Protestant Pluralism and Public Rhetoric
At its birth at the end of the eighteenth century, the United States was populated by a wide variety of Protestants. They were found in a wide variety of churches - ranging through Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Unitarians. And they were found on a wide spectrum of the Protestant declension ranging through its first four stages from born-again Christians to unitarians. No one church and no one stage represented a majority of the American population (or even of that part of the white male population which comprised the only persons with the right to vote).
This condition of Protestant pluralism meant that public pronouncements on religious themes that honored citizens situated in one church or stage were just as likely to offend those situated in another. This drove public officials to a religious rhetoric of the least-common, and least-offensive, denominator. This was the rhetoric of unitarianism, which was the fourth stage of the Protestant declension. Not all American Protestants could believe in the full implications of each of the three persons of the Holy Trinity, but all of them could believe that God was a supreme being and that providence was divine. The adoption of this unitarian rhetoric was facilitated by the fact that some of the political elite already believed it.
In the early nineteenth century, there were periodic religious revivals among portions of the American population. These moved some Protestants back up the scale to higher stages of belief. However, this did not change the religious rhetoric in public pronouncements. The logic of religious pluralism, reinforced by the substantial numbers of Roman Catholic and even Jews immigrating to the United States in the 1840s and after, continued to drive public officials even further toward the rhetoric of the least-common and least-offensive denominator. This would be a public rhetoric that, while it would use conceptions that were congruent and congenial to the Protestant ones, would make almost no references to religion at all. In regard to economic matters, the central conception was the free market; and in regard to political matters, it was liberal democracy. By the early nineteenth century, most Americans had come to believe that 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 ideology, that was described so brilliantly and so beautifully by that young Frenchman who was both an aristocrat and a liberal, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America (1834). The full development of these ideas would eventually lead to the fifth stage of the Protestant declension, the American Creed.
The Protestant Declension and American Foreign Policy
During the nineteenth century, these transformations down the scale of Protestant declension did not have much impact upon American foreign policy, even though they had tremendous impact upon American domestic politics (including the origins of the Civil War). As long as the United States was focused upon the great task of westward expansion across the North American continent and as long as it was on the western margins of the international competition between the European great powers, the American ideology of the free market and liberal democracy could have little effect upon international affairs. Its chief foreign impact was upon the native American tribes (which, however, were sometimes called "nations") and upon the Mexican population annexed by the United States after the Mexican War.
With the beginning of the twentieth century, this all changed. The grand project of continental expansion was completed and was replaced within a decade by a new project of overseas expansion, at first into the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific. The era of the United States being on the margins of the great-power competition was followed, after the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War and its construction of the Great White Fleet, by an era where the United States was clearly one of the great powers.
In the nineteenth century the United States had few opportunities to bring its particular ideology into its foreign policy. Now, suddenly with the twentieth century, it had many opportunities to do so. And for some Americans, most obviously President Woodrow Wilson but also most U.S. presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, opportunity has been seen as a necessity.
The Fourth Stage of the Protestant Declension: Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian clergyman. His pronouncements on public policy, however, seem to have more in common with Unitarianism than with Presbyterianism. He seems to have believed that he was carrying out God's will, but he does not seem to have given much thought to the other persons of the Trinity, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. As we have already discussed, this is not surprising from someone who was president of a vast nation which was characterized by a wide range of religious diversity and by now even by a substantial amount of secularization.
Wilson's political identity was as a Progressive and his political program was known as "the New Freedom." These were congruent and isomorphic with his religious identity as a Presbyterian and his religious actuality as a unitarian. Wilson believed deeply in free markets, ordered by written contracts, and in liberal democracy, ordered by a written constitution. He also seems to have believed that God meant for him to advance these ideals both at home and abroad, e.g., "to make the world safe for democracy." Conversely, Wilson had almost no sensitivity or sympathy toward those non-Protestant conceptions of hierarchy, community, tradition, and custom.
