190
PARTISAN REVIEW
advanced this agenda not simply because religion violated their intellectu–
al and aesthetic sensibilities, but because they were determined to
secularize public affairs in order to avoid the conflict that competing reli–
gious faiths often engendered-conflict that was frequently unwieldy,
entrenched, and, more often than not, bloody. The Enlightenment archi–
tects regarded secularization of the public sphere through the privatization
of religion as an innovative solution to the conundrum of pluralism and
the conflict that pluralism inevitably fostered.
Privatization has not been the result of structural forces alone.
Religious authority has been
pushed
to the margins of public life as well.
To be sure the "cultured despisers" of religion, as Schliermacher once
described secular modernists, have made hostility toward the authority of
traditional theism central to its liberationist agenda and the prerequisite to
alternate moral claims, the premise (even if unstated) of all other antago–
nism toward traditional morality and the social order it reflects. The reason
why the critique of traditional theistic religious texts, traditions, and rea–
soning has been so important in this regard is that it attacks the heart of
the structure of traditional moral authority. By rejecting any appeal to the
status of the speaker, to the power of an office, to tradition or to a divine
presence the cultured despisers undermine the foundation of an entire
constellation of social relationships and habi ts oflife now regarded and dis–
carded as "oppressive."
Whether the result of natural developments wi thin contemporary
Western societies or the result of anti-populist hostility, most social scien–
tists leave the matter of religious authority there-with its marginalization
from public institutions and public affairs. Yet more can be said about it.
Indeed, within the private sphere, religious authority has been fragmented
and subjectivized.
In making this case I take as a case study the religious legacy of
Evangelical Christianity. Not only is Evangelicalism in America the lega–
cy of Josiah Strong and
L.F.
Sterns mentioned earlier, but in the popular
imagination, Evangelicalism has been remarkably resistant to the corrosive
effects of late modernity. If the dynamics of which I speak play out in
this
fai th, it is very likely that they play out wi thin other fai ths as well.
Within Evangelicalism, belief in the divine nature of scripture has long
been a hallmark of the faith. It has been a defining criterion for doctrinal
orthodoxy, setting the terms over the centuries within the Christian com–
munity for distinguishing truth from heresy. In principle Evangelicals still
remain committed to the belief that the Bible is the divinely inspired
Word of God, and therefore, infallible, even inerrant. But what do
"inerrancy" and "infallibility" mean? The fact is that major differences of
opinion have emerged over the past half century, differences most notice–
,able among Evangelical theologians. While Evangelical theologians insist
