The "Mainline" and the "Evangelical"

During the interview Cody Matchett and I had with Elesha Coffman, author of the book Turning Points, somehow her published dissertation came up. I turned back to a bookshelf and there it sat. I pulled it off, and that evening I took a look at it. That look became my main read during our time in Northern Michigan. Her book, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline, combines a history of The Christian Century [=CC] and the history of the “mainline,” and what the latter means through the lens of what was probably its major instrument, that magazine.

Her book is a well-written, laced up with timely and interesting stories about people, and is a full study of the CC, its origins in the Disciples of Christ, its first and long-time editor (Charles Clayton Morrison), its social gospel shaping, its connections to ecumenicism, and most especially the essence of the mainline through the CC’s pages: an intellectual elite that saw itself as the leaders, first, of the heart of Protestantism and the direction of the American church should go, but then, second, its more restricted audience of mainline pastors, intelligent church leaders, and its lack of appeal to populism.

Her question is how the mainline became the mainline. One could ask along with that how main was the mainline? Its lack of appeal to populism, which was the clear appeal of the neo-evangelical push with the rise of Billy Graham and Christianity Today, led to the magazine’s constant struggles to push for subscriptions and donations. The financial dimension of this study was, for me at first, the least interesting theme, but as the book unfolded it became obvious why this mattered so much. (And it matters for all magazines, including CT and CC today.)

A theme: who would speak for American Christians? “Despite the impossibility of constructing an actual establishment, though, religious leaders of various stripes have attempted to assume responsibility for the national soul since the beginning of European settlement. American religious history is in many ways the story of this struggle.”

The mainline – what is it? “Like the proverbial elephant investigated by blind man, the mainline is all these things: a set of denominations, a mode of religiosity, a social network, and an attempted religious establishment.” But the mainline’s appeal was “prestige” far more than “popularity,” and the former was “conferred by other cultural elites rather than by the masses.”

A study that complements her study is called WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy, by Michael Knox Beran, which is a good read, too. With no royalty in the USA, with no landed heritage or aristocracy, leadership had to find a way to legitimate itself and establish itself as the voice for the Americans. By the way, the same applies to American evangelicalism: there is no institution that says “This is who we are.” Voices are out there, but no voice has establishment authority or power. So, there are rivals.

There is no snarling in Coffman’s descriptions of the elitism of either the CC or the mainlines, but elitism needs to be in the mix when one describes either. Her term for this, which she explores with clarity and plenty of evidence, is “cultural capital.” That built the mainline, and it defines its identity. “Cultural capital … encompasses qualities like aesthetic taste, linguistic patterns, and academic skills, all of which enhance a person's prestige.” “In other words, the possessor of cultural capital reads the right books, wears the right clothes, associates with the right kind of people, and holds the right opinions. All of these things are right because of the possessors of cultural capital have deemed them so.” It was not about charisma; it was about cultural capital. She uses an expression that has value: they were “leaders without followers.” In the USA’s evangelicalism, followers matter more.  It all began near the University of Chicago.

Viewpoints were articulated by those with platforms, and the people were summoned to agree. “Because the mainline centered itself on the American religious landscape not by camping out in the heart of the majority but by claiming high ground and then calling others to range themselves round, these declarations performed a vital function for the tradition. Mainline authority flowed from the top down, so someone, somewhere had to give marching orders.” Enter the CC as one of those giving orders. The authority of the CC thus grew slowly as progressives increasingly saw it as their voice. Supply led the foot of demand. CC feared the laity in some ways.

What about its voice in the political fray? Coffman has this summary: “although the Century had a voice in national and international affairs, it did not convert (directly or through its clergy readers) large numbers of American Protestants to its progressive vision. Rather, the Century exercised its most powerful influence in the process of mainline identification, both in the sense of defining which writers, institutions, and ideas belong to the emerging mainline tradition and in the sense of offering readers an opportunity to identify with that tradition.” Her study includes some thinking about media theory, and what she concludes is that the CC represented an order of things, which conferred some status for those who saw it as their voice.

Very interesting chp that has a discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr’s participation in the CC but then how he pulled out over Morrison. The CC’s editors were pacifists when Niebuhr had become a realist, in fact, the Christian realist voice – which had more popular attraction than the pacifist view.

Another interesting chp dealt with the tension of visions as Christianity Today arose in contrast to and competition with the Century. Karl Barth vs. C.F.H. Henry. (Henry’s five volume study was a response to Barth, and by the time Henry was done Barth had gained much ground in the audience Henry assumed to be on his side. Barth was a no-no for evangelicals at the time.)

One major theme from Morrison on was the unity of American Protestants. “To use a distinction running throughout this book, the idea of the mainline – a unified American Protestantism, culturally dominant, socially progressive, fulfilling its obligation as shepherd of the nation's soul -- achieved unprecedented success in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The idea was a social construction, advanced by elite individuals, flawed in many ways, but nonetheless real and meaningful to me millions of Americans.”

I finish with this: “unless ministers committed to preaching a clear, relevant gospel and yielded some of their power to straight-talking men and women of action, Protestant churches would remain fragmented and weak, unable to influence society. On both sides, the question of representation -- who embodies and speaks for the church -- loomed. … By the mid-1950s, that rift mapped onto a renewed liberal-conservative divide in American Protestantism to an extent that destroyed dreams of Protestant consensus.”

Mainline became a religious descriptor in about 1960, and the term was not of their own choosing. But it stuck and it’s here to stay.  Mainline then parallels evangelical in American religious discourse. No one controls either; CC and CT approximate the voices and center; some leaders are more prominent than others; class and status are at work, with evangelicalism imitating the mainline. What most impressed me with this book was the populism of evangelicalism and the elitism of the mainline. And neither is a pejorative; they are America’s religious reality.