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Church and Main is a podcast at the intersection of faith and modern life. Join Pastor Dennis Sanders as he shares the stories of faith interacting with the ever-changing world of the 21st century.
Music.
Hello and welcome to Church and Main, the podcast at the intersection of faith
and modern life. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host.
Church and Main is a podcast that looks for God in the midst of issues affecting
church and the larger society.
You can learn more about the podcast, listen to past episodes and donate by
checking us out at churchandmain.org or churchandmain.substack.com.
And consider subscribing to the podcast on your favorite podcast app and leave
a review. That helps others find this podcast.
Well, this episode is actually a rebroadcast of an episode from December 2021.
It's with Geoffrey Kabaservice, someone that I know very well,
known of him over the years.
He is vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center,
which is a think tank in Washington, D.C.
He's best known, he's an author, and one of the books that he's best known for
is Rule and Ruin, The Downfall of Moderation, and The Destruction of the Republican Party.
He, in fact, that kind of is related to what this episode was all about.
We got to, this episode was actually kind of talking about J.
Irwin Miller, who at one time was the head of Cummings Engine.
But what was also fascinating about him was not only that he was a kind of a
leader of industry, but he was also something that is very uncommon these days,
a moderate Republican, moderate to liberal Republican.
He was also a mainline Protestant member of the Christian Church Disciples of
Christ, which happens to be my denomination.
And And so this episode is to talk a little bit about J.R.R.
Miller and about kind of the downfall of these two, or I shouldn't say downfall,
but maybe the diminishment of these two traditions, moderate republicanism and
mainline Protestantism.
I tend to believe that because those two traditions in some ways are not as
prevalent as they once were, that our society is kind of in the mess that it is in because of that.
I don't know if anyone can really prove that, but that's kind of where I'm at.
But I wanted to share this interview. It also comes with some thoughts that
I shared at the end of that episode.
But I do want to, without further ado, have you listen to my conversation with
Jeffrey Kappa Service just also to let you know that some new episodes are coming down the pike.
Those should be coming out next week but other than otherwise I hope that you're
having a good Thanksgiving and we'll see you with new episodes hopefully next week.
Just one quick note, you may be hearing in the podcast that I refer to the podcast as En Root.
That was actually the name of the podcast before it became Church in Maine.
So if you're getting confused, why are we hearing this word called En Root?
That's why. So without Without further ado, let's listen to this interview with Jeffrey Kappa Service.
Music.
Hello, and welcome to En-Root, a journey of faith and modern life.
I am Dennis Sanders, your host.
Welcome. This is the podcast where we explore the who, where,
why, what, and how of religion and other topics.
This is episode 64 and I hope that your advent is going well.
Well, I've known Jeffrey Cabaservis since we were both writers for.
David Frum's new site from forum These days Jeffrey is the vice president of
political studies at the Niskanen Center and also host of the vital center podcasts,
he is also an author especially of,
For our purposes the book rule and ruin the downfall of moderation and the destruction
of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party I brought him on the
podcast today to talk about the intersection of two important streams in 20th
century American culture,
moderate republicanism and mainline Protestantism.
Both of these movements drove much of American society at mid-century and also,
shaped a lot of post-war America.
And now both are in a weakened state. We will look at what's been lost as these
institutions decline, and we'll also focus on one person where these two streams met.
J. Erwin Miller was the CEO of Cummins Engine.
He was a Rockefeller Republican and a member of a mainline denomination,
the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, which so happens to be the denomination
I am ordained in and a member of.
If you are someone that is interested in American and political social history,
what has changed in the ensuing decades, I think that you're going to love this episode.
Now, before we get to the interview, just one note.
Please consider sharing this episode on social media.
If you have an account on Facebook or Twitter, make sure to get the link and share it.
I really want to get this podcast out to more and more people,
so please consider sharing this episode on social media.
So now, without further ado, here is my conversation with Jeffrey Kava Service.
Music.
Thank you for joining me. It's good to chat with you again.
It's very nice to be here, Des. Well, the first thing maybe to kind of talk
about in these two subjects of the importance of and the history of moderate
republicanism and then also mainline Protestantism,
and these are two things that are kind of have been important in my own background,
Where have you, and how historically, have those two backgrounds kind of merged
in American life, both politically and culturally?
So I've written two books that touch directly on these subjects, Dennis.
The first was the book that I basically made out of my Yale dissertation in
history, which was called The Guardians, Kingman Brewster, His Circle,
and The Rise of the Liberal Establishment. Kingman Brewster was president of Yale from 1964 to 1977.
He then became ambassador to the court of St. James in Great Britain under Jimmy Carter.
And he was an important figure in that group, the liberal establishment,
which I guess to put it most concisely was the successor generation to the wise
men that Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson wrote about.
