The kingdom of baseball

Christian Century, June 5, 2002

The American champion of these Protestant themes is the Congregationalist theologian Horace Bushnell. Bushnell's Christian Nurture, with its portrait of the redemptive power of the family, was published in 1847 as a rebuttal to the evangelical understanding of children. Bushnell returns "God to the world of parental activity." Salvation is not an individual act of adult conversion, but a "gradual, unfolding process" advanced by parental love and familial actions that mediate grace. Infant baptism is the formative step in this corporate definition of redemption. It ensures the integrity of the child's own faith.

Bushnell's familial definition of redemption diverged from the evangelical focus on adult conversion. Indeed, evangelicals believed that this eschatological drama between God and the sinner could actually be impeded by family entanglements. Evangelical parents, because of their belief in the rebellious will of the child and the inborn lure of evil, sought to break children's wills in order to prepare them for conversion. This preparatory activity sometimes justified physical or psychological violence. Conversion itself required "emotional and physical rigors" beyond the reach of children. Bushnell denounced such treatment of children as a nurture of despair. Rather than breaking a child's will, he sought, through the formative power of love, to "impart an internal sense of power and control."

After outlining Bushnell's theology, Bendroth asks the question of longevity: How has the tradition of nurture been received and adapted by subsequent generations? A vast array of cultural and ecclesiastical evidence convinces her that "public optimism about the redemptive power of the home" continued well into the 1950s, that "golden era of family religion." The limitations and deficits of "domestic piety" were not evident until the tumultuous social transitions of the '60s. Now Protestantism must encounter the new reality of a family life that is no longer nuclear but "divorced, blended and extended." The middle-class home has become the subject of Protestant lament. Protestant leaders encounter a membership ill-equipped to face this strange new world.

In their worship of the family, Protestants had turned inward, isolating themselves from any engagement with larger social problems. Their inability to walk through the modern world with healing authority was intensified by their religious illiteracy. The family failed in its role as theological educator; children had no core identity as Christians. Christians knew themselves merely as middle-class. Church leaders not only realized that they had failed in their pedagogical task but, even more important, discovered that there was never any theological justification for family religion to begin with.

Ironically, those evangelicals who regarded family life as secondary to the pursuit of conversion became the promoters of "family values." Evangelicals filled the void in leadership left by the failure of "family religion." The New Right became the protector of the middle-class family. In the 1980s evangelicals united around a "distinctive social and moral agenda." The model of evangelical child-rearing, with its themes of hierarchy, discipline and corporal punishment, "offered a clear and compelling alternative to randomness" in a "rapidly decentralizing culture."