These political and economic conceptions of Wilson were repeatedly expressed in his foreign policies: (1) his notion that the problems of Latin American countries could be solved by formal elections, written constitutions, and the enforcement of contracts: (2) his focus upon freedom of the seas, international law, and democratic ideology as he led the United States into the First World War; (3) his relentless opposition to the Habsburg Monarchy, the very embodiment of hierarchy and community, tradition, and custom (and the only Roman Catholic great power), in the name of self-determination, which was an individualist or even Protestant conception inappropriately applied to a communal or even Catholic condition; and (4) his insistence upon the abstraction of collective security, as written down in the Covenant of the League of Nations, as the solution to the perennial problem of international conflict.
Each of these notions seemed normal and obvious to Wilson and to millions of other Americans. Indeed, in their up-dated versions, they seem normal and obvious to Bill Clinton and millions of other Americans today.
They only seem normal and obvious, however, to a people growing up in a culture shaped at its origins by Protestantism, rather than by some other religion. It is difficult to imagine a statesman who was Eastern Orthodox, Muslim, Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, or even Roman Catholic coming up with these notions so consistently and continuously as did Wilson and his fellow Americans. At least no such actual statesman comes readily to mind. It is even difficult to imagine a statesman of secular convictions but growing up in a culture that was shaped by one of these other religions developing this particular ideology. The ideologies of even such democratic secular figures as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sun Yat-sen, or Konrad Adenauer were quite different.
The Fifth Stage of the Protestant Declension: The American Creed
The last and grandest of Wilson's projects, the League of Nations, was of course a failure, being rejected in 1920 by the U.S. Senate and by millions of other Americans as well. But most of Wilson's Protestant-like notions became permanent features of American foreign policy.
It is a cliché of American diplomatic history that the United States "retreated into isolationism" after the First World War. In fact, this U.S. retreat or withdrawal really only applied to Europe (and there only in regard to security and military matters). In other regions of the world, particularly Latin America and East Asia, the United States continued and even expanded its presence in the 1920s under Republican administrations in much the same way as it had under the Wilson administration. Then, under the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930's, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt adopted new approaches toward Latin America (the Good Neighbor Policy and an end to U.S. military interventions) and East Asia (a renewed focus upon the Open Door Policy and China). But throughout the inter-war period, American foreign policy in these two developing regions was dominated by the promotion of the central elements of what was by now the fully-developed American Creed: free markets and equal opportunity, free elections and liberal democracy, and constitutionalism and the rule of law.
A central reason why the United States withdrew from European security matters after 1920 was because Americans had come to believe that they could not make-over the European nations -- economically-developed, militarily-strong, and politically independent -- in America's image, i.e., they could not convert the European nations to the American Creed. In Latin America and East Asia -- economically-underdeveloped, militarily-weak (except Japan), and politically-dependent -- it was a different story. Because of the weakness and therefore openness of these countries, it seemed plausible that they might actually be converted to American ways. Of course, this could only seem plausible if the cultural and social features, the traditions and customs, of these countries could be dismissed or ignored. But these features were formed around such religions as Catholicism and Confucianism, which, to the Protestant mind of Americans, seemed obviously retrograde and irrational. With just a little persuasive effort on the part of Americans, this would become obvious to Latin Americans and East Asians as well. Then they too would adopt some version of the American Creed.
Thus, a characteristic pattern had developed in the conduct of American foreign policy in peacetime. When a country was strong in relation to the United States, particularly if it was a great power, American foreign policy tended to be marked by either prudence or distance, by either "realism" or "isolationism." The United States acted toward that country in ways similar to those of the other great powers. In contrast, however, when a country was weak in relation to the United States, American foreign policy was marked by the drive to convert that country to free markets and liberal democracy, by "idealism" (really secularized Protestantism). The United States sought to remake that country in the image of the American Creed.
A problem would arise, however, if the United States, while seeking to convert a particular weak region, came into conflict with a particular great power. Then the idealism and the insistence would come into conflict with the realism and the prudence. This of course is what happened from 1931 to 1941 when the American vision for China came into conflict with the expansion of Japan. The result was the U.S. entry into the Second World War.
In the course of that war, Franklin Roosevelt mobilized and deployed many of the same notions that Woodrow Wilson had promoted during the First World War. Formally, Roosevelt was an Episcopalian, whereas Wilson had been a Presbyterian, and his foreign policies were rather more realistic and pragmatic than those of Wilson. In their actual religious beliefs, however, they both seem to have been some kind of unitarian, and in their wartime policies they both vigorously advanced free trade and liberal democracy. And, of course, Roosevelt brought about at the end of the war the resurrection of Wilson's League of Nations in the form of the United Nations Organization.
