Hailed as "one of the leading feminists of our time," Dr. Ann Douglas is Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and has also taught at Princeton and Harvard. Her highly acclaimed work, The Feminization of American Culture, was followed recently by Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's. One of Dr. Douglas's main theses is that the demise of Calvinism led to a sentimentalism in religion that shaped the larger society. Although Dr. Douglas is committed to a much broader theological perspective than we would embrace, her critique is trenchant. It is an especially appropriate topic in relation to our understanding of Christ's saving work in our time and place.
MR: You talk a lot about sentimentalism. Is that part of the dismantling process in the 19th century?
DOUGLAS: Yes, it is. Calvinism had experienced sustained attacks, especially in the eighteenth century, with the founding of such groups as the Universalists and then, of course, the Unitarians. The liberals, headed by Unitarians and Universalists and some Congregationalists as well, began to say as we entered the 19th century, 'No, if God loves human beings, he understands and sympathizes with human beings. He wouldn't ask them to do something or believe something that would go against their own needs or desires.' There's that line in Job: 'Though he slay me, yet will I worship him,' and this was the Calvinistic ethos that the liberals simply could not accept–that idea that God is much greater and larger than our own happiness. Calvinism wasn't saying that God wanted to be cruel, but that his plans are so much vaster and grander than anything human beings can conceive. The liberals could not accept this view of God, due in part to the humanist tradition, but it is also partly commercial: You know, if we've got to sell ourselves now–since the churches are now self-supporting rather than dependent on state funding–is this the adspiel, so to speak, that will best sell our product?
MR: Today, especially in what is being called the church growth movement, we hear, in varying degrees, that we must tone down doctrinal distinctives and meet felt needs, focus on healing and wholeness, and prefer soft inspiration to hard sayings. Soft lights, soft sermons, soft choruses caressing the air, have become the rage. Instead of "Eternal Father, Strong To Save," we sing about walking with Jesus alone in a garden "while the dew is still on the roses," or, in the words of one chorus, "I keep falling in love with him over and over and over and over again."
DOUGLAS: Right, this is straight out of the liberal Unitarian, sentimental tradition of the last century. Women, by far, comprised the largest number of churchgoers, and they were staffing mission boards, Sunday school classes, and any other church position they could, at a time when they could not vote or purchase property. As writers, moral reformers, Sunday school teachers, and women transformed the church and they wondered, 'Why do we have to have all this theology and an emphasis on sin and the need for redemption? Why isn't the home the model for God? Why shouldn't the things we do and hear in church suit us where we are and woo us where we are, rather than expecting this radical change of heart that Calvinism had required?'
MR: That's an interesting point. A few years ago, Christianity Today ran a cover story on a so-called "megashift" in evangelical theology, from the 'courtroom' model that emphasizes sin, guilt, judgment, and the need for an atonement and justification, to a more 'relational' model. It was a switch from the courtroom to the family room, toning down the tough theology in favor of a more therapeutic approach. Do you see this as in some way the arrival of the sentimental creed firmly within that same evangelical Protestant establishment that ended up leaving liberal Protestantism over these same issues early this century?
DOUGLAS: Oh, it is. I could quote you chapter and verse of ministers and evangelical women writers and reformers in the 1830's who said exactly the same thing–a sense that we need a more human God, a God who is nearer and will understand us better. It's a tough issue, and Calvinists weren't saying that God is uncaring. The problem with this whole sentimental tradition, which you're describing in the 20th century and I'm describing in the 19th, is that once you drop the idea that God is a judge, you do seem to weaken things. To some extent, my own sympathies lie with the Calvinist tradition, because I have enormous respect for the intellectual and spiritual endeavor of trying to understand a world that, you admit, is not necessarily there just to make you happy.
MR: In the 19th century, the Arminian revivalist Sam Jones thundered, 'God never did throw a javelin into the heart of his Son,' thus attacking the classical doctrine of the substitutionary atonement as insufficiently moral and sensitive. Increasingly, there is this cry for a 'kinder, gentler' God in evangelism. Then you have the 'Re-Imaging' conference of mainline feminists, among whom was one speaker who declared, 'We don't need guys hanging on crosses with blood dripping and all that weird stuff.' As strange as the parallel may seem, is there a connection here between Arminian revivalists and liberal Unitarians that makes today's evangelicals and liberals more similar than we might have thought? In reaction against offense of the Cross, many came to see Christ more as a caring nurturer (a mother, as you say in your book), rather than as a bloody sacrifice. Doesn't this make unlikely bedfellows?