The almost entirely wasp, fairly upper-class elites elites who had created American
foreign policy and shaped its domestic policy in important ways in the post-World War II era.
The second book I wrote was called, Rule and Ruin, The Downfall of Moderation
and the Destruction of the Republican Party.
And that was more specifically about the moderate Republican tradition.
That used to dominate the Republican Party until its displacement by conservatism,
starting in the 1960s, but really gathering force from the 1980s and through to the present day.
And most of the moderate Republicans that I wrote about were,
in fact, mainline Protestants.
It was not totally important to be a moderate Republican if you weren't a mainline
Protestant, that was fine, but that was kind of the perception.
And again, it was sort of related culturally to the dominance of the WASP elite
that I'd written about in my previous book.
Let's just leave it there, and then I'll get into whatever specific questions you want to ask. Okay.
Well, one of the things I guess I would want to ask is,
Where do you think, maybe to begin with talking a little bit about someone that
I found just learning about in the last few months, and that is J. Irwin Miller.
He was the CEO of Cummins Engine in Columbus, Indiana.
He had an outsized role in helping that town, especially kind of survive a lot
of the changes that were taking place in the Rust Belt.
And there I also have kind of a personal connection having grown up in the Rust
Belt, having grown up in Flint, Michigan, which had a very different outcome from Columbus.
He was a moderate Republican and also a Christian Church Disciples of Christ
member of which the denomination that I'm from.
He tell me a little bit about how his life kind of reflected these two backgrounds.
And how has that contrasted from leaders of the modern era?
So J. Erwin Miller was a very interesting person. It was a privilege of mine
to be able to go to his hometown of Columbus, Indiana and have lunch with him
and interview him. and I've kept up with him in the years before his death.
He was somebody who was from the leading family in that small town.
His parents were bankers, his grandparents and great-grandparents had been early
settlers, as well as founders of the Disciples of Christ Church in that area.
As was the practice for many upper-middle-class Protestant.
Families, they sent him east to Yale to do his undergraduate work.
I believe he also went to Oxford to do postgraduate study.
He served in World War II, and then he came back to run the family business,
which was Cummins Engine.
And I say a family business, but it was really not very well established at that point.
He really built it into this enormous multi-billion dollar global company.
And so he had a lot of strength and credibility in American culture as,
you know, by virtue of being one of these really dominant entrepreneurs of the era.
And he channeled that largely into his interests in culture,
in education, and in politics and religion.
So speaking most directly to the religion question, he was one of the people
who was instrumental in founding the National Council of Churches in 1950.
And then I believe he became the first lay president of that organization in
1960 and also chaired the NCC's commission on religion and race.
Like many moderate republicans and especially like many moderate midwestern
republicans, he was acutely conscious of the civil rights heritage of the republican party.
Civil rights was a cause for which he fought strongly and in fact he met with John F.
Kennedy shortly after the 1960 election to push for the legislation that became
the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And he also was one of the critical sponsors of the March on Washington at which
Martin Luther King gave his, I Have a Dream speech.
So, you know, this is somebody who actually is using his political,
cultural, economic power to push the cause of civil rights, which he sees as being completely 100%,
aligned with his religious mission that he gets from being a devout member of
the Disciples of Christ.
In looking at his life, one of the things that I started to think about a lot
was with both of these traditions, in mainline Protestantism and modern Republican,
is this kind of public nature of both of them, that there was a civic part of
who they were, their ethos.
Why do you think that both of these traditions, of course, now are kind of either
on the decline or non-existent, why do you think that they are not as vibrant,
as they once were, and what has that meant to American society?
Uh, Dennis, that's a deep and interesting question. I am just going to take
a fairly random stab at it.
You know, uh, if you go back to the formative period, uh, for this liberal establishment
that I wrote about, it was the 1950s.
And that was a time when like 95% of Americans would tell pollsters that they
identified as religious, uh, of those, about two thirds were Protestant,
I guess a quarter Catholic, and maybe 4% Jewish.
And that was sort of the tripart melting pot that people talked about back in
those days. There was that famous Will Herberg sociological study from 1955
called Protestant Catholic Jew.
And that was a time when the mainline denominations were growing by leaps and
bounds, sort of in connection with the move to the suburbs,
but also because there was a great coming together around the American way of
life, which was also a common religion in Herberg's terminology.
You know, essentially, ideas, rights, symbols, that people looked to to provide
a sense of national unity, and that was very different from the kind of more
radical revisionist energies of the 1930s.
And one of the things that Americans are trying to do in the 1950s,
in both the establishment sense and also in the religious sense is to re-establish,
a sense of order that had been disrupted by the depression and the world war
that had really shaken so many assumptions about human nature as well as American society.
And you know religion isn't a necessary component to reordering society in that
sense, but it is something that Americans historically had identified.
