The Protestant Deformation

Ross Douthat has picked up on the CC post the other day on whether or not Evangelicalism is a good fit for conservatism (this, based on a Wilfred McClay speech). He says that the Bush Administration's failures are not only due to the intersection of big government and crony capitalism, but also:

They have also been evangelical failures, flowing from a surfeit what McClay calls the "moral radicalism" of the evangelical mind, which is a bit too eager to unleash that "fire in the minds of men" that Bush cited in his Second Inaugural Address. Unlike Andrew, I don't think this fire is burning out of control among "Christianists" or theocons or whatever - or if it is, it's hardly the existential threat that he makes it out to be. I do think, though, that the Iraq War will stand for a long time as a monument to the potential excesses of evangelical thinking - and when it comes to our foreign policy, I hope the next GOP President partakes of a little less of Bush-style missionary zeal, and a little more of that old-time conservative religion.

All this calls to mind a fascinating essay that Swarthmore's James Kurth, a conservative and a Presbyterian, wrote for The American Interest not long ago. It's called "The Protestant Deformation," and in it, he talks about how America's crusading internationalism is a direct result of the decline of the Protestant Reformation. I wish I could link to the entire essay, but it's behind the subscriber firewall. I can give you parts of it though. Here's his lede:

President Bush has often spoken of freedom as God's gift to America and to mankind, and of America's calling to bring freedom to all peoples. Moreover, his strongest electoral support has come from evangelical Protestants. These are the people the liberal media call "the religious right" (although by that logic, the media themselves should be called the "secular left").

As it happens, Protestantism has indeed had a major impact on U.S. foreign policy, but this is not primarily due to evangelical Protestantism. It is due to the "Protestant Deformation."

It is this peculiar pseudo religion upon which both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush have drawn in their foreign policies to spread American ideas of liberal democracy, free markets, individual freedom and human rights abroad.

Analysts have debated for decades the relative influence of different factors in the shaping of American foreign policy. Although numerous scholars have stressed the importance of realism, idealism, capitalism or liberalism, until recently almost no one has thought that Protestantism itself - the dominant religion in the United States - was worthy of consideration.

In fact, American foreign policy has been and continues to be shaped by the Protestant origins of the United States, but with a twist. That Protestantism has not been the original religion, but a series of successive departures from it down the scale of what might be called the "Protestant declension."

We are now at the endpoint of this declension, and the Protestantism that shapes American foreign policy today is a distinctive heresy of the original religion - not the Protestant Reformation, but the Protestant Deformation.

Kurth argues that the Reformation's rejection of hierarchy and community fostered an individualistic way of seeing the world that spread to secular life, including the world of politics and economics. Plus, the increasingly diverse nature of the American populace led to a kind of pluralistic civil religion, and mentality. He goes on:

The logic of religious pluralism, reinforced by the substantial numbers of Roman Catholics and Jews immigrating to the United States in the 1840s and thereafter, continued t o drive public officials even further toward the rhetoric of the lowest common and least offensive denominator.

This trend gave rise to a public vocabulary that used concepts congruent and congenial to Protestant ones but that made almost no references to religion at all. In regard to economic matters, the central concept was the free market; in regard to political matters, it was liberal democracy. By the early 19th century, most Americans had come to believe that the only legitimate form of economics was the free market, ordered by written contracts, and that the only legitimate form of politics was liberal democracy, ordered by a written constitution.

This was the mentality, really the ideology, described so brilliantly by that young Frenchman who was both an aristocrat and a liberal, Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1834).

Kurth goes on to say that Woodrow Wilson's crusading moralism and internationalism was the natural fruit of the Protestant Deformation. He says that it is perfectly obvious to millions of Americans that free markets and democracy are the right and proper way to organize societies everywhere -- and that (in Kurth's view) this view is what you should expect from a Protestantized culture. He predicts that the broader culture may well turn on Evangelicals and blame them for the Iraq debacle, which would be wrong because liberals too -- Progressives, you might say -- are formed by this Protestantized culture, and that there is a direct line between this deformation of Protestantism and liberalism.

It's a provocative thesis. Pity that his whole article isn't there to see. But you can get a better idea of what Kurth is talking about in this sidebar (posted to a blogsite), in which he identifies the stages in the decline of Reformational Protestantism to a secular creed that commits the cardinal conservative sin: an attempt to immanentize the eschaton!