Evangelicals must learn to think like a minority

Newsflash: Evangelicals must face a new reality. No, not the advent of the Obama administration but the reality that they are a minority.

 

On one hand, this is not new at all. Misperceptions notwithstanding, evangelical values didn’t exactly dominate America’s culture or politics during “the last eight years.” Daily Kos prophesies of theocracy failed to materialize.

 

Yet a shift has occurred; like Earth’s rotation, barely noticeable.

 

According to the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the percentage of self-identifying Christians has steadily declined for almost two decades, dropping 10 percent. During the same period, the percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation nearly doubled, rising to 15 percent.

 

Newsweek’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Jon Meacham gave a thoughtful, if predictable, response, writing of “The End of Christian America.” Yet the philosophy he attacks, that of the old-guard Religious Right, as seen in The Moral Majority, vanished 15 years ago in most evangelical circles.

 

The news here is not that Evangelicals must recognize their Winthropian vision of “A City on a Hill” as a pipedream. Ask your average evangelical if they want to see a Christian takeover of government and an implementation of “Christian laws” and you are likely to hear laughter.

 

No. The news stirring the collective evangelical consciousness is that they must assume a new mindset in the public square. Americans’ religious beliefs are becoming more polarized, and without “minority thinking” Evangelicals may lose many of the freedoms they cherish.

 

The history of Protestants in American public education reveals the imperative nature of this Gestalt shift.

 

Evangelicals’ advocacy for school vouchers has been rebuffed, often because vouchers run afoul of Blaine Amendments. Most states have one. They stipulate that no money “shall be appropriated to, or used by, or in aid of any sectarian, church, or denominational school.”

 

In the mid-19th century, tax-funded public schools took over Northern education. Most Protestants liked public education as long as that didn’t mean secularized education. They were pleased with a public system which taught the King James Bible and a milk-toast Protestantism.

(To be fair, many Evangelicals, especially Calvinists, saw the public school movement as a Unitarian watering-down of Protestantism. But public schools won the day.)

 

By the 1870s, many Protestants feared what the growing number of Catholic immigrants might mean for public, supposedly non-sectarian (read: Protestant) education.

 

Then-House Speaker James G. Blaine decided to exploit this angst. Attempting to invigorate Northern Protestant voters, Blaine pushed an amendment (followed by similar state amendments) prohibiting “sectarian” schools from receiving tax money. Protestants were in the majority and state-funded their “public” schools, while barring taxpayer funds from Catholic schools.

 

This was a dual error. First, it relied upon what Marvin Olasky and others dub “the myth of neutrality” – that worldview-neutral education can exist when teaching kids how to view the world.

 

Second, and here lies the lesson for Evangelicals today, the Blaine Amendment movement was myopic: It failed to see that one day even those wanting Protestant-infused public education may not be in power.

 

Today, parents wanting to educate children according to a Protestant worldview must overcome an obstacle their forbearers erected; redeeming a voucher at a religious school is likely against their state’s constitution.

 

Similarly, if the 2009 ARIS teaches Evangelicals anything, it is not that Christian America just died, whatever that means.

 

The real lesson, the big picture, is that America is rapidly losing a shared frame of reference, and Evangelicals must think ahead. They must see through the secular stereotype of Evangelicals behind all the levers of power and view themselves as a minority that they might ensure religious freedom for all.

 

Logan Paul Gage is a policy analyst with Discovery Institute in Washington