I remember that when I was a graduating senior at Yale.
We at commencement sang the traditional Yale commencement hymn,
which if I remember correctly is called, Oh God Beneath Thy Guiding Hand.
And the sort of second lyric is, Our exiled fathers crossed the sea.
This is sort of in keeping with the whole Puritan and Pilgrim heritage.
And there's a line in there which is, laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God
came with those exiles over the waves.
And it was that sense of order provided by religion that was so central to the
Americans' idea of ordered liberty.
And specifically, religion provided, I guess you would say, restraints on the
energy of the frontier, on the energy of individualism that otherwise would
have torn the nation apart.
Kingman Brewster, the subject of my first book, was really quite taken by the
fact that his Harvard Law degree, and all Harvard Law degrees,
came with the motto about those wise restraints that make men free.
And again, there is some sense that Protestantism specifically was the culture
that channeled America's energies into productive paths,
and that absent that kind of restraint, you would have an unruly anarchic society
that ultimately might collapse.
And that was also a sense that people like J. Edward Miller had of themselves
and their role as members of an establishment.
And as Miller put it to me in one of our discussions, he's an engine maker and
engines can overheat and explode in some cases.
And the thing that prevents them from overheating is what's called a governor.
And Miller saw that as his role. He is part of the governor or the governing
group that to some extent tamp down on the vociferous energies of society that
keep it moving forward rather than exploding.
And it sounds like in our own modern days we don't have those governors anymore.
Well, you know, you and I had talked once upon a time about a review I wrote
of Joseph Bottom's book, An Anxious Age, which is his meditation on post-Protestant America.
And the analogy that he used, which I think is a very good one,
is that Protestantism used to define American culture.
It was the great cultural Mississippi running through the nation.
And now that river appears to have run dry,
but in fact part of Bottoms'
claim, which was really sort of ahead of the time for 2014 when he wrote the
book, was that those essentially religious energies have been diverted into
other channels given the decline of mainstream Protestantism,
and he specifically thought that the people whose parents would have been Episcopalians,
Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists,
were going to college and then coming out and becoming secular and channeling
those essentially religious impulses into social progress and the kind of social
gospel first articulated by Walter Rauschenbusch.
And political correctness he identified as a form of religion and therefore
he was one of the first, again, to the fore to say that the energies released
last year by the Black Lives Matter movement, the kind of racial and ideritarian re-evaluation.
That went on, had much akin to a kind of religiosity.
And I've had a lot of people push back on me when I repeat things like that
because they think that being identified as being moved by religious impulses
as a way of diminishing their commitment and sincerity, but I think there actually is something to it.
Oh, there's a lot to that.
I think religion, obviously, if you're thinking it's just that it's about belief in God,
that might be offensive to some, but religion also can be something that is
the thing that orders our lives and that can really guide who we are and what we do,
and as you even said earlier about a governor, it really kind of directs you.
So, and I do think that there is a lot of that when you see that in some of
those social movements, what has been kind of called quote-unquote woke culture,
there is a religiosity to it that is very similar to what you would see in a church.
There is sin, there is confession, there isn't yet that much redemption yet,
but those parts that are there are very much there.
Yeah, I agree. I got to admit, I am troubled when I think about this movement
or religion or whatever you want to call it.
Because the model that I have in mind for social progress is specifically the
civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.
And of course, this moderate republicanism that I'm talking about,
this liberal establishment I'm talking
about, did support the civil rights movement very strongly as well.
But so too ultimately did society. The civil rights arguments of people like
Martin Luther King ultimately proved to be very persuasive.
And when one tries to think about what made the civil rights movement successful,
you identify a number of factors that don't seem to be present in today's politics
or today's society, for that matter.
One of them, obviously, is that the civil rights cause was deeply important
in both parties and arguably stronger in the Republican Party,
precisely because it identified itself as the party of Lincoln that was founded
to free the slaves and bring equality to Americans as against the southern aristocracy.
But another reason is that the civil rights movement operated on multiple levels.
You'll often see essays nowadays about Martin Luther King as a radical, and it's true.
The idea in the early 1960s of a society in which Black people participated
equally was a radical idea.
It represented a huge change in society.
But at the same time, Martin Luther King especially was drawing upon biblical
themes, biblical morality, channeling the profits.
In that sense, the Civil Rights Movement was quite conservative.
It was also deeply grounded in America's most treasured ideals of the Constitution
and the Declaration of Independence.
And also at the same time, the Civil Rights Movement was moderate because it
was actively engaged in compromise.
There was a maximalist set of demands that people within the movement put forward
and those were mediated by the leadership, negotiated with leaders in both parties,
and ultimately what came out was something that fell short of maximalism,
but still, as I said, represented a radical advance.
I don't see the current drive for racial equality operating on all three of those levels.
