” (57) Their problem though was their naive optimism about human nature and neglect of an adequate philosophical or religious foundation for such ideals. Marsden also faults these liberals for failing to see that their “universal” values were the product of a “particular” social setting—white, middle-class, suburban, university-trained men. The same problem afflicts contemporary secularists who aspire for the same ideals but sound just like the 1950s consensus.

Yet, when Marsden himself argues for the kind of pluralistic society that he believes will emerge from a proper theological basis, it sounds remarkably similar to the 1950s liberal project he critiques:

The primary function of government is to promote justice and to act as a sort of referee, … patrolling the boundaries among the spheres of society, protecting the sovereignty due within each sphere, adjudicating conflicts, and ensuring equal rights and equal protections for confessional groups. (169)

This vision of liberal society seems almost the same as what 1950s liberals wanted. Is the difference that Marsden arrives at his social order because he has the correct theology? If so, then how will Reformed or evangelical Protestantism provide an adequate basis for a society in which spiritual descendants of the Protestant Reformation are a minority?

Maybe the difference is that Marsden is recommending a pluralism that flourished in the Netherlands during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, one that derived from policies conceived and implemented by Abraham Kuyper during his political career from 1880 to 1915. What distinguished Kuyper’s project from other efforts to accommodate modern society’s diversity was a commitment to principled pluralism, one that did not treat science as objective or neutral but that made it a legitimate competitor of other outlooks, including religious ones. According to Marsden, Kuyper’s “richly pluralistic society” protects Christian groups by guaranteeing equal rights for such institutions. But these protections were also in place in 1950s America. The OPC, for instance, had certain legal protections during the heady days of the American Enlightenment even if the pluralism of the 1950s meant not being “too dogmatic” and being “open to other points of view” (124). Protestant denominations might not be open to other ideas within their own structures and membership, but they had to be open to the possibility of people outside their fellowship holding positions of power in the wider society.

Marsden may be right to think that Kuyper had a better account of pluralism than America’s liberal establishment did. Even so, Kuyper’s theory of pluralism was not a requirement for obtaining legal protections in the Netherlands. In other words, Kuyper did not supply a foundation to eradicate the differences among Roman Catholics, Protestants, and secularists. His theory merely provided a platform by which these groups could live together, and in that sense the American liberal consensus of the 1950s was equally pluralistic and inclusive. The limits of that inclusive pluralism are now obvious but they came with benefits such as marshaling national resources to oppose the spread of Communism and eradicating prejudices that subjected African-Americans to legal discrimination. If the Netherlands had emerged from World War II as the West’s super power and if it had needed to address racial segregation in one of its provinces, does Marsden think Kuyper’s principled pluralism would have succeeded?

In fact, the example of New School Presbyterianism, the topic of Marsden’s first book, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (1970) might suggest why Kuyper’s proposal for pluralism was out of sync with the American religious mainstream. As Marsden well demonstrated, New School Presbyterians, the ones who favored the Second Great Awakening and supported the parachurch cooperative endeavors (the ones that led Old School Presbyterians to defend confessional standards and Presbyterian polity), those pro-revival Presbyterians rallied around evangelistic, moralistic, and nationalistic aims. For New Schoolers, along with Congregationalists who supplied the leadership and financial backing for a host of religious voluntary societies (Bible, tract, Sunday school), the health of the United States depended on extending Protestantism from the East Coast to the frontier. Without a Christian influence, morality would deteriorate and social order disappear. The ideal was for a unified political, economic, religious, and educational order that reflected Protestant (but only generically so) standards. Societal evils such as slavery and alcohol were roadblocks to a Christian America, as were religious and cultural outsiders like Roman Catholics and Mormons.

The sort of cooperation Protestants exhibited before the Civil War in attempting to fashion a Christian society was all the more prominent after the war. When Old School and New School Presbyterians in the North reunited in 1869, their merger prompted cooperative efforts among Protestants on an even larger scale. Presbyterians took the lead in interdenominational agencies that culminated in the 1908 formation of the Federal Council of Churches. That body’s first official act was to ratify a “Social Creed for the Churches,” a Protestant version of the sort of political reforms associated with the Progressive Party. It was also a classic statement of the major concerns of the Social Gospel. Its aim was to establish a society with the justice and equality only Christian ideals could supply. And while Protestants continued to hope for greater church union—they tried and failed in 1920 to form the United Protestant Church of America—those from Anglo-American backgrounds (Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Disciples, even Unitarian)—also supported increased centralization of the nation’s political and economic structures. Coordinating industry and transportation, along with supplying the manpower, for the United States’ intervention in World War I was a major component of such centralization of the nation’s major institutions. Loyalty to the cause for which the United States fought was another ingredient in what J. Gresham Machen lamented as the creation of America as “one huge ‘Main Street.’ ”[1]

