On Religion - Ten years of reporting on a fault line - Columns

On Religion - Ten years of reporting on a fault line - Columns

Terry Mattingly, writing in 1998:

"Back in the 1980s, I began to experience deja vu while covering event after event on the religion beat in Charlotte, Denver and then at the national level.

"I kept seeing a fascinating cast of characters at events centering on faith, politics and morality. A pro-life rally, for example, would feature a Baptist, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox rabbi and a cluster of conservative Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans. Then, the pro-choice counter-rally would feature a "moderate" Baptist, a Catholic activist or two, a Reform rabbi and mainline Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans.

"Similar line-ups would appear at many rallies linked to gay rights, sex-education programs and controversies in media, the arts and even science. Along with other journalists, I kept reporting that today's social issues were creating bizarre coalitions that defied historic and doctrinal boundaries. After several years of writing about 'strange bedfellows,' it became obvious that what was once unique was now commonplace....

"The old dividing lines centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic - the nature of truth and moral authority.Two years later, [James Davison] Hunter began writing 'Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,' in which he declared that America now contains two basic world views, which he called 'orthodox' and 'progressive.' The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to 'resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life.'"

J. Gresham Machen identified this fault line within Protestantism in his 1923 book Christianity and Liberalism. Even then, orthodox Protestants who agreed on fundamentals of the faith -- the inerrancy of Scripture, the deity of Christ, His virgin birth, bodily death and resurrection, the reality of miracles -- were linking arms across denominational divisions while religious liberals were creating ecumenical initiatives of their own, gradually expanding them into interfaith organizations. What's changed, starting in the 1970s, is the development of the broader conservative coalition that Mattingly describes above, reaching beyond Protestantism and beyond the boundaries of Christianity.