I see mostly radicalism, and if anything, it's a kind of radicalism that is
antagonistic to American history, rather than presenting itself as a logical
outgrowth of our history and ideals.
Neither do I see the kind of bipartisan consensus that ultimately came together
to support the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
If anything, there is the kind of division that is being operated into,
and it's a division that also, in some sense, involves religion,
since so much of the evangelical Christian vote is so enthusiastic for Donald Trump.
Yeah, I think one of the things that we tend to forget, and I remember reading
this from one of Taylor Branch's books on the Civil Rights Movement,
this is specifically about Martin Luther King,
was in many ways he was actually steeped in mainline Protestantism.
Obviously he came from the Black church, that is, we know, but you know,
he went to an American Baptist seminary, and he was very much steeped in that culture in a way that he,
that I think also made him who he was.
I think that also then in turn shaped the civil rights movement in a way that
was, as you said, geared towards compromise,
that was believed in some sense of a radicalism,
but yet it was also tempered and hooked up to really appealing towards helping
America live up to its ideals,
where it seems like this current movement isn't really about that.
It's not connected about trying to help the nation live up to its ideals,
instead of in some ways just basically condemning.
The nation for past problems and in some ways not having faith that it can,
as a nation, we can be more than our past.
That's very well put, Dennis. Martin Luther King, you know, again got his PhD,
in Divinity from Boston University, and he was deeply versed in all of the sophisticated
theological discussions of the day.
Curiously, so too were most of the leaders of the liberal establishment that I was looking at.
George Bundy, for example, who was dean of the Arts and Sciences at Harvard
University in the 1950s, then became national security advisor to John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, then became head of the Ford Foundation,
a sort of critically important person in the establishment.
But, you know, he would recite Reinhold Niebuhr at the drop of a hat.
And indeed, many of the leaders of that era thought it was deeply important
that grapple with the moral conundrums that World War II had presented to the
kind of benign progressive view of human nature that had prevailed before the war.
And I just don't sense, it's not just that I don't sense that kind of theological
sophistication coming from much of the discussion on the left,
which I feel is really marginalizing religion as the country becomes more secular,
I just don't think there's an interest in that kind of dialogue.
And this is leaving the religious dialogue almost entirely to conservatives
of a pretty radical kind, like the integralists such as Adrian Vermeule at Harvard.
I think this ultimately could end badly for all sides.
One of the other points that Jody Bottom made in his book An Anxious Age was
that the decline of religion could go very badly for the left in the sense that most of our liberal.
Beliefs and principles and and norms are based on Christian metaphysics And
the belief that you can preserve Christian ethics without Christian metaphysics May be doomed.
We don't know the answer to that. Well, I believe it was Ross Douthat that has
said that if you Don't like the Christian right wait until you meet the post Christian, right?
That having a a conservative that is kind of not really Christian in many ways, or post-Christian.
Is going to be far more dangerous than one that is in some ways,
I think, tempered by religion in some ways,
from doing and being kind of letting kind of their feelings fly or their worse
sides will be shown out without being kind of tempered back.
Emily Eakins at Cato has actually done a number of interesting polls and studies
of the split between Christian Trumpists and post-christian Trumpists to use your terminology and,
the post-christian Trump is a much more radical Yes on
any dimension you care to look at whether it's a lack of Sympathy and empathy
for migrants in cages whether it's a belief in the need to punish the opponents
of Trump whether it's a belief that that the opponents of Trump politically
are not just wrong or mistaken,
but in fact evil and may be in need of being destroyed.
Yeah. And, you know, the thing about that is that if you are someone that goes to church,
you're going to hear things about a God of love or that you should love your
neighbor, all of those things that you will hear and you will take those to heart. So that kind of.
Kind of makes you not as radical in some ways, that you start to care for other
people because that's what you've learned.
But if you're someone like a post-Christian Trumpist that maybe goes to church
once a month or has never gone to church, there's nothing there to hold you back.
You're just kind of taking all this in and anyone that is different from you is not simply wrong,
but is someone that's evil and basically needs to be challenged, if not eradicated.
Yeah, it's something that I think we both worry about. It is.
It's something that is incredibly worried.
One of the things, though, that I am wondering between, and looking at both
liberals and conservatives today, or conservatives and progressives today,
is that there seems to be a lack of a civic nature.
And obviously that's showing itself on the right,
in not putting a whole lot of support in public services and kind of cutting
of those services, lower taxes seems to be the only thing that matters.
But it seems to also be found on the left and not as much on the role of government
and as is the role of civic society.
To go back to J.R. Miller, he seemed to be someone that was obviously believed
that government had a role in our society, but he was also involved in other institutions,
that were also beneficial for society, whether that was the arts or education,
obviously, different like civil rights organizations, church organizations.