After the Second World War, the characteristic pattern of American foreign policy -- "realism" toward the strong and "idealism" toward the weak -- developed further. When the United States was dealing with weak nations (and in the post-war era this was the condition of the European states and Japan), American foreign policy sought to remake them into an image resembling the American Creed. When the United States was dealing with great powers (in the Cold-War era this was first the Soviet Union and later also China), however, American foreign policy was different. An interim period of conflict with these communist powers over their weaker neighbors (Central and Eastern Europe for the Soviet Union; Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia for China) was followed by the establishment of a rough division of the contested region into spheres of influence, and the ensuing U.S. policy tended to be marked by realism, be it prudence (toward the Soviet Union) or distance (toward China until 1973).
During the Cold War, another characteristic of American foreign policy also reached its fullest development. This was the peculiarly American focus upon international organizations as the solution to international problems, a feature that we have already noted in Wilson's League of Nations and Roosevelt's United Nations Organization. This characteristic also seems to have roots in Protestantism.
International Organizations and Protestant Conceptions
When great powers have become great enough to create a sphere of influence composed of themselves and several smaller states (usually neighbors in their own region), they have normally established some kind of international association which has served to legitimize and institutionalize their hegemony. These associations have usually been termed "confederations" or "leagues." Thus, Napoleon's France established the Confederation of the Rhine, Metterich's Austria the German Confederation and the Italian League, Bismarck's Prussia the North German Federation, and twentieth-century Britain the Commonwealth of Nations. This variety of examples demonstrates that great-power status and interest in themselves are a sufficient explanation for a great power establishing an international association.
In the history of international associations, however, the United States has a unique place. It has established more of them than any other great power, and indeed it has established more than all of the other great powers of the modern era combined. It has established them with a greater range of functions -- economic as well as security -- than the other great powers. It has established them with a greater degree of complexity, resulting not just in associations but in organizations or even institutions. And it has sought to establish not just organizations with a regional scope but also those with a global or universal scope as well. International organizations are clearly a central part of the American way, the American creed, in foreign policy.
Much of the U.S. focus upon international organizations can be explained by a realist theory of U.S. foreign policy. As the greatest of the great powers, it is to be expected that the United States would establish international organizations wherever its power or hegemony has extended. At first, this was only Latin America (the Pan-American Union, followed by the Organization of American States). After the First World War and then again after the Second World War, it briefly seemed to be the world itself (the League of Nations, followed by the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank). Then, during the Cold War, U.S. power extended into several regions -- Western Europe (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the Middle East (the short-lived Middle East Treaty Organization), and Southeast Asia (the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization).
With the end of the Cold War and with the end of any other great-power competitor, the United States has returned to the construction of international organizations with a global or universal scope (a new economic institution, the World Trade Organization, and an expanded role for the United Nations). But it also has continued to develop regional organizations (the creation of the North American Free Trade Area and the expansion of NATO).
The establishment of these myriad international organizations in particular places and at particular times can be explained by the particular opportunities for and limitations on American power. Still, the consistency and continuity of the American practice with international organizations does seem extraordinary. Americans clearly have both a drive and a gift for international organizations that goes beyond that found in other nations that have been great powers. For these other nations, the most natural way of organizing international relations between a great power and smaller ones is through some sort of explicit hierarchy, ordered by customary deference. For Americans, the most natural way is through some sort of formal equality, ordered by a formal treaty. This American way is the only way that is congruent and isomorphic with the Protestant conceptions of ordering relations between individuals.
The American focus upon international organizations represents a bridge between the fifth stage of the Protestant declension, the American Creed, and the sixth stage, universal human rights. In the moment from one stage to the next, it almost seems that international organizations are transformed from being a means by which U.S. policy-makers advance American foreign policy to being a means by which they advance abstract universal values.
The Sixth Stage of the Protestant Declension: Universal Human Rights and the Protestant Deformation
In the 1970s, American political and intellectual elites began to promote the notion of universal human rights as a fundamental goal of American foreign policy. This conception took the central elements of the American Creed and carried them to a logical conclusion and to a universal extent.
