FROM RATIONALITY TO SUBJECTIVITY
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Our first speaker,]ames Davison Hunter, is the WR. Kenan Professor
of Sociology and Director of the Post-modernity Project at the University
of Virginia. He is the author of
Bifore the Shooting Begins: Searching for
Democracy in America's Culture War, Culture War: The Struggle to Diftne America,
and
Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation.
His presentation today, on "The
Changing Locus of Religions," may shed some light on what the role of
religion and spiri tuali ty amounts to under the paradigm of the social sci–
ences, which have been dominant during the past one hundred years.
James Davison Hunter:
A century ago progressive opinion was thor–
oughly convinced of the successful march of secularization. The
flourishing of higher criticism in intellectual circles, the gaining domi–
nance of the German model in American higher education, the social and
political marginalization of religious orthodoxy-all seemed proof of the
inevitable. And yet in the popular imagination and experience, the evi–
dence points to just the opposite: religion remained robust. The idiom of
religion continued to penetrate
public
discourse, underlay popular thinking,
mark local and national observances, give meaning to nearly every public
and private crisis. In this way, the public narratives about America contin–
ued to be prominently, even predominantly, framed by the symbols and
normative ideals and demands of biblical faith-and not just biblical faith
but more precisely Protestant faith. America was still "a land thoroughly
Protestant, almost to an extreme, since Protestantism embraces not mere–
ly the large majority of the population, but is the source, at the same time,
of all its social and poli tical princi pi es."
"The facts are manifest. The unbeliever sees them as fully as the
Christian. Deny them he cannot.... [O]ur many-sided modern civiliza–
tion, with its immense superiority over that of the heathen and ancient
times, is the effect of Christianity." So announced Lewis French Stearns in
the Ely Lectures at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1890.
His declaration was not exactly startling to his audience. It was, rather, a
bold articulation of a sensibili ty of ascendancy shared by most Protestant
Christians-that theirs was indeed a Christian nation and if the cause of
civilization was moving forward, it was so because of its Christian charac–
ter. The sense of optimism was grounded in the evidence plain to
everyone. He explained,
Today Christianity is the power which is moulding the destinies of
the world. The Christian nations are in the ascendant. Just in propor–
tion to the purity of Christianity as it exists in the various nations of
Christendom is the infl uence they are exerting upon the world's des–
tiny. The future of the world seems to be in the hands of the three
