Has the Pulpit Failed America?
A Review of When Sorrow Comes. The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter, Harvard University Press, 2021. 428 pp. By Melissa M. Matthes. The Christian Century, December 1, 2021.
America may no longer be a nation with the soul of a church, as G.K. Chesterton famously claimed, but there is something of “church” about America that continues to infatuate theologians, historians, and cultural commentators. We are “one nation under God,” but how and under what circumstances does this God influence the nation as a whole? Well, just about every one of the nearly 400,000 churches and synagogues in America has a pulpit or an appointed place from which a leader may speak of the Lord. Political scientist Melissa Matthes, who teaches at the US Coast Guard Academy, is not the first to identify the sermon as the key measurement of the church’s cultural and political influence. Like Harry Stout, who in The New England Soul combed through more than 2,000 unpublished pulpit manuscripts ranging across a century-and-a-half of colonial life, Matthes has surveyed the sermons of “ordinary ministers from rather unremarkable congregations” in order to examine the state of America’s soul. She doesn’t pursue a homiletical or a quantitative analysis or distinguish between the theological traditions that inform the sermons. Hers is a portrait-like cultural study fueled by the aggregated raw material of mainline Protestant sermons, with some evangelical and fundamentalist sermons “also considered.”
The prism through which she reads the sermons is not arbitrarily chosen. She well understands both the political and religious power of mourning, how it strips away our pretenses and leaves us naked before ourselves and our God. For her book, Matthes read “several hundred” sermons related to each occasion of national brokenness. She isolates nine moments of national tragedy as points of contact between the preached word and the national psyche: Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese citizens, the assassination of John Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Los Angeles riots of 1992 following the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City Bombing, 9/11, the Newtown school shootings, and Black Lives Matter. Her choices are not exactly equivalents, but each represents a genuine crisis, which she defines as a broken paradigm, “when,” as Hannah Arendt noted, “the past ceases to throw its light upon the future,” when the “reigning theoretical banisters [can] no longer support a ruptured reality.” When the unchurched temporarily return to church and the sanctuary is filled with need.
There is an argument to this book, and I will get to it. But before I do, let me say what a fascinating read it is. The pleasure is derived from the quintessentially American scrum of politics, media, and religion. It is a reminder of how wafer-thin is Jefferson’s wall dividing church and state. Open any chapter and (if you have a little age on you), there is much to remember. Remember George Bush in the National Cathedral after 9/11. Remember Barak Obama in Charleston, SC. I don’t remember Pearl Harbor, of course, but I shall never forget the awe with which my parents remembered their Lutheran pastor peering over his monocle on the Sunday after the attack and declaiming from the pulpit: “Be still and know that I am God.”
It’s not possible to recap the author’s dense commentary on each of the crises. But, as she unfolds them, arguments take shape and conclusions are reached: Matthes concludes that the church’s preachers have failed their calling in the face of national tragedy. In the broadest of terms, she suggests two interrelated reasons for their failure. The first is a failure of analysis. Most of the preachers settled for generalities, such as “evil,” “hate,” or “sin,” but did not dare analyze the historic or social nature of these failings. For example, after the Kennedy assassination, a common theme in the pulpit was the danger of hate. Preachers—I will occasionally use we, since the failing is not limited to one generation of preachers—we focused on the general climate of hate, but seldom did our sermons adequately define “hate” or allude to the racism or anti-Catholicism that caused many in the south to hate Kennedy. Soon after the killing, apocryphal stories of grade school children in the south cheering the announcement went “viral.” The great majority of sermons relied on a collective and therefore fuzzy responsibility for social evil.
After 9/11 the preachers and journalists who suggested that American political adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere had some bearing on the attack were angrily dismissed. Right-wingers who linked the attack to tolerance of homosexuality in America were also condemned. The same reaction occurred after the Newtown school shootings twelve years later, when a governor-turned-pundit blamed the godlessness of public schools for the children’s murder.
Race was everywhere in both political and religious reactions to national tragedy. By and large, African American pastors were less likely to identify with the government than their white counterparts. While many white preachers tacitly relied on the state to remedy our losses, Black preachers were more likely to remember the sins of the state. After 9/11 whites looked to the state to restore America, whereas African Americans remembered that it was the state—in the guise of sheriffs, courts, and governors—that had helped kill Martin Luther King, Jr. It was the state that failed to do justice for Rodney King. It was the state that cleared the square in Washington, D.C. so Donald Trump could hold up a Bible. Several preachers remarked that the terror unleashed in Oklahoma and New York City were instances of the historic and ongoing terror experienced by Blacks at the hands of White lynch mobs and racists. In Los Angeles the police officers who had struck Rodney King with batons more than fifty times were acquitted. Most white preachers did not address the savage mistreatment of King but focused instead on the rioting and looting that followed the trial. When they did mention code word “Rodney King,” the majority followed President Bush’s condemnation of lawlessness (an irony, considering the jury’s verdict). They focused on Black anger, ignoring the causes of that anger. Nor did the preachers or politicians delve into the fraught relations of Blacks and Koreans or mention the huge losses suffered by Korean businesses.
