What I like to call American Folk Religion is a real thing. It transcends the socio-political demarcations and can be found on both sides and everywhere. It might be hidden behind facades of orthodoxy, or even heterodoxy; but it remains a pervasive reality. It is the religion of the American masses, one rooted in a history of ideas. John Webster describes this well as he sketches how pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany looked through Barth’s lights and theology:

A large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this — the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements — that the ethical question interrogates.[1]

While America (and the world) is in the midst of the current socio-political upheaval that we are I think what Webster is noting in regard to Barth’s understanding of the German mind (of his day) ought to serve as a cautionary tale for us today. No matter where we are situated in this moment, politically, and I’ve made it no secret about where I stand, it is always important to bear in mind that as Christians we ought to be under God’s Word; and importantly, we ought to avoid conflating God’s Word with the culture’s or our own—no matter how noble our perceived right might be. Remember, as Jesus said: ‘only God is good.’

But to press down further into how this sort of mode, that was present in Germany, has taken shape in our day, James Ungureanu offers a helpful sketch of what might be identified as American transcendentalism. You’ll notice, as you read Ungureanu how the American religion has roots in the German background (of the sort that Barth was critical of). James writes:

Rooted in European liberal Protestant ideas, American liberalism began as a distinctive movement in American thought with the emergence of Unitarianism and transcendentalism in the early nineteenth century. Theological Unitarianism, or the belief in the oneness of God, began in seventeenth-century England and was adopted by eighteenth-century American liberal theologians. But the rational religion advocated by the founders of the republic was eventually combined with such romantic movements as transcendentalism.

The transcendentalists had imbibed German idealism, avoided religious institutions, and preferred informal fellowship through intellectual and literary pursuits. They emphasized the presence of divinity within each human being. This divinity powered the self and was best fostered without the external control of religious institutions. Consequently, American transcendentalists encouraged individuals to pursue spiritual truth on their own. While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century liberal Protestants focused on the “inner light” of reason, liberal Protestants of the new theology looked to emotions as the final source of religious authority. Their primary religious focus was on the immanence of God, the notion that God’s presence pervaded all things.[2]

Some have identified this as a neo-Gnosticism, but whatever the designation of this American Folk Religion, it is pervasive and grounded in a turn-to-the-subject mode of being. My concern is that no matter how noble the cause, no matter how conservative or progressive, that people from all around, because of their socio-political identity, might presume that they are eternally justified before God as proven by their good [political and social] works. My concern is such adherents see themselves as ‘saved’ because of the measure of their passion for what they perceive to be the good and the beautiful. But only God is good. And insofar as people cannot discern God’s Word from their own, such people have been taken captive by Babylon rather than the Kingdom of Christ. Obtaining this sort of discernment requires much sweat and blood before the living God. Kyrie eleison

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[1] John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 35-6.

[2] James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of the Conflict (Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 154-55 kindle.