I mean, I guess I'm just wondering, do you feel that we have lost this sense
of civic nature of our society that we may have had 30, 40 years ago?
So one of the most depressing books that I read in the past year was a book
with a fairly optimistic title, The Upswing. and this is by the eminent Harvard
sociologist Robert Putnam with the assistance of I think Shailen Romney Garrett.
And it starts out with the description of the political scene during the Gilded
Age in late 19th century America, and this was a time much like ours in the
sense that there was very little social trust, there were bitter social divisions,
there were very few national institutions or individuals in which people believed.
It was time when America really seemed to be coming apart.
And then what actually happened over the next 70 years or so was the progressive
movement, which directed people's attentions into reforming and improving America's institutions.
And you had a kind of increase in social trust that was shaken by the Great
depression but strengthened by World War II and emerging into this period in
the 1950s and 60s when Americans really did express high levels of trust in the government,
in the institutions that served them, and in each other.
Obviously this was an imperfect time, there was still Jim Crow segregation in
the South, you can't overlook that, but it also was a time when the civil rights
movement was growing by leaps and bounds and you had incredible African-American.
Achievement in all manner of areas of American life that was also being recognized at that time.
I'll just give an example that I've been thinking about lately.
In 19, let's say the early 1950s, to judge by testing the best high school in Washington, D.C.
Was Dunbar High School, which was the country's oldest public high school for African Americans.
And, you know, there are reasons why it was better perhaps than typical white
schools in Washington, D.C.
At that time because so many African-American PhDs were barred from other areas of American life.
They had to teach at high schools rather than at universities or in businesses.
And that meant that the students at Dunbar High School were just given this
incredible level of education. And a lot of them went on to do tremendous things.
I mean, this is the school that actually produced America's first African-American,
member of a presidential cabinet, its first attorney general.
One of the great civil rights leaders in Walter Houston. I mean,
it was just an incredible school.
Now, you know, you can't say that the achievement of that school makes up for
in any way the segregation of the era, but it was a time when actually African-Americans,
were deeply optimistic about the future and their own chances for progress and equality.
And this movement of social trust and national unity and coming together and
optimists about the future peaks in the late 1960s and it has been all downhill ever since.
And there are political reasons you can ascribe to that, certainly.
There are economic reasons you can ascribe to that, such as the stagnation of
working class wages, the disappearance of jobs, particularly the kind that didn't
require college educations.
But there's also a political dimension in the sense that the Republican Party
really did attack a lot of America's belief in government and possibilities,
and Americans also fell away from a belief in collective effort and civic activism,
which is deeply connected with the decline of mainline Protestantism.
You know, some of the old enthusiasm for mainline Protestantism,
particularly the 1950s, had a bit of a conformist aspect to it,
maybe even a socially coercive element.
You used to see signs at businesses that would say, it's good business to go to church.
People don't really believe that anymore.
But, you know, whatever the reason, the result was in large part this kind of
national unity, the sense that we could overcome our problems,
a can-do sense that America can solve any problem that's put before it.
And we really have lost that as we have lost that mainline Protestant and mainline
Catholic and mainline Jewish participation.
And the problem with the book, The Upswing, is that the authors don't really
give you any indication as to how we're to reverse this U-curve,
this soaring upwards throughout the 20th century,
it's cresting in the 60s, and then it's downfall to where we are today.
How do we get out of this second gilded age?
Some of it could be through policy, but I think some of it is going to be through,
the conscious rededication to the institutions of our collective civic life,
which definitely could include churches and religion.
But it seems that for that to happen, people have to really want to put the
time into that, and I worry that people aren't willing to do that.
Just because I follow a lot of center-right politics,
one of the things that I tend to think this has to happen is that you,
the only reason, the only way that you can kind of pull back from,
I think, Trumpism is by having a counterforce within the party and having enough
people and enough kind of institutional fortitude that can kind of present an alternative,
present a better way of being,
of what it means to be a Republican.
And I don't know if people are willing to put in that time.
I mean, I think there's a lot of a sense that for all of that change to happen,
it has to change, has to come out from the outside.
And I don't know if that always will work.
It feels like there has to be this kind of willingness to get involved in the
organization, in the institution of the Republican Party to change the party.
Maybe I'm being Pollyannish in that way, But it just, I think the way that I
hear people saying it is that basically if,
they can be if we can outvote the current Republicans that will solve things
and I don't think that it will necessarily.
I mean you and I Dennis are disadvantaged by being stuck in our time right now.
Yes. It's the tail end of 2021.
I you know can make informed predictions about the Republicans taking back the
House of Representatives in 2022 and what might follow from that but you know
the reality is we don't know what's going to happen. Yeah.
So you know personally, I have become very pessimistic about the probabilities
of reforming the Republican Party from within, even though this is a course
of action I myself have counseled for lo these many years.
