Morality Without the Tommyrot

Joseph Bottum recounts the central role of mainline Protestantism in the history and cultural attitudes of America. It was the unifying principle:

Which makes it all the stranger that, somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, ­soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.

The once outlandish actions of Bishop Pike, for example, (“discarding doctrine in the name of ethics, and he was always ­ feckless: dangerously irresponsible, ­refusing to think his way through causes and ­consequences”) became the norm.

And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other ­period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.

Among the causes, Bottum discusses Canadian law professor John Humphrey who completed a draft of the 1948 U.N.’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights and said what had been achieved was “Christian morality without the tommyrot.” Tommyrot to Humphrey stood for dogma, sacraments, prayer, and other trappings of religion. And morality without the tommyrot seems to be precisely what many Americans seek. Morality has been replaced by ethics, and religion by spirituality, and the core principles are no longer apparent.

Protestantism’s quest for greater relevance in the economic and political realm has led to its demise. The real tommyrot in hindsight seems more likely to be the lefty causes that distracted mainline Protestantism into irrelevance.