The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church by Peter J. Leithart (review)

Evangelical author Peter Leithart urges Protestant denominations to reunite (5). He contends that Protestants are bankrupt when they claim that they are “spiritually united” while empirically divided (1). Civil with each other, many Protestants are nevertheless unable to acknowledge each other’s sacraments and ordination. For Leithart, the church should be a visible, unified society, an alternative to other publics (1), particularly as the world grows more and more secular. To tolerate visible division runs counter to the church’s spiritual destiny in which a divided humanity will be reunited in the life of the Triune God (16).

Leithart proposes that the future united church will not hold to absolutely uniform beliefs. But it will prize the unity it has in Christ; thereby, dissenting voices will be reluctant to break from the church (29). The ideal church will be “Bible-saturated” (30). But it will honor the wider catholic tradition as a “treasure” (27), retrieving, not rejecting catholicity (41). It will also be a political church, not because it takes specific political stances, but because it will serve as an alternative public within the wider public, a concrete form of civil society (36).

Leithart claims that the proliferation of Protestant groups in the English-speaking world was in part due to the “dissenting brethren” at the Westminster Assembly (1643–1653) who saw no single model of church government prescribed in scripture and who did not want present doctrinal judgments to be binding for the future (61). These dissenters advocated that Christians could co-exist in peace despite their differences (63). But the unintended consequence of this tolerance is a pluralism which reduces the faith into a “shopping mall” for religious consumers. Leithart claims that thereby tolerance increases, but zeal for faith decreases (65). He does not discuss the view that Christian faith remains vital in North America precisely because differences among churches are tolerated and in fact evoke competition between them.

In the United States, the assumption grounding this religious pluralism is that there is no one established church. But Leithart challenges this. While the US has no de jure established church, Leithart argues that there is a de facto establishment of the many churches insofar as their perceived purpose in public life is to advance the moral character of the United States (88). But North American Protestantism is marred by moral failures: (1) it has done little to heal the racial divide between Blacks and Whites and (2) it has had a legacy of occasional anti-Catholic violence. Leithart fails, however, to bring up the heritage of Catholic moral failure, including racial discrimination in the Americas as well as violence against Protestantism in Europe and elsewhere.

For Leithart, Luther’s reform was necessary, but provisional (114), since ultimately all believers will be united in the triune life in heaven. Modeling the unity to which we should aspire are churches in the majority world, in Africa, South America, and Asia, for whom the divisions of Western Christianity mean little to nothing. Leithart champions a “Reformational Catholicism” that has moved beyond the excuses that keep current divisions in place. In such a new form of the church, excommunication would no longer trigger the excluded to start a new faith community. Instead, it would be such a shock that dissidents would think twice before they breach unity.

Fear of secularism, with its privatization of faith, drives Leithart’s concerns. A divided Christianity can be marginalized in a secular world, and so he claims it is rendered ineffective. Surprisingly, he does not address the fact that in those European countries where Roman Catholicism prevails, a “united” Roman Catholicism has not prevented its marginalization. Nevertheless, he insists on the Roman Catholic critique that when individuals are their own priests, then a cacophony of interpretations of scripture is unleashed. In response, must we not ask, isn’t it likely that failing mainline Protestant groups will unite within the next several decades (or...