The new puritans

The Confessing Church movement

The "Confessing Church": the new Puritans

This essay has attracted lots of interest ... and criticism.

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I believe the Presbyterian Laymen and the Confessing Church Movement when they say they don't want to split the Presbyterian Church. They want to take it over. They are the new Puritans.

Old Puritans aimed to "purify" the Church of England from within. The Laymen and the CCM have the same idea. I tell my history students that in the 17th-century, the Puritans claimed that God called them to remake the "worldly" Church of England in their "godly" image. Puritan congregations sprouted across old and New England. After a bloody civil war, England went Puritan, then backslid. New England eventually became non-Puritan, too.

At this point in the lecture, I generally advise my students, "The significance of all of this today is..."

The Puritans failed in large part because they were too strict and narrow-minded even for the 17th century, hardly the heyday of toleration, religious or otherwise. Likewise, the Laymen and the CCM will fail to win the hearts and minds of most Presbyterians who trust in Jesus, but readily admit that there is also truth in other religions. Most Presbyterians are glad to grant others the freedom to use their God-given brains to worship, or not worship, as they see fit.

Like the Puritans, the Laymen and the CCM sizzle with self-righteousness. They remind me of the old Puritan poet who penned:

They cry, they roar for anguish sore,
And gnaw their tongues for horrour.
But get away without delay,
Christ pitties not your cry:
Depart to Hell, there may you yell,
And roar Eternally.

The Laymen and the CCM are what most Presbyterians are not: ideologues, folks who, according to historian Paul F. Boller, believe "they have final answers to the big questions about human existence in their grasp and consequently the obligation to force their views on the rest of the world." "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" proclaims a fundamentalist bumper sticker. I can imagine that on Puritan carts and wagons as well as on Laymen-CCM cars and trucks.

The Laymen and the CCM profess what the well-known TV journalist Eric Sevareid called "dangerously passionate certainties" when he commented on the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. Most Presbyterians have a healthy skepticism about "dangerously passionate certainties." Most Presbyterians know that faith - not certainty - is the most we mortals can muster. Presbyterians, in the words of eminent church theologian Shirley Guthrie, don't profess to know how far God's grace goes, even to non-Christians.

Anyway, the Laymen and the CCM want the church to retreat to fundamentalism.

Like Marxism-Leninism, fundamentalism's day is past. Fundamentalists and Marxist-Leninists are more alike than they would care to admit. Fundamentalism and Marxism-Leninism are, well, Puritanical. The gay issue is a good example. The Laymen and the CCM demonize gay people. Homosexuality was a crime in the old Soviet Union. Gay people could be tossed into prison.

Anyway, just as the Cold War began, Hector Hawton, an English humanist, wrote that "Christianity (I'm pretty sure he meant Christian fundamentalism) and communism ... impose a rigid theory and way of life from above; private judgment is subordinated to scriptural text or church discipline or to the party line."

Presbyterianism is a thinker's religion. But you don't need a theology degree; just plain old common sense thought and prayer work fine.

Presbyterianism aims for the head, not the gut. We may never be as big as some of the fundamentalist denominations because we do not promise pat answers for complex problems. Presbyterians know that simple answers to knotty problems don't work.

So in the end, the fundamentalist "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" theology of the Laymen and the CCM will prove less than soul-nourishing to most Presbyterians.

In God's Bullies, his 1982 book about the Religious Right, Perry Deane Young wrote "...When somebody tries to impose unnatural limits and boundaries on other people's wants and needs, you end up with a solution far more destructive to the individual and to society than the so-called problems were to begin with. We have enough examples in our past, when love and compassion have overcome such movements as we are now facing, to be hopeful about overcoming the current one."

The Rev. Roger Williams is a good example of love and compassion triumphant.

Driven from Puritan Massachusetts more than 300 years ago, he founded Rhode Island as a center of religious toleration. Williams was a devout Christian, yet he conceded that he might be wrong. Thus, he prayed for "a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships be granted to all men in all Nations and Countries." Boller observed, "There do not seem to be many people like Williams in any age: passionate believers who prefer debate to coercion."

Though Williams was not a Presbyterian, his way is has been the Presbyterian way for almost a century. Most Presbyterians "prefer debate to coercion." Most Presbyterians have faith in Jesus, but don't claim "ours is the only water."

Berry Craig is a fourth-generation member of Mayfield, Ky., First Presbyterian Church, a Witherspoon Society member and a professor of history at Paducah, Ky., Community College.