As has so often been the case in Church history, persecution failed to defeat the faithful. They were instead defeated by peace and flourishing, and through compromise, the ability to attain status and respect in society. The American Beast did not persecute the Church, instead it seduced it. The crisis for American Christianity came at the turn of the twentieth century when the Classical Liberalism of its founding (with its secular assumptions) finally overtook and began to openly subvert the (by then) weakened and deformed Christian consensus – thus creating the crisis that would generate new cycles and chapters of reaction and compromise in American Church history throughout the twentieth century right up to the present.
Who can doubt the optimism that British Evangelicals felt as the nineteenth century progressed. Access to politics, growing prosperity, and even a growing social respect was theirs for the taking and abandoning their once marginalised status, they became card-carrying members and cheerleaders of the British Empire. Buying into the deceit surrounding the narratives of a Liberal and Moral Empire, they turned a blind eye to many other realities and evils. As full supporters of the Victorian-era reaction to the Revolutionary ethos that emanated from the continent, they helped to create a society of manners to be sure – but it was later revealed to be but an empty form. And once that order faced the crises of 1914-1945, it quickly imploded and the form was revealed to be utterly lacking substance – and was quickly swept away. It is truly astonishing to witness how quickly Christianity collapsed in the United Kingdom – and continues to do so. Contemporaries can lament this all they want, the lesson is that it wasn't all that it was made out to be. The house may have been impressive but it was made of cheap paper and the foundation was sand.
In many respects one wishes the contemporary British nonconformist narrative was different. Rather than lament The Great Ejection of 1662 and the loss of the Puritan dream, that Restoration event should in fact be celebrated and the entire English Civil War condemned. The years of second class status from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century should instead be looked back upon as a golden age – even an ideal. For it was when the Nonconformists emerged from this period and re-entered society with standing and the hope of influence that their numbers swelled, only to be met with a quick collapse. The victories these Evangelicals thought they won in the nineteenth century were revealed as hollow and devoid of substance. They counted victories but failed to note what was being lost in the process.
In 1945, Europe was once again devastated on an even greater scale and Liberal Theology had eradicated what was left of any kind of doctrinal substance in the state-affiliated denominations or those that remained within that heritage. Apart from the Plymouth Brethren, there was little in the way of Biblically-minded testimony on the continent. There were still conservative elements within the Dutch Reformed sphere but in the grand scheme of things their numbers were small and these groups remain under the shadow of long-standing entanglements and traditions. In the former Habsburg lands, one could find the Anabaptist- Fröhlich Nazarenes but again their numbers were small and apart from America, they had little impact outside their narrow sphere which would soon fall under the shadow of Communist administrations.
Britain was on the winning side of the war but the victory was Pyrrhic. Facing economic ruin, the country languished under rationing for another decade. Its Empire began to be liquidated as it could no longer be sustained and the British economy began to shift focus and would only become a power-house once again in the 1980's and 1990's – with the financialisation of its empire, leading to dreams of Empire 2.0. Fed by the victory in the Falklands, and being openly expressed in the 2000's, the new vision reached its most poignant expression in the nationalist-driven Brexit referendum of 2016 and the subsequent Johnson premiership.
During the course of this period, British nonconformity continued to support liberalism, mostly allying with the Labour Party which had become dominant in the 1920's. The twenty-first century would see many Nonconformists under the influence of American Evangelicalism and due to the continued fragmentation of British society move over into the Tory column and for some the embrace of a kind of wistful remembrance of the supposed halcyon glory days of Empire – 'Rule Britannia' need no longer elicit eye rolling and snickers.
On the continent, the devastation wrought by the World Wars is hard to quantify and the loss of faith is palpable. The Brethren have maintained a steady witness but challenged by the Lausanne Movement and American-style Evangelicalism in the 1970's, even they have been affected by the new mood and style. Their Dispensational theology has never been of the politicised variety as seen in the United States and from what I can tell they remain somewhat aloof from politics – at least on the continent. I know this is not the case in the UK and places like Australia. And the Brethren I've encountered and interacted with in the United States have been greatly affected by the same Right-wing impulses that dominate the Evangelical world. The shadow of the FOX channel looms large in their thinking and sermonizing.
In Europe there has been a shift (if slight) in terms of Brethren worship and perhaps a bit of struggle to maintain their own unique ground in light of Evangelical energy concerning societal influence, personal wealth and flourishing and the like. That said, the overall ethos within Europe is one of historical cynicism and understandably so. Even the EU, once a harbinger of great optimism has soured and one gets the impression that Europeans (generally speaking) feel rather trapped by the forces of history and this certainly breeds not only a kind of realism but a latent pessimism.
Again, how different is the American Experience. After 1945, America was riding high, the most powerful country in the history of the world, a devourer of empires it seemed. And for the Christians in America any doubts concerning the synthesis of America's Classically Liberal ideology and the religion of the New Testament were eradicated. Americans suffered very little during the war and in fact there is little heritage of suffering in the American story. There were deprivations on the frontier and a living if highly overblown angst concerning the American Indian and the long skirmishes and small-scale wars that were largely ended by the turn of the twentieth century. The Americans suffered during The Great Depression but no more than other peoples and certainly less than some. It is only with the late twentieth century that America begins to find itself feeling stretched in terms of resources and feeling the population strains that Europe has known for many generations.
Southern Americans have a little bit more in the way of a suffering heritage that has affected their thinking as expressed in the arts. The Civil War represented true suffering for them as a bloc – they are the only social segment of America to know (personally) something of the horrors of war. And yet this tale is interwoven with romanticised and largely false notions surrounding the lost cause, and the ugly history of Jim Crow laws and a bitterness regarding the relative poverty which would dominate until the middle period of the twentieth century.
This legacy has come back to haunt not just the South but the larger Right-wing movement that has come to dominate American Evangelicalism. These currents are familiar and when one considers the devastated landscape of the Church today, the way in which nationalist politics are able to form a symbiotic relationship with this weakened form of Christianity (comprised mostly of empty forms and traditions), and the daunting task of evangelising a massively complex and diverse culture that is post-Christian as opposed to merely pagan – one can begin to understand what the men of Reveil were looking at in the early 1800's on the continent. In some cases they too made their compromises and while they were all gone from the scene before the horrors of 1914, many lived to see nationalism rearing its head. One wonders how many of them looked on with alarm – all the more to see the role the compromised churches played in this episode.
In some respects we live in a parallel time – in another way Britain is much closer to this reality than in the United States. Here, the Evangelical movement is still flourishing but looking over its shoulder with not a little concern. Its collapse will be terrible and it will generate a wasteland and we're already experiencing a taste of this in the kind of rural areas such as where I live. The collapse of the Church has been sudden and pervasive – but the kind of spiritual situation seen on the continent after Napoleon may still be quite a few years away. It may be that I'm gone by then but my adult children will be reckoning with it in their middle age and as their children are entering adulthood.