The Last of the Protestant Modernists?

Does the old Modernist Religious Left still exist ? The New York Times found one of its last recognizable vestiges in the Reverend Jim Rigby of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. His congregation includes Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, who is also a seminarian, hence the interest. St. Andrew’s is in the fast-declining Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The PCUSA (including its predecessor bodies) has lost about 75 percent of its members over the last 60 years.

Rev. Rigby disputes the historicity of Christ’s resurrection, prefers alternative language to “God” and “Lord,” and stresses political and social action from his pulpit. He is the type of Mainline Protestant pastor who was much more common in the mid-20th century, the zenith of modernist Protestant theology.

Modernism prevailed in Mainline Protestant seminaries early in the 20th century. It rejected the supernatural, believing it irrational and nonscientific. It rejected or minimized Christ’s Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and miracles, along with other extraordinary events in the Bible. It reinterpreted the Gospel as chiefly a morality tale, filled with metaphors and legends, but illustrating God’s desire for humanity to do good. Jesus was not literally divine, but He reflected divinity through his good works and sacrifice, offering Himself as an example for all.

“Fundamentalism” was chiefly a reaction against Modernism. Famously J Gresham Machen, a Presbyterian, wrote “The Fundamentals” in which he stressed the historicity of key biblical events. He left his Mainline denomination, and Princeton Seminary, to start a new Orthodox Presbyterian Church and a new Westminster Seminary.

Conversely, famed Modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Baptist serving a prestigious New York Presbyterian church, faced with a potential heresy trial. He instead resigned, and John D. Rockefeller Jr built him The Riverside Church to showcase his heterodox theology. Before leaving the Presbyterian denomination, Fosdick delivered a sermon: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”

Perhaps Fosdick should never have left his denomination. The so-called Fundamentalists did not win in the Mainline Presbyterian church or other Mainline denominations, where Modernists took charge, usually quietly, and without lots of resistance. Most Modernist clergy were smart enough to avoid details in the pulpit, using traditional language without explaining they did not literally believe in what they were describing. So, there was plausible deniability.

Modernists assumed they represented the future. Afterall, they were rational and scientific. And they controlled America’s most influential religious institutions, with their ample funding, extensive institutions, and tens of millions of members. Modernists did not anticipate that “Fundamentalists” in the form of evangelicalism, would throughout the 20th century create alternative Christian institutions that would eventually displace Modernist Mainline Protestantism.

Mainline Protestant denominations began their continuous and irreversible decline in the mid-1960s, at the apex of Modernism. Episcopal Bishop James Pike, who publicly denied Christ’s literal Virgin Birth and Resurrection, etc, was a prominent public figure in the 1960s, who unlike most Modernist pastors, boldly proclaimed what he did not believe. Traditional bishops sought a heresy trial, but the Episcopal House of Bishops instead deflected by finding him guilty of “irresponsibility.”

Even most Mainline Protestant traditionalists did not want to confront Modernism and provoke division, so deflection was the constant response. The flood of post-World War II church attendance offered a false sense of security, and Mainline Protestant leaders ignored the 1960s decline as an aberration, even as it continued unabated for decades. Afterall, where else would church goers attend if not the Mainline? Conservative churches were for “holy rollers” and “Fundamentalists” lacking in social, economic, and intellectual prestige.

But by the 1970s, evangelicalism, which was attracting middle class educated suburbanites disenchanted by dry Mainline Protestantism, was surpassing the once dominant denominations. The Southern Baptists surpassed the United Methodists as the largest Protestant denomination. Pentecostalism and charismatic worship were fast growing, led by the Assemblies of God. And non-denominationalism was emerging as a force. Afterall, who really needed denominations?

Wider cultural forces that had birthed and sustained theological Modernism were also subsiding. Postmodernism, with its focus on narrative and the subjective, was replacing Modernism, which stressed scientific facts and objective rationality. By the 1990s, the last great prominent Modernist pastors were edging towards retirement.

In the 1980s, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, born in 1931, published books, and appeared on talk shows, not just denying biblical miracles but denying personal deity and theism. He claimed he was keeping Christianity “relevant,” not realizing he and what he represented were instead becoming irrelevant. He joined the Jesus Seminar as a “scholar,” whose team of scholars in the 1980s convened regularly to vote on which biblical miracles were factual. Inevitably, they voted that none really were. They made headlines. But Modernism in the churches was already ebbing.

Reverend Rigby, age 76, who graduated from seminary in 1979 and has pastored St Andrews Presbyterian Church since 1984, is a vestigial Modernist. Interestingly, his most famous parishioner, the politician Talarico, age 37, told The New York Times that unlike his pastor he believes in the historicity of Christ’s resurrection. Even progressive Protestants of the last 30 years, as post-modernists, are far likelier to believe in the supernatural. Modernism, which specialized in telling people not to believe that Christianity is exceptional, was always unsustainable.

Reverend Rigby told The New York Times that the story of Mary’s Annunciation, when an angel announced her miraculous pregnancy is “mythological, not historical.” Its real message, he said is that, as The Times framed it, “she was poor, and the Scripture records her calling for the rich and mighty to be brought down from their thrones.”

Mythology has limited abilities to dethrone the rich and mighty. Christianity’s power comes from believing in a God who literally intervenes in history and is sovereign over the rich, the mighty and everybody else. Mythology inspires some mystics. But most of humanity hopes for a more solid reality.

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