You know, I think the reality is that Democrats cannot deliver a defeat to the
Republican Party on the scale that would actually cause the party to reform
and redirect itself even back towards its own traditions and heritage.
In 2020, you have probably the most unpopular president,
seeking renomination throughout the entire time that we've actually done polling
and Republicans actually gained
in the House and came pretty darn close to having Trump win re-election.
I mean, the reality is that just by virtue of the constitutional system that we have inherited,
it's gonna be very difficult for Democrats to overcome the Republican structural
advantage in these underpopulated states, which give them a better chance a
majority in the Senate with every election that passes.
And the same thing is true of gerrymandering at the level of the states and
the whole nature of the electoral college.
So, you know, I am pessimistic on that score. On the other hand,
you know, if you are at all a student of America's history, you realize that
change comes from places that could not have really been predicted at all.
So although I don't actually study religion in American history,
specifically, I was actually writing about two years ago, a book about the life
of women in a particular community in upstate New York,
and it happened to be in that part of sort of central and western upstate New
York that Whitney Cross in a book in the 1950s called The Burned Over District,
and this is what Cross called the psychic highway of American life,
and what you had there during the second Great Awakening of the early to mid-19th,
century was the creation of whole new religions.
The Church of the Latter-day Saints in Palmyra, better known as the Mormon Church.
The Shakers were active there. The Millerites, I want to say,
were created in upstate New York at that time, from which we got the Jehovah's
Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventism.
You also had the spiritualist movement being very active there,
and also just utopians, like, let's say, the Fourierists or the Oneida Society.
And so although we've mostly been discussing religion as a conservative force,
obviously it also has within it the potential for radicalism.
And it could be that the scale of our problems seems so insurmountable through
politics that people are going to channel the desperate need to reform into
other dimensions, one of which could conceivably be religion.
So I try not to be super pessimistic. You know, I am a pessimist by nature.
And looking at American history, I see our country declining.
I don't know if you're familiar with Rudyard Kipling's poem,
Recessional. He was asked to write a poem in the great national celebration
of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
Instead of a celebratory poem, he came out with essentially a vision of,
the British Empire Going the Ways of Fallen Empires of Past Human History.
And it's a great poem, and it directly connects the British people's lack of
faith in God to the decline of their empire.
And, you know, I used to know it by heart. I still remember parts of it.
Far called our navies melt away, on dune and headland sinks the fire.
Low all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Judge of the nations spare us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget.
And, you know, I really do feel that America's decline comes from forgetting
what spurred us to greatness in the first place.
In the Republican Party, that means forgetting what it meant to be a Republican,
to be the standard bearer of the heritage of Lincoln and the union that won the Civil War,
to forget the legacy of the civil rights movement across the centuries.
And I do feel that that's also connected with the falling away from religion,
but I'm not pessimistic about the possibility for renewal...yet.
So, I think, what do you think it's going to be?
We'll put it this way. As you said, we can't know what's going to happen.
Anything can happen in the next few years.
But we can at least have some sense of contours of what's possible in the next few years.
And so, where do you think we as a society are headed,
and where do you think there are those nuggets of renewal of civic life that
you may find coming from religion, or coming from.
Politics, maybe cultural, probably would be the better word.
I'm not optimistic about what's happening at the national level and the political level.
You have a Republican Party that is going in an ever more radical and even authoritarian
direction under Trump, but not entirely due to Trump.
At the same time, you have a Democratic Party where the leading faction is a
progressive movement that is going way out over its skis in terms of what the
American people are prepared to accept,
even lying aside some other problematic aspects of it in terms of its post-liberalism.
And its post-racial liberalism.
So, you know, if you follow that line of argument long enough,
you get to civil war and nothing good comes from that.
But if you're looking for optimism or at least encouraging signs,
I think the most encouraging are to be found at the local level.
If the upswing was the most pessimistic book I've read in the last few years,
one of the most optimistic is the book by James and Deborah Fallows called Our Towns.
Which is a record of their travels in their spiffy little small plane across
the United States going to places that don't usually make the news.
And you know they're not pollyannish about it. They see the decline of industry
in many of these small towns, they see the decline of local news,
the way in which social media is making people crazy, but if there's anywhere
in America where people of disparate
views can come together to create progress, it is at the local level.
That's where your partisan affiliation makes the least difference if you're
trying to solve something even as mundane as a pothole, or as profound in a
way as how do we regenerate this town which has fallen upon hard times.
And I think religion has a very important role to play there,
and I think small institutions of all kinds have a profound importance.
Small churches such as your own, people coming together and willing to see even
people with they disagree politically as allies, at least on a particular cause,
and a willingness to communicate with each other in these smaller forums out
of the glare of social media and the anger and frustration and division that
come with channeling the national dialogue into our own local dialogues.
