Tea at Trianon: Losing Their Religion

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 5, 2023

Losing Their Religion

From First Things:

Here Bullivant might have followed the approach of Callum Brown’s classic The Death of Christian Britain. Brown argued that Christianity had been supplanted in Europe by a worldview whose essential principles were the extreme privatization of spiritual belief, radical egalitarianism, social utopianism, therapeutic culture, and the notion of politics as the highest human calling. Though America seemed to have escaped the worst of this fate, it had not emerged unscathed. The worldview had colonized many mainstream religious institutions, most notably among mainline Protestants. These groups became utterly dominated by it after losing their more traditionalist members to theologically conservative denominations. As Christian theology was only accidental to the new values, elements of religious practice were gradually shed, while the fundamental worldview was preserved. Post-Protestant values had effectively supplemented older theological notions: Brown describes the revaluation of temperance in Britain, for instance, on the basis of health, weight loss, the prevention of drunk driving, and other self-help principles.

Many of these themes are already present in the vignettes of Bullivant’s study. In case after case, the nonverts of the book return to the same small handful of mainstream secular ideological arguments to illustrate their opposition to their former faiths. John invokes his libertarian political beliefs, Judy cites her BDSM and leather kinks, Dorothy describes her church as “intolerant,” and nearly all of these subjects name their LGBTQ identities as the seed of their discontent with religion. And yet, Bullivant treats “No Religion” as a null hypothesis or a state of contentless neutrality. He is right to point out that secularism comprehends many diverse beliefs. But that does not mean there are no commonalties worth studying.

It is no coincidence that many of today’s arguments about Christianity and secularism mirror the intra-Protestant debates of a half-century ago. As Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens have observed, mainline Protestants became increasingly apathetic toward doctrinal differences; many, indeed, were theologically illiterate. Post-1960s liberal mainline Protestantism and post-Protestant secularism had always shared a worldview through the medium of liberal theology, and they were already converging. Bullivant rightly rejects the notion that mainline Protestants were insincere in their religious beliefs. But he misses the way in which mainline churches de-emphasized supernatural, soteriological, and eschatological values, to the point that these values lost relevance or were abandoned altogether—without, however, the churches losing their sense of Protestant identity or suffering any internal moral crisis.

To be a mainline Protestant was to believe in an alternative articulation of a perspective shared with the Nones, one that deprioritized supernatural beliefs or reduced them to representations of socio-political values. Take a person who once identified as a liberal mainline Protestant and now identifies as a Rawlsian liberal humanist. Has this person nonverted, or merely changed denominations? By and large, to change from liberal mainline Protestantism to secular liberalism has not involved the kind of personal or cultural disjunction experienced by nonverts from Mormonism, evangelicalism, or Catholicism—as evidenced by Bullivant’s frequent, yet never fully scrutinized, references to this recurring theme. It could even be said that liberal post-Protestantism always was these people’s underlying faith, and that they merely clarified and simplified their practice of it by shedding the unnecessary elements of church attendance and supernaturalism. If the primary reason to go to church was civil rights activism, what exactly was the purpose of maintaining a priest and sanctuary? (Read more.)