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The Liberalization of the United Church
The United Church of Canada is widely recognized as a foremost
example of liberal Protestantism,
not only in Canada, but worldwide. Victor Shepherd’s analysis in
an earlier issue of this journal
traced the “operative theology” of the United Church back to
Friedrich Schleiermacher, the dean of
liberal theologians.1
But how did liberalism become the
operative theology of the United Church?
This article draws on my own research
into the denomination’s history to sketch the four main
historical stages by which the United
Church was “liberalized.”2
1. Liberalization of the leadership, 1880-1925
The first phase in the liberalization process actually began
long before the United Church came into
existence, back in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century. Liberalism was entering into its first
period of ascendancy in the seminaries and theological faculties
of Europe, and it is no surprise that
some of the keen young Methodists and Presbyterians who left
Canada to study under Europe’s
leading theologians and biblical scholars returned imbued with
liberal ideas.
What were these ideas? The late nineteenth century was the first
heyday of historical (or higher)
criticism. Far more than being merely the disinterested
scientific study of the authorship, form and
historical context of the biblical texts that it sometimes
purported to be, much of the historical
criticism of the day was in fact animated by secular
presuppositions shaped by the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment and its intellectual successors. Did
certain texts speak of miraculous
interventions by God? Well, educated men like the biblical
scholars knew that such things were
impossible, so the texts in question must be legendary
distortions of events that had naturalistic
explanations. Did certain prophets make startlingly accurate
predictions about events in ancient
history? Well, no one knows the future, so the prophets must
have written their “prophecies” after
the events in question. In short, the historical criticism of
the day proceeded under assumptions that
guaranteed a conflict between biblical scholarship and belief in
the reliability of Scripture.
Another characteristic of nineteenth-century liberalism was an
evolutionary or progressivist
conception of human history. Darwin’s theory of human origins
and its conflict with traditional
understandings of Genesis often gets the lion’s share of
attention here, but the evolutionary mindset
went far beyond the question of humanity’s biological
development to assume that “progress” was
the law of the universe. Certainly this assumption fit with the
world of educated Europeans at the
time: technology, science, “the Empire” (whether British or
French or German), and civilization itself
seemed to be marching ever upward. More, perhaps, than any
specific theory of human origin or
question posed by historical criticism, this progressivist
mindset made it difficult to believe that
Scripture or tradition – both of which on this view
represented a less developed, less enlightened
past – should dictate or limit what “modern Christians”
believed. Some of the sharpest of Canada’s
budding Methodist and Presbyterian scholars were won over
to this way of thinking. As they
returned to Canada and took up positions teaching in
theological colleges, their ideas naturally
brought them into conflict with the evangelical consensus then
dominant in their denominations.
Although at first some of them faced heresy trials as
church leaders attempted to enforce existing
doctrinal standards, for the most part the older generation of
evangelicals – eager to avoid continuing
conflict and hopeful that the new learning could be reconciled
with evangelical piety – were content
to tolerate liberalism in the classroom. The eventual result of
this tolerant approach was that by the
First World War liberals dominated not only the theological
colleges but also the administrative
structures of the Methodist and Presbyterian denominations. As
historian Michael Gauvreau has
argued, the contrast between the liberal influences in the
training of ministers and the continuing
evangelical convictions of congregations created a growing
gap between the theology taught in the
colleges and the preaching heard in the churches. 3
With the passing of years the gap between pulpit
and pew grew wider, as the
liberal religious understanding of ministers left behind the evangelical
understanding of their flocks. The
rising prominence of the social gospel and various reform
movements in the early twentieth
century was a welcome diversion for many from what seemed to
them like arid doctrinal controversies.
The same could be said of the church union movement, which
held hope that all Protestant churches
in Canada could be united into a single body ready to exert
social influence from coast to
coast and shape the destiny of the young nation.
2. An intermediate period, 1925-1960
The consummation of union by the formation of the United Church
of Canada in 1925 began a new
phase during which the liberalization process nearly ground to a
halt. Although liberalism continued
to be the basic theological orientation of both the colleges and
the head office, there were a number
of countervailing factors. Robert Wuthnow’s observation that the
decades leading up to the 1960s
were characterized by avoidance of conflict between conservative
and liberal positions and
emphasis on consensus in American mainline Protestantism also
applies to the United Church in this
period, and can be extended as far back as the 1920s. 4
After a world war and the conflicts
surrounding church union, United Church
leaders preferred to focus on the programs of the church,
especially its extensive social service
work, rather than reopen old wounds – a conviction reinforced
by the traumatic experiences of a Great
Depression and Second World War that came all too soon.
