Secular Protestantism 2025-12-13T18:13:43-05:00 Gene Veith

We keep hearing about non-believers saying they are “cultural Christians.” They appreciate living in a society with Christian values, such as the equal worth of all human beings and the priority of mercy to those in need, and they also like Christian customs, such as celebrating Christmas.

But can you have a Christian culture without the, you know, Christianity? If you can for awhile, how long could those things you like last without the religion to sustain them?

Here is a different but related question: Can someone be a Protestant without being a Christian? Is there such a thing as “secular Protestantism”?

Christian historian Daniel Hummel thinks there is. He believes that America, however secular it has become, has a Protestant culture. Not only that, he argues that Protestantism–both in its liberal and its evangelical manifestations–has been a major cause of America’s secularism.

He has written a thought-provoking post at Mere Orthodoxy entitled Secular Protestantism Is America’s Religion. He says that through much of the 20th century, mainline Protestant denominations met with great success in influencing American culture. But, ironically, their success led to their downfall. He writes:

Liberal Protestants achieved their “deep culture” victory by promulgating, over the course of the twentieth century, their “liberal value set”—in the words of sociologist Jay Demerath: “individualism, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellectual inquiry.” Derived from modernist theology, democratic ethics, and scientific reasoning, this set of values produced Christians who downgraded adherence to orthodoxy as a marker of Christian identity and instead extolled the ideals of pluralism and tolerance far beyond liberal Protestant circles, primarily through academia, government, and media that have been hospitable to liberal Protestantism and shape so much of the culture.

And yet, Hummel observes, “the values became so ubiquitous that liberal Protestants were left with little to offer.” That they themselves downplayed the importance of orthodox Christian doctrine meant that the people they were influencing did too. And once they accepted the mainline Protestant tenets of “individualism, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellectual inquiry,” there was really little need for mainline Protestantism any more, and membership in those denominations has plummeted. Hence, America’s secularism.

Evangelicals were also very successful, Hummel points out, though they adopted conservative politics in contrast to the mainline’s liberal activism. Their victory in the “deep culture”–defined as “the tacit assumptions and latent frameworks of meaning embedded within the structures of social life”–was also dramatic:

On the evangelical side, the resounding cultural victory was to make it virtually uncontested in American culture that a “personal relationship with God” and subjective spiritual experience were the dominant paradigms of American religiosity. As Smith writes, by the twenty-first century, evangelicals helped establish a much broader American assumption “that subjective individual experience is the litmus test of authentic faith” no matter what religion (or no religion) an American ascribed to. Yet this victory put evangelicals in a bind. It did not extend to the broader context within which evangelicals endorsed a personal relationship with God. Evangelicals never intended to convey that a personal relationship with God should be pursued apart from community and orthodox theology; however, by making that personal connection the center of spiritual life, they inadvertently did.

If religion is about a highly-individualistic “personal relationship with God” and Christianity is primarily about “me and Jesus,” the church with its theology and doctrines is really not all that necessary. As Hummel says, this was not the intention of evangelicals to create this impression, though I would add that the rise of “non-denominational” churches is in accord with that tendency. If we don’t need denominations or institutions or doctrinal creeds, it’s only a small step towards being “spiritual, but not religious.” Hence, the Nones.

Hummel goes on to back up these assertions with a deep dive into American church history of the last century. He’s persuasive. But if Protestantism brought on secularism, what accounts for the secularism in Catholic countries? France has historically been described as the “eldest daughter of the Church” and popes had given its kings the official title of “Most Christian,” meaning they were more Christian than other kings. For one thing, they had pretty much eradicated Protestantism from the land. But today’s France is surely more secularist than the United States, as is being “spiritual, but not religious.”

I’m also trying to think through where confessional Lutherans fit in with Hummel’s thesis. The ELCA, of course, fits in well with his diagnosis of what happened to the Protestant mainline. But while the LCMS repudiates liberal Protestantism–Walter A. Maier often took on Hummel’s prime example Harry Emerson Fosdick on the Lutheran Hour–it also resists the individualistic spirituality of the evangelicals. Perhaps it models, with its Two Kingdoms theology, how Christians need to be in regards to their culture: engaged but distinct.

HT: Steve Bauer

Photo: Christian LGBTQ pride flag with cross hanging in a Metropolitan Community Church by Ted Eytan – https://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/31154894055/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58267844

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