Evangelicalism—America’s Substitute for Lost Culture

Will Herberg's Protestant—Catholic—Jew

A Personal Essay on America's "Faith in Faith," with Thanks to Will Herberg

In my twenties, I found a whole other world than the evangelicalism I was raised in. Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand it. There were many factors for the shift, much to do with location, but a big part of it started with meeting my wife, Lisa.

Lisa grew up in a working-class town off Exit 8A on the New Jersey Turnpike, then went to a state college in Virginia where we met. Once we got beyond my awkwardness as an introverted preacher’s kid, there were aspects to her that were everything I was not. She could cuss, drink beer, laugh loudly, had a variety of non-church friends, and majored in fine arts. My family didn’t do those things: my mother was a church-going elementary school teacher from California and my father a Georgia-raised pastor turned Christian counselor. Lisa’s parents hailed from western Pennsylvania; her mother was a retirement community nurse, and her father was a teacher in a state prison, a man who was also a B17 tail gunner and WWII prisoner of war. Also, Lisa grew up Catholic.

As our relationship grew, I enjoyed driving north to visit her parents in one of the original suburban bedroom communities of the 1950s. You might say that her hometown was average, a bit worn by the late ‘80s when we were dating. It’s hard to define, but the people there seemed to exist in a less presumptuous key. They went to mass, watched baseball and Welcome Back, Kotter, listened to Bruce Springsteen who grew up nearby, and had high school or state college degrees. This was my first introduction to the everyday person in Northeast society and culture, where there were few Baptist-like evangelicals.

When Lisa and I eventually moved to Morris County, New Jersey, so that I could attend graduate school, I noticed how many of the numerous small towns had local parades on national holidays. I also noticed the many mainline Protestant and Catholic churches that were like a foreign land to me, so staid and liturgical compared to my ambitious and sermon-oriented evangelical churches.

Through a graduate school friend, we got to know a local family. They were Italian and Catholic. Their men poached the deer munching on their backyard gardens and cooked venison with mushrooms and tomatoes served with shots of Jack Daniels. Every year they roasted a pig stuffed with garlic cloves in their backyard, the same backyard that had a garage with a winepress. Once, these beautiful people treated Lisa and me to an experience of an hours-long seven-fish dinner on Christmas Eve. In all this, there was always a lot of aluminum foil.

Lisa and I eventually bought our first home in a former Methodist camp meeting community in the area. It was once a late 1800s Christian revival grounds that now had permanent and often worn with age gingerbread homes packed tightly on a hill, a little enclave within north Jersey’s chaotic suburban landscapes. Now a secular submunicipality, it had an unusual strength of community with various annual traditions, capped most of all by a weekend that celebrated children.

This is the Northeastern life I grew into and loved as an adult. It felt grounded, normal. We had a variety of friends. We were connected but casual, even to folks older than us in the Methodist church we eventually joined. It seemed that people knew who they were without knowing who they were.

In the world I grew up in, however, you knew you were somebody. You were a “Christian” (interestingly, such Christians don’t usually call themselves evangelicals). You were part of an all-encompassing culture; it was your society, all of it, amped up on intentionality or mission, on macho and emotive performances. So many of us are raised in these evangelical communities—there are many varieties—that have cultural traditions often limited to church going, Bible reading, worship music listening, and belief debating.

But as an adult, I experienced a normalcy in New Jersey over time that I didn’t know was possible. It often led me to ask myself, why didn’t I have this growing up, why couldn’t I have been average and normal, and where were my traditions?

Religion as a Social Marker, Not a Faith

More and more, it seems that evangelicalism is a style of Christianity, one that is mainly a social construction, both ubiquitous and supplanting. In other words, evangelical culture is the replacement for the loss of varied historical cultures that defined humans throughout history. In even stronger words, evangelicalism became the apex predator of culture that we see today. It consumed other “religions,” complete with many customs and traditions, and became more a religion and culture substitute.

One scholar who states this well was mid-twentieth century sociologist Will Herberg. In his landmark Protestant—Catholic—Jew, he writes that it was third-generation immigrants who aided in the coalescence of the normative, ubiquitous religious sensibility in America today. It was their cultural experience that catalyzed the most unusually religious society in the post-industrial Western world.

