Saving Faith: How American Christianity Can Reclaim Its Prophetic Voice

By Randall Balmer

Survey data and anecdotal evidence agree that Christianity is losing its hold on American life. The Roman Catholic hierarchy struggles to regain its credibility following the pedophilia scandals, mainline Protestantism wrestles with issues of sexual identity and attrition, and white evangelicalism has merged with the far-right precincts of the Republican Party. Moral authority, it seems, is hard to come by, with all three of the major Christian traditions--Roman Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, and white evangelicalism--facing a crisis of credibility.

Finger-pointing abounds. Many people of faith blame the rampant secularization of society in recent decades, while critics contend that Christians themselves, or at least their leaders, are blind to their own shortcomings. Some of the proposed remedies--an appeal to nostalgia, an attempt to undermine the separation of church and state, trying to throttle religious diversity, and asserting the supposed "Christian" origins of the nation--are historically misguided and would only deepen the crisis facing Christianity.

Saving Faith argues that any attempt to arrest the decline of Christianity in America must first reckon with the past, especially America's "original sin" of racism, with which Christians have been far too complicit. Christians also need to turn to the Bible, from the creation accounts of Genesis and the prophetic calls for justice, to the words of Jesus, the Word of God. We can also profit from the examples of Christians in earlier days, especially those in the nineteenth century who advocated for the abolition of slavery, for prison reform, for public education, for women's equality, and against the ravages of unbridled capitalism. The Social Gospel remains a worthy example, and the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern sought to remind evangelicals of their once-robust prophetic voice.

Prophetic Christianity, affirming Jesus as the Word of God, renounces temporal power in favor of speaking from the margins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781506488073

Randall Balmer

Randall Balmer is a prize-winning historian, a leading public commentator on religion, and the author of more than a dozen books, including Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. He holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College.

Book preview

Praise for Saving Faith

Randall Balmer is, all at once, one of our most discerning scholars about religion, one of the most passionate voices within his tradition, and one great storyteller. Saving Faith is both a gift and a challenge. Like Pope Francis, Balmer calls for a prophetic Christianity that positions itself at the margins. Paradoxically, it is from the margins that faith can have its most transformative effect.

—E. J. Dionne Jr., author, Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, and coauthor of 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting

Widely known and much respected, the master storyteller Professor Randall Balmer offers his readers what we have come to expect—a clear-eyed and carefully researched historical perspective of American Christianity. In Saving Faith, he diagnoses the multipronged disease of greed, politicization, and racism that has spread to infect multiple strands of Christianity, from evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism. But lest we lose hope and give up on a deeply flawed American religious tradition or accept that this is the norm, Balmer offers us a prescription to make a sick Christianity healthy. The medicine to cure Christianity will require multiple doses over time. It will cause pain in the interim and will require sacrifice, love, bridge-building, and reestablishing the separation of church and state. While the cure will not be easy, what will emerge is a healthy, restored religion that is prophetic, principled, and disentangled from the world. Balmer offers Christians a way out of a troubling past and present and shows us that hope is warranted.

—Kristy Nabhan-Warren, associate vice president of research, and professor and Figge Chair of Catholic Studies, University of Iowa

There is no more incisive, prolific, and enlivening interpreter of American religion than Randall Balmer. Saving Faith is a well-documented sermon from history that proves the point. In it new villains and heroes will be discovered, as Balmer explains why we are at an inflection point unlike any other, with evangelical megachurches, mainline Protestants, and Catholics each experiencing crises of their own making. His breathtaking explication of the American Christian rush toward ecumenism while growth was happening for exclusive—not inclusive—churches is alone worth the price of the book. He finishes this tour de force with a concise walk through the American founders’ faith, with many surprises. To some this may read like a stinging indictment of Christianity in America, but to others it is the long-awaited healing treatment that we have needed.

—Rob Wilson-Black, president and CEO, Faith & Politics Institute

Saving Faith

Saving Faith

How American Christianity Can Reclaim Its Prophetic Voice

Randall Balmer

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

SAVING FAITH

How American Christianity Can Reclaim Its Prophetic Voice

Copyright © 2023 by Randall Balmer. Published by Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933063 (print)

Cover image: Abstract Oil Painting Smudged Textured Brush Strokes, ©oxygen | Getty Images

Cover design: Kristin Miller

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8806-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8807-3

Also by Randall Balmer

Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America

Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

Solemn Reverence: The Separation of Church and State in American Life

Evangelicalism in America

Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter

First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty

The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond

God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush

Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America

Religion in American Life: A Short History [with Jon Butler and Grant Wacker]

Protestantism in America [with Lauren F. Winner]

Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism

Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father’s Faith

Religion in Twentieth Century America

Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America

Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism

The Presbyterians [with John R. Fitzmier]

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America

A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies

For Douglas Frank and Sam Alvord

who introduced me to the life of the mind

and the music of the spheres

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way.

—Isaiah 53:6

I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds and the grossest of all libels.

—Frederick Douglass, 1845

It is customary to blame secularism for the eclipse of religion in modern society. But it would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive and insipid. When faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain, when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1976

. . . there is an enormous number of people, and I am one of them, whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it. A better possibility is that this, our native religion, should survive and renew itself, so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be.

—Wendell Berry, 1993

Contents

Preface

1. How Bad Is It?

2. Misguided Remedies

3. The Fantasy of Christian Nationalism

4. Reclaiming the Faith

5. Back to the Bible

6. Worthy Examples

7. The Case for Prophetic Christianity

Appendix

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

Anyone who sifts through the ashes of American Christianity in the early decades of the twenty-first century owes his readers the clarity of knowing who presumes to do so.

I identify myself as a follower of Jesus, even though I’m acutely aware that I often fall short of that aspiration. It’s well beyond my pay grade to assert that my faith is necessarily superior to others’; that discussion holds little interest for me. I’ve examined other traditions from time to time, and I’ve come away with appreciation for their integrity,