If we can create space, a sort of bubble, let's say, in which people can at
least temporarily enter into and talk with each other as human beings,
then I think that's where the possibility national regeneration exists.
Going back to what you talked about earlier in how.
Basically the left has kind of gone into this, have moved away from faith,
but they've channeled that faith into social issues.
On the other side, we've kind of seen religion kind of change with the rise
of the people like the interglots,
such as Adrian Vermeule.
What do you think is the allure of that movement? And it is a movement within
the American right that seems to want to have,
obviously in some ways they want religion to have a public role,
but not in the way that you or I would envision it.
It seems to be a much darker way of having religion be a force in society.
So I'm in Florida and the National Conservatism's second big national conference
happened in Orlando just about a month ago.
And clearly the energy, intellectual energy,
on that new right is coming from the integralists and these kind of very orthodox,
radically orthodox Christians,
you who took a sort of hegira to Hungary to see his vision of the good society.
So too with people like Patrick Deneen, who's one of the most prominent critics of the liberal order.
So too with people, let's say, who are a bit more obscure like Gladden Pappin.
You know, these are the people who I think have a lot of pull in American culture
and things seem to be going their way as people become disillusioned with what
the liberal order seems to have wrought.
You know, to put in a brief plug for my employer, the Niskanen Center,
we have started the State Capacity Project to complement our Open Society Project.
The Open Society Project is essentially a defense of liberal democracy.
The State Capacity Project is the defense of liberal democracies through strengthening
governance performance, if you want to put it that way.
Because what we've seen in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007 to
2008 is that when our ability,
the ability of liberal democracies to provide a decent standard of living for
its citizens comes into question, that's when you get the rise of populism, nationalism.
Ethnic chauvinism, all of these other sort of forces on the right,
and ultimately one of the places that people look for a reordering of society
along more just lines will be something like integralism.
You know, integralists make a number of trenchant criticisms of the liberal order.
There is no doubt that there is atomism in our communities. There's no doubt
that Americans are leading unhappier lives than their parents in many cases.
You know, a lot of commentators like to poke fun at the younger generation who
don't seem to be able to date or have sex or marry in the same proportions as their parents.
But, you know, this is actually a real societal problem. This is a problem that
if you actually looked at a society in the past, you could say,
wow, that's not going to end well at all.
So the question is, can these problems be addressed within the liberal order
or do we need an alternative to that liberal order?
When I read the interlists, when I hear them, I cannot feel that their prospect
of creating a Hungary in America,
creating a Hungary of America, or trying to return to the Middle Ages,
number one, can succeed, or number two would actually result in a society in
which anyone who's currently an American would really want to live.
I admire the architecture that the Austro-Hungarian Empire created in Budapest,
but you also, if you're opening your eye, this cannot help but notice that it's
a poor society and that its lack of liberalism and democracy is actually part
of what creates its poverty.
And, you know, to actually follow these kind of authoritarian visions put forward
by these post-liberals of both the left and the right, I think,
would only lead to disaster and no one would actually say that this was an achievement of utopia.
But you know at the same time it's incumbent on those who are defending the
established liberal order to acknowledge criticisms where they're valid and
try to improve them in what ways we can.
And I think that's the project that you know my center and others are trying to advance.
I happen to be on the center right. I have a lot of criticisms about the Republican party.
I feel it's not my role so much to criticize the Democrats that should come
from within in a sense But at the same time, you know, they need to realize
if they do not actually reform voting rights, disaster looms.
If they do not do a better job of responding to the American people's concerns
about crime and inflation, immigration, disaster also looms.
So, you know, I think that essentially totalitarian visions,
whether of religion or of secular ideologies,
they beckon most strongly when the liberal order is faltering and failing.
And if we are to forestall those dystopias, then it's up to us to try to strengthen
the liberal order here now while we can.
Yeah, I have, I know that there has been some talk about, you know,
the love of the Middle Ages and how wonderful that was, but I like my antibiotics.
So, you know, I don't think that that was a great time for people.
Yeah, there's some kind of interesting weirdness about that,
but it also again leads me to go back to what we've been talking about with
Miller and some other people is that they truly believed in state capacity and
the belief that government had to perform well.
And it seems like that is lost, especially on the center right,
that we've become so obsessed with limited government, small government,
and not to say that that's a bad concept.
I think that there is some good in that, but it's become such a overwhelming
concern that we no longer seem to be interested in how well government performs.
And I think that that example definitely came out during the coronavirus pandemic
in that there have been many examples where the government didn't work well.
And there are lots of reasons why that happened.
Some of it comes down to investment that hasn't been, and we haven't really
focused a lot on investment.
But it seems like we've lost that sense on the center right for the importance
of state capacity, that you don't have to be a believer in quote unquote big
government to believe that the government we have has to operate well,
for it to function and for people to continue to believe in the liberal order.