Already during the union negotiations, the framers of the Basis
of Union had been content to adopt
Articles of Faith that were considerably more conservative than
their personal beliefs in the interests
of avoiding theological conflict and preserving elements of the
heritage of each of the uniting
churches.5
(In any event, the inclusion of the “essential
agreement” clause ensured that the Articles
were essentially unenforceable.) In the
following decades, the influence of neo-orthodoxy probably
also played a role; although it neither
became the dominant theology of the United Church nor
effectively challenged the
underpinnings of liberalism in the long run, its widespread influence and
acceptance was part of a more conservative mood in the church
during this intermediate period. This
mood was also reflected in the 1940 Statement of Faith, which –
although it displayed liberal
influence in its silence about the Virgin Birth, failure to call
Jesus “God,” and avoidance of terms like
sacrifice and justification – for the most part read like a
shorter version of the Basis of Union.
The other important feature of this intermediate period was the
strongly traditional character of the
church’s programs. Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s, the
church (especially its Board of
Evangelism and Social Service) kept the revivalist traditions of
the church alive through its support
for mass evangelism, notably giving the conservative American
evangelist Billy Graham a warm
welcome in 1955. Strange as it may seem from the vantage point
of the early twenty-first century,
mid-twentieth-century liberals were enthusiastic advocates of
any and every type of evangelism they
could think of, and frequently spoke of the importance of making
a personal commitment to Christ.
Similarly, the church’s policies on sexual and family issues, in
keeping with the cultural mores of the
period, continued to adhere to traditional Christian teaching.
As late as 1960, a major official
statement by the church bluntly condemned any form of sexual
relationship outside of heterosexual
marriage as “a form of disobedience and rebellion against God.”6
At the same time, the Christian
education curricula used by the church
for its Sunday schools were largely aimed at getting children
to learn Bible stories, memorize Bible
verses, and trust in Christ for salvation, and contained little
liberal content. In short, certain
liberal hallmarks of later decades – rejection of traditional
evangelism, acceptance of non-marital
sex, and production of liberal Sunday school curricula – were
not seen during this intermediate
period.
3. The upheaval of the 1960s
If the period from church union through the 1950s was a time
when the development of liberalism
slowed to a standstill, the 1960s was the decade in which that
development resumed with a
vengeance. Contemporaries frequently used the words “ferment” or
“crisis” to describe what was
going on, and there was little doubt that major changes were
afoot in the United Church (as indeed
in other mainline churches). There were several aspects of this
upheaval as it affected the United
Church.
First, the days of liberalism being a rather subdued theological
force came to an end. A
crop of bestselling religious books, like John A.T. Robinson’s
Honest to God
and Pierre
Berton’s The Comfortable Pew
popularized a new emboldened post-Barthian
liberalism,
drawing heavily on theologians like Bultmann and Tillich. Church
leaders such as the outspoken
moderator E.M. Howse and talking heads in the
United Church Observer
warmly applauded ideas
that would have been considered
inappropriate for public consumption by their predecessors in
previous decades. Even the faddish
“death-of-God” theology attracted favourable comment from
highly-placed figures; Howse for one
commented that he found it less extreme than neo-orthodoxy.7
Although there were ordinary United
Church folk who found this shift in the prevailing winds
exhilarating, surviving correspondence
and letters to the editor suggest that as many or more were
confused and upset that their leaders could countenance what
seemed to them like heresy.
The ferment also found expression in behind-the-scenes work by
the Committee on Christian Faith
on two issues: the authority of the Bible and the development of
an alternative to the Apostles’
Creed. Although the committee members were in the end unable to
agree on a single statement
about biblical authority due to internal divisions, they were
united in rejecting the infallibility of the
Bible, which they described as “subject to the fallibility that
belongs to human limitations and sin.”8
In
the same decade, the committee was
given the task of developing an alternative to the Apostle’s
Creed for use in the baptismal service.