It was a conjunction of factors that caused American elites to embrace universal human rights at that time. First, those elites who had condemned the U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War needed to develop a new doctrine for American foreign policy to replace the doctrine of containment, which in their eyes was now discredited. Secondly, the surge in U.S. trade and investment in newly-industrializing countries beyond Europe and Japan caused some elites to see a need to develop a new doctrine for American foreign policy that could be applied to a wide variety of different (and often difficult) countries and cultures. Most importantly, however, were changes within the American people themselves. America was changing from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and thus from a producer to a consumer mentality. It was also changing from a modern to a post-modern society and thus from an ideology of "possessive individualism" to an ideology of "expressive individualism." The new post-industrial, consumer, post-modern, expressive-individualist America was embodied in the "me generation," i.e., the baby-boomer generation. For them, the rights (and definitely not the responsibilities) of the individual (and definitely not of the community) were the highest, indeed the only, good.
In the new ideology, human rights are thus seen as the rights of individuals. The individual's rights are independent of any hierarchy or community, traditions or customs, in which that individual might be situated. This means that human rights are applicable to any individual, anywhere in the world, i.e., they are universal, and not merely communal or national. There is thus a close logical connection between the rights of the individual and the universality of those rights. Individual rights are universal rights, and universal rights are individual rights.
Numerous social analysts have noted that the United States has become in the past two decades a new kind of political society, what has been called "the republic of choice."2 It is characterized by the "rights revolution" in law, "freedom of choice" in politics, "consumer sovereignty" in economics, "question authority" in attitudes, and "expressive individualism" in ideology. In regard to spiritual life, one manifestation of this new mentality is "New Age."
The ideology of expressive individualism thus reaches into all aspects of society; it is a total philosophy. The result appears to be totally opposite from the totalitarianism of the state, but it is a sort of totalitarianism of the self. Both totalitarianisms are relentless in breaking down intermediate bodies and mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the highest powers or the widest forces. With the totalitarianism of the state, the highest powers are the authorities of the nation state; with the totalitarianism of the self, the widest forces are the agencies of the global economy.
Expressive individualism -- with its contempt for and protest against all hierarchies, communities, traditions, and customs -- represents the logical conclusion and the ultimate extreme of the secularization of the Protestant religion. The Holy Trinity of original Protestantism, the Supreme Being of unitarianism, the American nation of the American Creed have all been dethroned and replaced by the imperial self. The long declension of the Protestant Reformation has reached its end point in the Protestant Deformation. The Protestant Deformation is a Protestantism without God, a reformation against all forms.
The foreign policy of the republic of choice, of the Protestant deformation, is universal human rights. But during the Cold War, there were constraints on the full pursuit of this project. As long as the United States was engaged in its great bipolar struggle with the Soviet Union and with communist ideology, it had to show some respect for and make some concessions to the particularities of hierarchy, community, traditions, and customs in the countries that it needed as allies. These concessions were often departures from the normal U.S. promotion of free markets and liberal democracy. In Western Europe and Japan, the United States accepted restrictions on free markets, while continuing to promote liberal democracy. In Latin America and Southeast Asia, in contrast, the United States accepted violations of liberal democracy, while continuing to promote free markets. Some of these concessions were beneficial to the people of the countries concerned, as when the United States accepted the policies of the Christian Democratic (usually Roman Catholic) parties and Socialist parties in Western Europe and supported the activities of the Roman Catholic Church in Eastern Europe. Some of these oncessions were detrimental as when the United States supported brutal dictatorships in Central America and the Caribbean.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the discrediting of communist ideology removed much of the necessity for such compromises and concessions. Now the United States could be unrestrained and uncontained in pursuing its grand project of universal human rights. At the same time the spread of the global economy and the competition among national governments to liberalize their economies in order to attract foreign capital legitimized the idea of free markets. Finally, the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 marked the arrival to political power of that generation of Americans who are the true believers in expressive individualism, the baby boomers. The Clinton Administration promoted universal human rights more than any previous administration. It saw human rights, free markets, and liberal democracy as the solutions to virtually every human problem.
