The God Box

The lecture at Luther Seminary was not my first foray into the topic of ecumenism. In the early 1990s, shortly after I had published an ethnographic study of American evangelicalism, David Heim from The Christian Century called to ask if I would be interested in revisiting the twelve Protestant congregations that the magazine had designated "great churches" in 1950. My articles appeared serially in the Century, and at the conclusion of the assignment I drafted a kind of epilogue, reflecting on my travels along the mainline of American Protestantism. In most of the articles I had struggled to present the glass as half full rather than half empty, and I employed that very image in the epilogue.

But honesty compelled me to reflect as well on the failures of mainline Protestantism and the ecumenical movement. I chose as a metaphor the building that stands just across the street from my office window, the Interchurch Center, better known as the "God Box." After the formation of the National Council of Churches (NCC) during a snowstorm in Cleveland in November 1949, Protestant leaders talked about a building that could house the offices of mainline Protestant denominations as well as the National Council of Churches and its affiliated organizations. There was nothing wrong with such an idea, and Protestant leaders at the time were enamored of corporate models of organization, so it is not surprising that they would want a structure that looked and functioned like a corporate office building.

The venue, however, was another matter. Protestants across the country – including the editors of the Century – pleaded with NCC leaders to locate the building somewhere other than Manhattan, arguably the most provincial place in America. One reader even suggested Manhattan, Kansas, if mainline Protestantism was sincere about locating near, in the Century’s words, "the psychological center of its constituency to insure the maximum response to its leadership."

Not only did mainline Protestant leaders ignore those entreaties in choosing the site on the Upper West Side, they constructed a building whose International-style architecture – unwittingly, I’m sure – came to symbolize the theology coming out of the ecumenical movement. Cold and lifeless, without historical reference, and so careful not to offend that its very blandness became an affront. Even in a neighborhood of undistinguished and largely derivative architecture, the Interchurch Center stands out as the worst of a bad lot. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, never known for his aesthetic discrimination, showed up to lay the cornerstone for the God Box on October 12, 1958, offering paeans to Protestantism’s importance in defining the American way of life.

Eisenhower’s remarks point to another determining influence for the Protestant ecumenism in the latter half of the twentieth century: the Cold War. The United States in the 1950s was engaged in a titanic ideological struggle with the evils of Communism. We Americans had to present a united front. A kind of pan-Protestantism was ideal or, failing that, the Protestant, Catholic, Jew formulation that Will Herberg articulated in 1955 – with all three traditions eliding their distinctiveness in favor of white and middle-class Americanness.

A Crack in the Cornerstone

The Christian Century politely declined to publish my reflections on mainline Protestantism and its ill-fated alliance with ecumenism – sellout, really – but I included it in the epilogue to Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism together with one final observation about the God Box as a metaphor for the failures of ecumenism. "The decline of mainline Protestantism over the past four decades represents the failure of an ambitious, even noble, vision," I wrote; "the dream of ecumenical Protestantism ultimately collapsed beneath its own weight, beneath the burdens of ambition, arrogance, and pretension." I closed with a rhetorical question, wondering if we should read any significance into the fact that a large crack now runs diagonally through the cornerstone that Eisenhower laid in 1958.

Tough words. I acknowledge that. But the arguments were neither flippant nor condescending, and I hoped those words might trigger a serious and long-overdue discussion about the merits of ecumenism. Perhaps the National Council of Churches would organize a conference around a snappy title like "Ecumenism: A Fifty-year Retrospective" or "The Ecumenical Movement: What Have We Gained? What Have We Lost?" As the weeks and months went by, however, I’d have been content with a roundtable discussion or even a mild reprimand from some mid-level NCC bureaucrat, but no one in the God Box seemed to be interested in "dialoguing" with anyone who had the temerity to question the shibboleths of ecumenism.

How did the Interchurch Center respond? As God is my witness, they dispatched a mason to the corner of 120th Street and Riverside Drive to patch the crack in Eisenhower’s cornerstone. You can’t make this up!

* * *

As I stood in front of the Disgruntled Lutherans in Minnesota, I had still another reason to oppose ecumenism. I had become convinced in the preceding months that ecumenism was wrong for cultural reasons as well as theological reasons. Since the Immigration Act of 1965 and the arrival of immigrants, especially from South Asia and Southeast Asia, the United States has become, for the first time in its history, a truly pluralistic society. As these immigrants have altered the religious landscape of North America – Buddhist and Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras, Islamic Centers – they have also taught us something about how to function in a pluralistic context. Like evangelicals throughout American history, the new immigrants were unapologetic about their faith; I’ve yet to hear a New York cabbie concede, "Yes, I’m a Sikh, but I also have a lot to learn from those Presbyterians." Immigrants have demonstrated the importance of particularity in a pluralistic context. The melting pot metaphor is hopelessly passé, even anachronistic, at the turn of the twenty-first century. Postmodernism means many things to many people, but it almost certainly affirms the importance of clinging to the life raft of identity and definition amid the seas of multiculturalism.

Finally, as a historian of religion in America, I’d observed long ago that the most successful religious movements in American history (success being defined, roughly, as transformative power both within and beyond their communities as well as numerical strength) have been exclusive rather than inclusive. The Mormons come to mind, as do nineteenth-century Methodists and twentieth-century pentecostals, to cite only a few examples. Americans look for definition in religion (if not in politics, but that is another matter), yet the denominations associated with mainline Protestantism suffer appallingly from a lack of definition.

In short, I had come to believe that ecumenism was not only misguided theologically, it was also tone-deaf to the culture. While there may be virtue in defining oneself against the culture, mainline Protestantism cannot avoid the consequences. "If mainline Protestants insist on pursuing this course," I wrote in Grant Us Courage, "they must reconcile themselves to the fact that they will never regain the influence they had over American religion and culture in the mid-1960s, much less in 1950."