The resulting “New Creed” of 1968 was a self-conscious
attempt by the committee to create a creed in keeping with the
new liberalism of the decade, and it
therefore lacked reference to the objectionable parts of the
Apostles’ Creed: the Virgin Birth, hell,
and the Second Coming.
The most prominent and controversial manifestation of the rapid
liberal shift in the United Church,
however, was the 1964 introduction of the “New Curriculum” for
Sunday schools. Christian
education officials conceived of the curriculum as a way of
closing the theological gap that had
widened between pulpit and pew since the beginning of the
century, by making the liberal approach
to Scripture taught in the theological colleges understandable
to the average church member.
Although the curriculum was heavily promoted, the promotional
materials did not convey just how
radically the new curriculum would differ from the old, so when
the more controversial elements of
the curriculum (questioning the Virgin Birth, “demythologizing”
the Old Testament, denying Christ’s
bodily resurrection) became a major news item the summer of 1964
most congregations had
already placed their orders for the materials. From many
quarters, the reaction was horror and
disbelief. My analysis of the correspondence contained in the
United Church Archives suggests that
nearly three-quarters of the letters church headquarters
received on this issue were opposed to the
curriculum. And despite all-out attempts at damage control by
the curriculum’s promoters, Sunday
school enrollment fell by over 90,000 people (13 per cent) that
year, more than any year before or
since.
Meanwhile, the church was also moving away from the traditional
approaches to evangelism and
morality that had defined it in the preceding decades. Social
service and evangelism had formerly
been paired in the work of the Board of Evangelism and Social
Service, but its new chairman J.R.
Hord steered away from evangelism, revivalistic or otherwise,
and instead focused his attention on
social programs and political lobbying. When Billy Graham and
his associates conducted a series of
evangelistic crusades in 1965 and 1966, the
Observer ran an
article heavily critical of Graham’s
theology9
and Hord lambasted him as “an arm of the status
quo.”10
Data collected by Graham’s
organization showed that United Church ministers were heavily
underrepresented among local clergy
helping with the crusades, despite strong participation only a
decade earlier. Interestingly, the same
data show that United Church laypeople still flocked to the
crusades in droves, often making up one
of the largest groups among those coming forward to surrender
their lives to Christ.
In terms of morality, the church came under the influence of a
situational approach to ethics which
held that no act or behaviour could be considered sinful under
all circumstances. At the same time,
both external critics of the church (like Pierre Berton) and
internal critics (like J.R. Hord) believed
that the church had for too long lagged behind the great forward
movements in society by clinging to
outdated ways of thinking; henceforth, it should aim to figure
out where society was heading and get
in front. Of course, leading opinion in the church had also
given up the idea that the Bible or church
tradition could serve as infallible moral guides. The result of
all of this was that the United Church
leadership had neither the tools nor the will to resist the
sexual revolution of the 1960s. By the end of
the decade, official policy statements had softened or even
reversed formerly stern positions on
issues like extramarital sex and abortion, with Hord in
particular lobbying hard for a loosening of
federal laws banning the latter.
The response of some church members, whether irritated by
controversy or simply taking the
iconoclastic spirit of the decade to its logical conclusion, was
to drop out completely. Some United
Church people at the time vocally opposed the changes, as was
symbolized by the formation in
1966 of the United Church Renewal Fellowship. Most conservative
or evangelical United Church
members, however, probably simply left the church for various
evangelical denominations, which
together with the drop-outs accounts for most of the decline in
Sunday school enrollment and
membership statistics in the 1960s. To a large extent, however,
the course was fixed. With the
theological colleges firmly in liberal hands, and with liberals
holding most official administrative posts,
liberalism was firmly entrenched as the guiding force of the
denomination; and after the public shifts
of the decade, it was now firmly established as the United
Church’s public identity.
4. Liberalism dominant, 1960s to the present
The story of the United Church since the 1960s reads like a
journey further along the course plotted
in that decade. The developments have been more gradual, to be
sure, than the abrupt dislocations
of those defining years, but they have been developments in the
same direction. Liberalism reigns as
the dominant, practically the only, theological approach in the
church. The adoption of “inclusive”
and non-hierarchical language to describe God, often in the
teeth of both Scripture and tradition, is
one sign that current secular values (in this case, extreme
egalitarianism) continue to set the agenda
for the church, providing the standards by which the church
judges not only itself but also its
former sources of authority. Likewise, the church’s courts and
officials have proven willing to
tolerate a string of ever-more-venturesome versions of
liberalism espoused by prominent figures,
from the not-quite-Nicene Jesus of Bill Phipps to the
near-atheism of Gretta Vosper.