After the Oklahoma bombing a few years later, the murderer Timothy McVeigh’s whiteness was not interrogated in the same manner as Rodney King’s blackness had been. Race was not a factor in our understanding of his actions. It apparently played no part in the tragedy, as it had in Los Angeles. Overlooking McVeigh’s reported racism, his superb record in the US military, his anger at the debacle in Waco, and the bullying he had undergone as a child—we were presented with a tragedy we had not brought upon ourselves. The implied racial identity of its victims was white. Hardly any preachers attempted to get behind the “evil” to address what was lurking in the American heartland, which was the smoldering insurgency among American men and women like McVeigh. It was Bill Clinton, rather than the preachers, who in words suited to our current crisis condemned those who “appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes” and compare themselves “to colonial militias who fought for the democracy . . . .”
From the Kennedy assassination to 9/11 to Newtown, preachers explained American tragedy as the loss of innocence. But “innocence” was rarely defined. Apparently, what was meant by it was not our purity but our shocking inability to atone for our own sins and master our own destiny. If there is single word to describe a nation that once wiped out its indigenous inhabitants, embraced slavery and segregation, and placed its own people in detention camps, “innocence” is not that word.
Our second failure was related to the failure of theological analysis. Christian preachers did not draw sufficiently on the resources of Scripture and the gospel. Instead of claiming its identity as the “prow” of the whole world, as Herman Melville describes the pulpit in an early chapter of Moby Dick, the pulpit has become a dinghy taking on the flotsam and jetsam of American culture. The literary allusion is mine, but it in no way overstates the author’s indictment of the pulpit. How did this happen?
Crisis by crisis, the church ceded its interpretive authority to the state. Already in November of 1941, the Roosevelt administration went so far as to circulate a sermon outline in support of the US’s undeclared war effort for clergy to deliver in their pulpits. Among the many outraged clergy, Charles Clayton Morrison of the Century compared it to a gambit worthy of Goebbels and Hitler. The pulpit’s response to Pearl Harbor differed markedly from succeeding tragedies. It did not eulogize the victims or exegete the preacher’s feelings about the attack. It spoke of the coming war as a matter of obvious fact. It did not attempt a theological explanation of the event or its motives. In their rush to associate the church with the US war effort, mainline preachers, despite Reinhold Niebuhr’s editorial to the contrary, were largely silent about the subsequent internment of Japanese citizens in fenced “exclusion zones.”
A few days after 9/11, I was startled to see a sign in front of a Baptist church in North Carolina. Instead of the expected “God bless America,” it read “God bless the whole world.” Maybe not in that country church, but in most congregations (according to Matthes’ research), preachers borrowed the state’s interpretation of events and incorporated its agenda into their sermons. We preachers made of each tragedy a crime against freedom. 9/11 proved, once again, how desperately our enemies envied the American way of life. With notable exceptions, Christians accepted the inevitability of all-out war and placed implicit trust in American power to right the wrongs. We stressed our own innocence and, with the media’s help, gave faces to the mass of human suffering. Beginning with the Oklahoma bombing, we set up make-shift memorials to the lost.
Our pulpits suppressed biblical lament, which is the voice of anguished believers hurled into the very heart of God. We replaced it with gratitude for the undeniable courage of our first responders. We shared the intimate details of our own grief in the pulpit, often reprising the very moment we had become aware of the atrocity, but our expressions of sorrow lacked an Object. Jesus, too experienced despair, but he addressed it to a Receiver, “my God.” Matthes quotes sociologist Philip Rieff and accepts his diagnosis: “this hardly means that the modern individual has abandoned spiritual concerns, but rather that they (spiritual concerns) have been recast purely as enhancing personal well-being, instead of serving as a source of love or awe before the great mysteries.” As familiar as the therapeutic idiom of Protestant sensibilities has become to all, it remains far removed from the old Lutheran preacher’s “Be still and know that I am God.”
The author is not entirely clear or consistent as to what constitutes a genuine use of the Christian message. When delivered from the pulpit, must every admission of one’s own grief be merely self-therapeutic? Doesn’t the title pastor imply the preacher’s obligation to merge his or her humanity with that of the congregation? Didn’t Ezekiel first “sit where they sat” before climbing on to his prophetic soapbox?
Nor was I convinced by her criticism of the preachers who called for gun control, or “gun safety,” after the massacre of children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. The author is not against gun control, but she distrusts political appeals that aren’t grounded in scripture. She offers no guidance on how that is done. I confess, my visceral reaction to a sermon that calls for gun control is applause. If our politicians are too timid, who will speak up for the Fifth Commandment if not the preacher?
On occasion, Matthes criticizes preachers for not engaging in theodicy in the pulpit; but if by “theodicy” she means the rational justification of God’s judgments, the fraught aftermath of trauma is not the time to do it. Appropriately, she highlights the exceptional preacher who enfolds our sorrow in the sorrow of God or who grounds our hope not in military revenge but in God’s victory over death. She wants what we all want: a broader and yet more specific theological context for our expressions of loss. Perhaps like the sign I saw outside a little Baptist church: God bless the whole world. The whole world belongs to God, and Christ died for all of it. One day its reconciliation to God will be complete.