Herberg notes a progression where first-generation immigrants, while hoping for an improved life in this new country, can’t help but preserve the language and customs and identities of their homeland. Then the next, second generation find themselves caught between their parents’ desire to preserve tradition and the pull to assimilate into a world that speaks only one language and aspires ideally to one culture. Finally, not having lived with their first-generation immigrant grandparents, the third generation must then find a way to assimilate more fully without the homeland language and traditions altogether.

It’s this third generation that must survive without identity giving and centuries-long heritages, and they do so, Herberg argues, by turning to religious institutions in the US in a rather stark way. Humans are creatures of culture, and if we lose that culture, we invent it elsewhere, even if it is quickly manufactured as a flawed prototype. This new, more widely shared American religious sensibility is the medium in which “remaining ethnic concerns are preserved, redefined, and given appropriate expression” (Herberg, p. 34).

For these third-generation immigrants, Herberg argues seventy-five years ago, it was not so much the uniqueness or particularity of their new religious tradition, that is, whether they are a Protestant, Catholic, or Jew, but rather that they at least had or possessed a religion. That is, it’s more important to have faith in faith, or belief in belief, rather than worry about what that faith is or what its varied teachings, stories, and symbols might say about kindness, wisdom, or power. Faith, in this respect, becomes more strictly a social identifier or marker. In American evangelicalism, a hyperfocus on belief and infighting about right theology is so much less about spiritual insight than it is about who controls the conversation in the club. Belief itself has become the new traditional heritage.

As evidence that religion in the US is more about social markers than the social revolutionary dynamics of spiritual and religious love and kindness, Herberg states that the actual operative religion isn’t so much the active values of their particular religion but the values of a “super-faith” called “The American Way of Life” (Herberg, p. 75, also notice the acronym AWOL in there?). While inside their faith communities, Americans are busy professing and proclaiming beliefs and enjoying each other’s company, outside they are enacting a different, at times contradictory moral code in public life. As it so often happens through history, religion becomes a component of, or service to, a larger set of symbols, stories, and ceremonies.

In survey research about religion, Herberg noticed curious discrepancies in stated beliefs versus operative actions. People stated that they believed in life after death but seemed more concerned with living comfortably in this life. They believed in loving one’s neighbor, but religious ideas should have no real effect on politics and business. More pointedly to politics, loving one’s neighbor especially should not apply to kindness toward those of a “dangerous” political party like communists. Herberg leaves us with the question, “Some ideas and standards undeniably govern the conduct of Americans in their affairs of business and politics; if they are not ideas and standards associated with the teachings of religion, what are they?” (Herberg, 73-74).

Evangelicalism is this third-generation religion, but when you judge evangelicals by their actions, it is a professed substitute and not the operative religion. It is both the coping and the control mechanism of those most disconnected from their heritage, their ancestors, and their native countries.

Instead of Substitute Religion, Our Diverse Identities Give Us Hope

It’s staggering but perhaps completely predictable that a nation so explicitly professing its Christian values then goes and hypocritically elects a billionaire, oligarchic, sex-abusing leader who wants to maximize the disconnect, or alternatively the complicity, between religion and power. This leader wants to wildly and unconstitutionally cut government services, diplomatic and economic relations with other countries, and the influx of immigrants. The cuts in governance are, in this sense, an attack on common values and creating space for new sacred stories. Evangelicalism, now more explicitly a narrative around the American Way of Life, doesn’t want you to have a nation that is for everyone, average and normal. Conversely, a nation of diversity is a nation with a soul, and it’s the only way the US can find its soul.

So many of us are incredulous by recent political events, but it is precisely because our imperfect government is the operative place where we can do the most to live out our values—to live out what is sacred to us, and not the Christian nationalist version. It is precisely in business and economics that we are challenged to enact our values. Another way to put this concretely: stop giving your money to build suburban churches and fund overseas ministries and help our government go where people live locally and domestically (and abroad) to create robust professional programs and alleviate income inequality. You’ll get more done and on a more equitable basis. Denmark and Sweden are somewhat isolated and imperfect laboratories, but churches factor little there while government and taxes factor a lot, yet they rank the highest on the happiness scale in the post-industrial West, far higher than the US (see Phil Zuckerman’s groundbreaking book Society Without God).

I opened this essay talking about culture, and here I am talking about governance and power. But the point is, if we lived out our sacred values well in matters of commerce and politics, we’d be free to pursue and create our heritages. Instead of using a substitute yet ubiquitous evangelical culture to shore up privilege, we can use a vibrant constitutional democracy to shore up uniqueness, diversity, beauty, and all the hope that comes from that.