The way the United Church speaks into society has also continued
to follow the pattern established
in the 1960s. In several respects, the church appears to have
taken Pierre Berton’s advice to heart,
adopting for its own a policy programme largely parallel to that
of the secular political left (leading
some wags to remark, borrowing the British phrase about
Anglicans and Conservatives, that the
United Church is the NDP at prayer). On issues of family and
sexuality, the United Church has led
the progressivist trend among mainline denominations. One thinks
in particular of the legitimation of
homosexuality as a gift of God and the attendant decisions to
ordain practicing homosexuals and
later to lobby the federal government in favour of same-sex
marriage. Here it is important to note
that the decision of 1988, although it was experienced as an
unprecedented crisis by many
conservatives in the church, was a consistent continuation of
earlier trends rather than a radical step
in a new direction. In a different area, but reinforcing the
same point, the church no longer maintains
an evangelistic programme that remotely resembles what was going
on in the United Church before
1960. Board of Evangelism and Social Service members from that
era would scratch their heads in
bafflement at today’s WonderCafe campaign.
The small renewal movement in the church, which includes Church
Alive, has occasionally had an
impact at a denominational level (and more often at an
individual and congregational level), but it has
not significantly changed the overall direction of the
denomination. The course set in the 1960s – a
course of liberalization – has continued to define the United
Church to the present day. As it turns
out, sociological research of the last several decades has
argued that this is exactly the path a
denomination should follow if it wants to lose members and
attendees. 11
Of course, matters of faith
and conscience should not be decided by
majority vote. As the Canadian Presbyterian George
Monro Grant wrote over a century ago,
“We come of race that never counted the number of its
foes, nor the number of its friends, when freedom, loyalty, or
God was concerned.” 12
The
question is rather whether Christian belief and church
involvement is worth something, and if so, how
to sustain and strengthen it. In the eyes of “progressive
Christians,” it may not much matter what
people believe or whether they are in church at all. For the
typical reader of this journal, in contrast,
I suspect it matters a great deal. But in any case, if the
United Church continues on its present
course, the day of reckoning cannot be far off.
Kevin Flatt
1
Victor Shepherd, “How Did We Get Here? Or The Origins of the
Operative
Theology of The United
Church of Canada,”
Theological Digest and Outlook 15
no. 1 (March 2000), 1-4.
2
Readers interested in examining the detailed evidence upon which the following
historical sketch is based
can find it in Kevin Flatt,
“The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church
of Canada, 1930-1971,”
(Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, 2008).
3
Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical
Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great
Revival to the Great Depression
(Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1991), 240-241.
4
Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring
of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 135-153.
5 John
Webster Grant, The Canadian
Experience of Church Union
(Richmond, VI: John Knox Press, 1967),
32-6.
6
United Church of Canada, Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce,
Toward A Christian
Understanding of Sex, Love, and Marriage
(Toronto: United Church Board of Christian
Education,
1960), 7-9. On homosexuality, see 15-16.
7 E.M.
Howse, “Here’s Howse,” United
Church Observer, 15 December 1965,
9.
8
“Revelation and Authority of the Bible,”
Record of Proceedings,
1966, 509-511.
9 Ben
Smillie, “Let’s Stop Backing Billy Graham,”
United Church Observer,
August 1965, 17-18.
10
Kenneth Bagnell, “What’s All This So-Called New Evangelism?”
United Church Observer,
15 April
1966, 16.
11 An
argument first brought to widespread attention by Dean M. Kelley,
Why Conservative Churches are
Growing (New York:
Harper & Row, 1972), and subsequently developed and refined in works like Roger
Finke and Rodney Stark,
The Churching of America, 1776-1990:
Winners and Losers in Our Religious
Economy (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), and Christian Smith, with
Michael
Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink,
American Evangelicalism: Embattled
and
Thriving (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
12
Quoted in Barry Mack, “From Preaching to Propaganda to Marginalization: The Lost
Centre of
Twentieth-Century Presbyterianism,” in
Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical
Experience, edited by G.A.
Rawlyk (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 152.
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