Christianity in the United States and Canada was never established legally, as it was in the European motherlands, though attempts at legal establishment were made here too; but, instead, what occurred on this continent—more as a matter of habit and association than as anything planned—was the gradual but effective identification of our culture or way of life with the Christian faith. We learned to consider ourselves Christian societies and Christian nations, and to equate Christianity more or less with what we have built here—our way of governing ourselves, our moral codes, our values.
For reasons that many of us are still trying to decipher, this tendency to equate religion and culture was always more prevalent in US-American experience than in the northern country of the continent, Canada. There has always been, I think, a stubborn streak of skepticism in the Canadian spirit, as there is in the spirit of most northern peoples (the Scandinavians and the Scots, for example): it’s hard to believe in God and all that when it’s so cold, and you’re living on a rock like the Canadian (Precambrian) Shield! The United States inherited not only a more hospitable terrain but a much heavier dose of Modern optimism, and its Christianity evolved accordingly. I think what surprises many Canadians and Europeans about church life in the United States (sometimes it charms them, sometimes they just find it excessive) is the combination of rather simplistic theology and rather stringent morality with enthusiastic and exaggerated displays of happiness, or what passes for happiness. There is a celebratory ring in most worship in US-American settings that neither Canadians nor Europeans can duplicate. When we try to do so, the results are usually quite laughable. The celebratory spirit of US religion cannot be imitated in other social contexts because its secret is its combination of religious piety and cultural complacency. It is a celebration of the culture, including its economic success and political preeminence, at least as much as it is a celebration of the religion that contributed so much to the shaping of the culture.
Peter L. Berger, whose book The Noise of Solemn Assemblies was a kind of milestone in the Anglo-Saxon deployment of the term culture-religion, explained this type of equation in the following way:
American society possesses a cultural religion that is vaguely derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and that contains values generally held by most Americans. The cultural religion gives solemn ratification to these values. The cultural religion is politically established on all levels of government, receiving from the state both moral and economic support. The religious denominations, whatever else they may believe or practice, are carriers of this cultural religion. Affiliation with a religious denomination thus becomes ipso facto an act of allegiance to the common political creed. Disaffiliation, in turn, renders an individual not only religiously but also politically suspect.15
Why is such an identification of Christianity and culture theologically problematic? What price does the Christian movement pay for this kind of proximity to the dominant culture? As a way into my answer to that question, I want to quote a sentence of Reinhold Niebuhr—it is in fact the very first sentence of Niebuhr’s 1935 book, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics: “Protestant Christianity in America,” it runs, “is, unfortunately, unduly dependent upon the very culture of modernity, the disintegration of which would offer a more independent religion a unique opportunity.”16
In this one sentence, Niebuhr puts his finger precisely on the consequences of practicing Christianity as a culture-religion. By allowing itself to be absorbed by the evolving culture, the Christian faith loses its potentiality for being responsible in and to and for that culture—for being, in biblical terms, salt, yeast, and light in its social context. It forfeits this prophetic calling for the sake of the shallow kind of acceptance and popularity and quantitative success that it may acquire through its accommodation of itself to the governing spirit of its host society. It has little or nothing beyond rhetoric to bring to that society distinguishable from the society’s existing assumptions and experiences; and this is particularly conspicuous and unfortunate when, in situations of social crisis, the society needs precisely some light from beyond its own resources—needs to hear, precisely, a voice that does not simply echo its own tired and failed ambitions, its Babel confusion. The ending of modernity, of which (in this perceptive sentence) Reinhold Niebuhr spoke decades before anyone heard the word postmodern—the end and crisis of modernity creates for prophetic faith an “opportunity” that faith communities rarely have when societies are in their heyday: an opportunity (one must say in Niebuhr’s behalf), not to enhance their membership roles and social standing, but to speak truthfully, to act out of genuine hope and not just social optimism, to enhance and preserve the life—the life not of the church but of the world to which the church is sent. Because most Protestantism in America had given itself so unconditionally to the modern vision, Niebuhr believed, it was not in a position to offer any alternative vision at the point when modernity began to show how shallow, deceptive, and dangerous a vision it was.
Stating the point in other language, culture-religion lacks the necessary distance from its host society to be truly responsible in and for that society. It is so much of its world that it has nothing distinctive to bring to its world, only more of the same—undoubtedly in stained-glass accents. In the end, while it may perform a certain pastoral and ritual function among people, Christianity as culture-religion serves more conspicuously those powers that have their own self-enhancing designs upon society: powers that benefit from the status quo and are therefore very glad to support a religion that helps to maintain the status quo.
Now, while culture-religion has a particular application to Christianity in America, it is by no means a new phenomenon. It is just a modern version of the very ancient idea and reality of religious establishment. It is an adaptation of this idea undertaken in more or less democratic societies where decisions about religion cannot be ordered from the top down, as was the case in Europe from Constantine onwards. It describes the kind of establishment that was worked out in this New World setting, a setting that positively rejected and despised the Old World versions of Christian establishment (since most of our pioneer forebears were fleeing precisely from those legal establishments of old Europe), but a setting that at the same time was not ready to entertain the idea of religious disestablishment. With some important exceptions, we seem incapable of entertaining the thought of Christian disestablishment to this very day. The concept of the separation of church and state is perhaps a polite bow in that direction, but it is also very deceptive, because the establishment we fashioned on this continent was never a de jure (legal or formal) one such as an agreement with the state would usually be, but a de facto informal relationship with the culture at large. Maintaining the separation of church and state (which itself often proves to be more rhetorical than real) does little to affect a distinction between Christianity and culture. That distinction can only be maintained at the level of the church’s theology, preaching, and public witness.
Why are we so steadfastly committed to the idea of Christian establishment? Our forebears said no to legal establishment, and we can be glad of that; but why should Christians seek establishment of any kind? Is there anything in the Christian gospel that would lead us in that direction? To the contrary, as Kierkegaard insisted, is there not in the gospel of the cross that which would deny Christians such a comfortable relationship with the world? Yet despite the biblical warnings against it, the notion that Christianity is quite naturally and properly a religion bound to seek some form of establishment—including some special relationship with the policy-making classes and governing institutions, but more important (in democratic societies) the achievement of majority status and people power—this notion is such a hoary one, itself so entrenched in church history and popular Christian imagination that it is terribly hard to displace or even to critique it. After all, it has been around for at least fifteen or sixteen centuries, by far the greater share of Christian history. It is assumed—most Christians in the United States (and many in Canada), I suspect, simply assume—that the very mission of the church is to achieve establishment in some form or other, if only by being able to claim greater numbers than other power groupings; it is also assumed that churches and Christians who do not manifest that aim, or who may even be very critical of it, are simply failing as missional communities. Again and again the great commission of Matthew’s gospel17 is cited to lend biblical weight to the belief that Christianity is positively intended for majority status, that is,