Yeah, there's a lot in there, Dennis, that we can't address in the remaining few minutes we have.
But, you know, let me just talk about Erwin Miller because I did know him pretty well.
And Columbus, Indiana, if you've ever been there, is a pretty small town.
I doubt if even now it has more than 50,000 people there.
And you would think that it's really too small and and probably too isolated
of a town to actually be the headquarters of a world-spanning.
Major corporation. But it's there largely because that was the wish of Erwin Miller,
and he felt that he would be betraying the citizens of his town and even to
some extent his family that had settled there if he were to allow the company to be moved.
Erwin Miller majored in Greek in college, and he used to read the New Testament
in its original Greek while he, well not while, but shortly after he would play
his Stradivarius violin.
I mean he was an unusual guy, but he also read Tacitus and often would quote
from him, and I particularly remember that he would say that the good life is
one lived in praiseworthy competition with one's ancestors.
And, you know, he wanted to live up to the model they had set, but also to advance it.
And he felt that was also the same way that we ought to approach patriotism.
Patriotism is not resisting change.
It's not just repeating what had worked in the past or wrapping the flag around you.
But it's saying that, you know, you want to accomplish something in your time
that is comparable to the accomplishments of your ancestors in their time.
But also then at the same time, he realized, you know, in the 1950s,
it's fine that you actually have this big company going in common tension in,
Indiana, but ultimately this is really too small a place to get world-class,
talent if you're just going to let it be that ordinary small town.
So through his company foundation he supported great schools.
He brought in great teachers from all over the country.
He had the city and county agencies hire the best architects in the entire world
to design the buildings in this little town.
Yes, he did pay their fees.
But, you know, it's like that's why you actually will find some of the world's
greatest mid-century architects represented in this tiny little place of Columbus,
Indiana, and nowhere else in the world.
Um this is why he supported uh civil rights
you know partly because the bible said that was the way
to do and american democracy said it but he also believed that civil
rights was actually good for the american economy that in fact it was you know
kind of a crime against the republicans belief in capitalism if you let uh talented
people lapse for no better reason than senseless discrimination um and you know
he really also did do what he could to look into the future,
and to make the changes now that people 100 years from now would feel were the best changes to make.
We're all imperfect when it comes looking into the future, but you know,
we can be guided both by our sense of what's needed in the here and now and
also by our sense of what worked in the past.
And I suppose that's also where religion comes in.
Religion at its best is calling us to be our best selves and to do the difficult
thing, not the easy thing.
Religion shouldn't flatter our prejudices, it should challenge them.
It should encourage us to look beyond the present moment.
And I think that's ultimately where, you know, I hope to see a union of politics
and religion in that kind of looking beyond something better.
And I think that's a good way to end, which is on a sense of hope.
Even though things do look dark right now, and I will be honest,
it is dark, there is still hope.
And so that's about all we can do. And you give me hope too, Dennis.
Oh, thank you. Thank you. And thanks to you for taking the time to talk to me today, Jeffrey.
It was a pleasure. All right, take care. Bye.
Music.
You know, sometimes you really don't know what has been lost until it's gone.
Mainline Protestantism and Moderate Republicanism have been maligned over the
past decades for not being clear on what they stood for.
Sometimes that criticism was
for good reason, but I think most of the time that criticism was unfair.
As the life of J. Earl Miller shows, these tradition, these two traditions basically
built 20th century America.
And Miller was able to support his hometown. He invested in his hometown of
Columbus, Indiana, at a time when other cities in the Rust Belt were left to wither on the vine.
When you look at Miller and also these two traditions from the early 20th century,
from our standpoint, it's hard not to look around and see the poverty of our present age.
Those institutions that were built decades ago are now failing and we're seeing
the rise of illiberal movements that could threaten the very nature of America itself.
There is a temptation to say it would be nice if we could go back to that era,
that era when these two traditions were still strong, when there were men like J.R.
Miller who saw, that took their religion and their politics seriously.
But the reality is we can't go back. The past is meant to be a teacher, not a place to return.
And the past is there to teach us how to build and rebuild institutions for a new day and time.
But can we build new sects within religion or new political parties in a time,
in time that we can challenge those forces on the left and the right,
both Maga and the woke? I don't know.
What I do know is that we can mourn the past, and we can also use it as fuel
to power us in this day and age because we need all the help that we can get.
The fight is on to create lasting institutions that can benefit society well into the 22nd century,
and we have to do it soon before authoritarian leaders sink their poisonous
roots into American society.
Mainline Protestantism and Moderate Republicanism may not make a comeback,
and they may not even continue or may not return to the form that they once
were, but I do hope that they can continue to teach us how to be a better society.
And I am so thankful for Jeffrey for reminding me about the value of these two traditions.
Music.