As has been discussed by Samuel Huntington and others, this universalist and individualist project of the United States has generated resentment and resistance in societies whose religions traditions are different from the Christianity of the West. Huntington has called this "the clash of civilizations," a struggle between "the West and the rest."3 There has been almost no resistance in those nations with a Protestant tradition, there has been some resistance in those with a Roman Catholic tradition, and there has been the greatest resistance in those with an Islamic or a Confucian tradition.
Virtually all nations whose religious tradition is Protestant have by now adopted some version of the human-rights ideology, if not the full extent of expressive individualism and the republic of choice (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, and even Britain and Germany). More resistant but now being driven into at least free markets and liberal democracy are those nations whose religious tradition is Roman Catholic (France, Italy, the former corporatist countries of Spain and Portugal, the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, and the former authoritarian and protectionist countries of Latin America). However, Pope John Paul II has consistently and comprehensively criticized particular elements of the American project (i.e. liberal ideology and the market economy) in several papal encyclicals. The Pope clearly recognizes that the liberal program, the Protestant deformation, represents the idolatry of the self.
As Huntington has observed, the major resistance to this American universalist and individualist project has been mounted by countries with either an Islamic or a Confucian tradition. The contemporary, modernized versions of Islam and Confucianism represent a counterpart to the most secularized version of Protestantism, a sort of Counter-Deformation to the Protestant Deformation. However, Islam is split among numerous states, no one of which has much prospect of becoming a great power in international politics. Furthermore, the current crisis in several Asian economies has discredited Asian-style capitalism based upon "Asian values" of hierarchy and community, be those values rooted in Islam (Indonesia and Malaysia) or in Confucianism (Japan, South Korea, and the Chinese communities in Indonesia and Malaysia).
We can not now know the outcome of this "clash of civilizations," this struggle between the West and the rest, these wars of secularized religion between the Protestant deformation and the counter-deformation. But the ultimate answer may lie in the character of the Protestant deformation itself.
The Protestant Reformation and the Protestant Deformation
The Protestant Reformation was a prime movement in the making of the modern era. Five hundred years later, the Protestant deformation is a prime movement in the making of the post-modern era. The Protestant Reformation was the most unique of all religions. The Protestant deformation seeks the end of all religions, or rather it seeks to replace the worship of God with the expression of the self.
The Protestant Reformation brought into being the first nation states and the first great powers of the modern era. The most Reformed Protestant of all nations was the United States, and it became the greatest of all great powers as well. Much of the power of the United States can be traced to the energy, efficacy, and organization that was a legacy of its Reformed Protestantism. However, the Protestant deformation, because of its universalist and individualist creed, seeks the end of all nation states and to replace loyalty to America with gratification of oneself. It relentlessly undermines the authority of the United States, the superpower which promotes that creed throughout the world.
In his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon once wrote that the Roman Empire spread the Christian religion throughout the ancient world, but that the Christian religion then undermined the Roman Empire. Now, the American empire is spreading the Protestant deformation throughout the modern world, but the Protestant deformation is beginning to undermine the American empire.
Perhaps one day, on the open and hostile terrain that has become the global economy and amid the empty formalisms of what was once liberal democracy, there will be found an individual. Once so intoxicated with his boisterous self-expression but now so exhausted from stress and strain, he at last recognizes how lonely and isolated he has become. Then perhaps he will turn and seek his refuge and his safety in the protection of a hierarchy, the support of a community, and the comfort of traditions and customs. And then perhaps too he will turn and seek his salvation by becoming open to receive the grace of God.
1. On Wilsonianism and "global meliorism," see Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
2. Lawrence M. Friedman, The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990).
3. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
I have a few minor quibbles, which may be misunderstandings on my part:
I wonder how unitarians can even be considered Christian, if they deny or doubt the diety of Christ and of the Holy Spirit? Ultimately, God will decide their salvation.
I note the irony that the Pope has recognized the danger of this culture of individualism that has sprung from Protestantism, whereas few among Protestants realize this "culture war" they decry has sprung from Protestants' individualism. The essential problem is one both Catholics and Protestants recognize: the divorce of rights of the individual and the celebration of individual freedom from the rule of God. This started with stage 4 in the 19th century and continues to this day.