DOUGLAS: Of course, it is part of the whole thing. Again, it does have to do with that sense that, 'Let's not make all of this pain and suffering.' Surely, one replies, 'Of course, let's not. Faith is also a matter of joy'–something a Calvinist would have believed also. The problem is that there is injustice in the world and there is suffering. By constantly softening Christian doctrine, there is a danger that you are simply going to efface them altogether, and people are going to be left in a real way unguided and left to themselves, as they already are.
MR: So consumerism is all one is left with in this bargain.
DOUGLAS: Well, that's the danger. I am not on the side of the fundamentalists, but there is a kind of rush toward accommodation these days, to get rid of all the elements that don't suit our own causes. Two things seem clear to me: one, that the liberalization is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and that most of the groups that are fighting it are doing so on the wrong front: on the social and moral issues. This seems to me to simply be a continuation of this process of turning God's terms into human terms. I'm not saying they are not important issues, but they are social and political; they are not theological issues. It seems clear that we're going to go on in this more humanized fashion. At the same time, it seems to me that life is such that most people who believe in something, however they describe it, are going to need a faith and a concept of God that includes rather than mitigates or denies the harsh realities of life as we experience it.
MR: This is what you call, 'terrible honesty'?
DOUGLAS: Well, this is especially in relation to the 1920's, when America's leading artists and cultural figures were still dealing with theological questions, whether Ernest Hemingway, who described his Sun Also Rises as a story about how people go to hell, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said the ultimate question was you standing in a white light before your God. These very secular writers were still speaking in terms of saving souls: What constitutes a life lived in the sight of God? In Europe, Karl Barth was launching the Neo-Orthodox movement, a revival of these older views of sin and the need for salvation. How did one explain the Holocaust without an almost Calvinist sense of original sin? Difficult explanations may get in the way of sentimentalism, but they are ultimately a solace because they match difficult realities.
MR: Studies of evangelical seminarians and the laity have shown that, in spite of whatever they may hold officially, when asked whether they view the self as essentially innocent, the findings are startling. Seventy-seven percent of the nation's evangelicals believe that "man is by nature basically good." Is this the triumph of the Sentimental Creed even over the body of Protestants who have at least officially attempted to defend classical Christianity?
DOUGLAS: Sure it is, because the arguments in the last century revolved around the question, 'Can you really tell me that children are really born sinful?' The Bible, after all, says that the imaginations of man's heart are evil continually. Now I think we all feel that that's a bit too strong, but the notion that the human heart is essentially innocent seems to me to reflect denial rather than optimism.
MR: George Lindbeck at Yale says that the shift in convictions can be measured by the fact that only liberal sentimentalists could swallow Norman Vincent Peale in the '50s, but today evangelicals accept the same message in the form of Robert Schuller. Sermons on sin and grace, with the Cross at the center, are often replaced with the focus on my happiness and self-esteem. Are you saying that positions that would have been regarded as more in line with Unitarian, liberal sentimentalism are now easily marketed in conservative circles? In other words, would someone like Robert Schuller have been considered an enemy of the Faith in the earliest days of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton ?
DOUGLAS: Yes, very much so. Harvard became the bastion of Unitarianism by the early nineteenth century, but early on that would have been true. The emphasis on therapy is really the big distinction: Do you see faith as therapy? We are moving steadily toward a therapeutic world order. Now, much of this is so admirable. Good therapy has a huge claim, but it isn't really theology-friendly because it's pragmatic. I believe in the Twelve Steps programs. They work. But there has to be some sense that there are other realities out there. Before the therapeutic triumph there was this sense that denying one's desires and one's importance was a sign of character. Getting one's life in order is a good thing, but it is not the only thing–or even the ultimate thing. When Roosevelt struggled to understand Hitler and the Nazis, he was at a loss until he was given a book of theology and was able to finally see in a bit deeper to the human condition. More liberal explanations just couldn't explain Hitler to him.