However widespread the factors, the United States was, during the very same years that Kuyper was operating at peak levels, moving in an opposite direction from the Netherlands. In fact, Protestants of British descent would have had trouble swallowing the sort of pluralism that Kuyper proposed and eventually introduced among the Dutch. Early in his career, Kuyper spoke out vigorously against the sort of cultural uniformity that characterized modern liberal politics (and the centralized state building that went with it). In his 1869 address, “Uniformity: the Curse of Modern Life” (1869), Kuyper saw that even if political uniformity ended in disappointment, the more dangerous strategy of liberalism was to rob people groups of “their characteristic genius” and render them “homogenous.” The result, he feared, would be a “false unity … celebrated on the ruins of what land and folk, race and nation” had contributed to social variety. “Cries for brotherhood and love of fellow-man,” Kuyper added, prevented an appreciation for “the distinctive features of the face of humanity” and ground away “with a coarse hand all the divinely engraved marking on the copper plate of life.”[2] To remedy the standardization of life that modern politics nurtured through invocations of universal, abstract rights, Kuyper led in the “pillarization” of Dutch society. As James Bratt explains in his authoritative biography, Kuyper advocated a social system (one that dominated the Netherlands until the 1960s) that included a “complete array of associations in which the various religious or ideological groups—Calvinists, Catholics, and Labor, with liberal humanists carried along by default—could live their separate lives from cradle to grave.” Bratt calls this a “clannish division of public space.”[3] Kuyper’s counterparts in the United States resisted such clannishness by using public schools to assimilate immigrants into the “American way.” The one trace of clannishness that persisted in the United States was race-based segregation. But that also became questionable due in part to the barriers that came down thanks to white and black soldiers fighting a common enemy during World War II.

One notable exception to the claim that mainline Protestants in the United States opposed the sort of pluralism that Kuyper advocated was J. Gresham Machen. His reasons for resisting centralization in American life were partly political. As a Marylander with deep sympathy for the tradition of States’ Rights, Machen was predisposed to resent the federal government’s expansion of power and influence. His testimony before Congress in opposition to a proposal for a Federal Department of Education was one such instance of resistance. Like Kuyper, Machen also was a defender of the rights of families and local communities to regulate their own lives. And as a confessional Presbyterian, Machen opposed cooperative plans that brought his denomination into closer ties with non-Presbyterians because he believed such endeavors typically reduced the unique claims of Reformed theology to vacuous ideals of spiritual uplift and moral suasion. In effect, though with different influences at play, Machen was as alarmed by cultural homogeneity as Kuyper. His decision in 1929 to form Westminster and his inclusion of Dutch-American Calvinists on the faculty (Van Til, Stonehouse, and Kuiper) was an American Presbyterian version of Kuyper’s pillarization on a much more modest scale—one that had no support from taxpayers and very little cultural cache in wider intellectual circles.

When Marsden almost twenty-five years ago wrote about Machen for a talk delivered at Princeton Seminary, he chose to view the original Orthodox Presbyterian through the lens of the South and its racist and secessionist legacy. To be sure, Marsden believed that Machen could teach mainline Protestants lessons about the value of education and ideas since Marsden was then working on a project on the secularization of American universities. But Marsden did not notice a connection or affinity to Kuyper’s point about pluralism. Of course, the South itself, even if for nefarious reasons, objected to the growth of the federal government’s power and control of a broad range of American activities. But Marsden noted Machen’s defense of the Confederacy, his lingering racism, and his “radical libertarianism.”[4] In fact, Marsden thought it plausible to interpret Machen’s departure from the PCUSA in 1936 as the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Confederacy’s secession from the United States. Had Marsden looked at Machen’s affinities with Kuyper in resisting cultural and political centralization and in leaving the mainline or established church, he might have recognized within the OPC’s founder an American Presbyterian version of Dutch Calvinism’s pillarization.

That older perspective on Machen, not the cultural pluralist but the rebellious southerner, may account for Marsden’s silence in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment about the communion in which he grew up, the OPC. Marsden’s experience of 1950s America and its enlightened progressivism did come, after all, in the context of worshiping at an OPC congregation and being a member of a household where Machen’s name was highly regarded. Yet, Machen’s ideas about religious and ethnic diversity, civil liberty, and the spirituality of the church make nary a dent on Marsden’s reflections on American society since World War II. Machen’s ideas about civil liberty showed remarkable toleration for diverse groups; a life-long Democrat, Machen defended the rights of Communists, Roman Catholics, and fundamentalists at a time when the ties between the Enlightenment and liberal Protestantism were solidifying. At the same time, Machen’s idea for a church set apart to pursue not public or civil but spiritual ends with spiritual means provided a way for confessional groups to retain theological fidelity without having to compromise religious convictions for political purposes. It was also a version of principled pluralism that emerges directly from the American Presbyterian experience and so has the advantage of not requiring the United States or its Protestants to reinvent themselves as belonging to a small, intriguing, and substantially homogenous country like the Netherlands. Had Marsden proposed Machen instead of Kuyper, his critique of the thinness of the 1950s consensus may not have been substantially different. But his proposal for a remedy might have connected his reflections on 1950s intellectuals with his own experience as a teenager who heard as many Orthodox Presbyterian sermons as he did platitudes about national greatness.

Endnotes

[1] Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 15.

[2] Kuyper, “Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life,” in James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 24–25.

[3] James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 343.

[4] Marsden, “Understanding J. Gresham Machen,” in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 196.

Darryl G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, and serves as an elder in Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Hillsdale, Michigan. Ordained Servant Online, March 2016.