Admittedly, this is not what a pluralist (and distraught) nation wants to hear when its children have been slaughtered and its towers destroyed, but it is the church’s distinctive language, and its preachers have a duty to speak it, even when their words are overwhelmed by other, heartfelt sentiments and by a stream of heartbreaking images. When Kennedy was assassinated, the networks covered followed events with continuous hours of commercial-free broadcasting. If words spoken in individual churches seemed to pale in the media’s spotlight, one must at least acknowledge the difference between local words and the global power of images: the riderless horse cantering behind the funeral caisson, the fireman in Oklahoma cradling a child’s body in his arms, the agonized faces of the parents of dead children. The twisted cross at Ground Zero.
Over the decades, the church’s submission to the state became evident not only in what was said (or left unsaid) but in who was appointed to say it. Beginning with Clinton and followed by Bush and Obama, the leadership of American mourning shifted from church to state, from preacher to president. After Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt did not lead the nation in mourning; nor did he eulogize the dead; and, though a serious Episcopalian, he never led a worship service or preached from a pulpit. Similar observations may be made of Lyndon Johnson, who did not eulogize his predecessor or give spiritual counsel to the nation at the death of Martin Luther King. Matthes doesn’t imply that the Roosevelt-era response was the gold standard from which succeeding generations have fallen short. But she does suggest a sea change in church-state spirituality. Following the Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton spoke movingly of his faith. After 9/11 George Bush organized a memorial in the National Cathedral and from its pulpit preached a memorable sermon.
In response to the surge of shootings in America, Barak Obama performed heroic service in vigils and church services across the land, notably after Newtown and Charleston. It was our first Black president who broke the white pulpit’s silence and publicly mourned Trayvon Martin. His mourning became one of the hallmarks of his moral leadership. One prominent Atlanta evangelical went so far as to dub him America’s “pastor in chief.” Matthes doesn’t criticize what Obama and others said, but she dwells on the public absence of church leadership in crisis situations. There was no Harry Emerson Fosdick, who from the platform of Riverside Church, preached the greatest anti-war sermon of the twentieth century, “The Unknown Soldier.” There was no Martin Luther King, Jr., to shatter the church’s silence on race and Vietnam. More often than not, she argues, pastors took their cues from a president’s playbook. In the end, she counts Obama’s spiritual counsel, including his evocations of “grace,” as a net loss for the church’s integrity.
I believe most Americans welcomed the religious expressions of the presidents (as much as they sorely missed them in the long months of Covid-19). They took pleasure in the very sounds and echoes of faith in the public arena. No president is the nation’s “pastor in chief,” and I agree that it’s not the best idea for presidents or judges to lead civil worship services. But must this necessitate a spiritual vacuum at the governing center of our polis? In the phrase of Richard John Neuhaus, does the American way of life demand a “naked public square”? “This thing was not done in corner,” Paul said to Agrippa regarding the crucifixion of Jesus. The public nature of Jesus’s ministry and the foundational events celebrated in other religions should not be privatized. The solution is not the muzzling of public officials but greater theological depth on the part of local preachers, priests, and imams.
The word “daunting” doesn’t begin to do justice to the scope of Mathes’s project. It is an impressive achievement. My guess is that a sociologist might notice some methodological fissures in her work, for example, the undifferentiated nature of her samples. Preachers will question the very possibility of synthesizing parochial and pastoral messages uttered in hundreds of thousands of churches into anything like a theory of American culture. Protestantism isn’t set up to produce a single coherent statement on anything. “Out of many, one” is no truer of religion in America than it is of American society as a whole.
In pursuing a comprehensive thesis regarding the usurpation of religious authority by the state, Matthes is led to several overstatements: for example, Obama’s performance in Charleston demonstrates that “the power of the pulpit had seemingly become just another tool in the arsenal of American power.” Following Newtown, “God (and thus Christianity) also seemed to have nothing to contribute to coping with the tragedy.” Nothing? “Christianity offered neither any specific remedy nor apparently even any special understanding of the grief of the community.”
The grief of a nation is what the poet Wordsworth would have termed “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” These are the emotions that the historian recollects in the tranquility of academic analysis. Matthes hits the salient themes of modern Protestantism and accurately charts the government’s growing influence in the church, but she doesn’t do justice to the minority reports of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim preachers—the last three largely excluded by her book—who have striven to maintain the integrity of their respective traditions. She quotes approvingly alternative voices, especially those preachers who were willing to wrestle with the “hard” passages in scripture and to “linger with the inexplicable,” but the relative few are subsumed beneath the many. In a “qualitative” study, however, prophecy and truthfulness deserve greater weighting, even if ones’ carefully wrought thesis is thrown out of balance. The quality of their message and the courage of their voices demand it.