In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

25 1 Mainline Protestants and Children MARGAR ET BENDROTH One day, when William Ellery Channing was a little boy, his father took him to hear a famous preacher. That in itself was not unusual: in the early nineteenth century, many New England Congregationalists considered a rousing sermon a good day’s entertainment. But this was no ordinary diversion . The afternoon fare was a full-tilt fire-and-brimstone sermon, laying out in lurid detail the lost state of humanity, its abandonment to evil, and its exceedingly dim prospects outside the grace of God. As the future founder of Unitarianism later recalled, “A curse seemed to rest upon the earth, and darkness and horror to veil the face of nature.” The thoroughly horrified child left the sanctuary convinced that all of life’s trivial amusements would have to go. His resolve grew even stronger as he heard his father’s gruff words of approval to a fellow congregant as they passed out the door: “Sound doctrine, Sir.” The return trip began in silence, with young Channing so “absorbed in awful thoughts” that he could not speak. But then his father began to whistle ! And when they arrived home, the elder Channing casually sat down, took off his boots, and began to read the evening newspaper, apparently unmoved by the prospect of hell and all its demons yawning below his feet. The truth began to dawn: “His father did not believe it; people did not believe it! It was not true!” As Channing later wrote in his memoirs, the incident was a watershed in his spiritual life; he would be forever after wary of religious emotionalism and of cynical adults. He vowed always to listen to 26 M A RGA R ET BENDROT H sermons with an attitude of doubt, for “he had received a profound lesson on the worth of sincerity.”1 Channing’s story has all the elements quickly associated with the experience of children growing up in liberal churches: dutiful attendance in Sunday service, early faith slowly undercut by a cheerfully agnostic parent, and then a moment of dawning cynicism. The prevailing picture of this tradition is that it simply cannot—or will not—transform its youngest members into churchgoing adults. Indeed, of all the adherents of religious traditions discussed in this volume, mainline Protestants seem the least apt to insist on specific parameters of belief and practice. They stand in stark contrast to Evangelical Protestants and Mormons, who take great care to impart deference to adults and the didactic content of faith; they cannot begin to rival Catholics and Jews in reverence for text and tradition; and in comparison with many believers in immigrant faiths, where family religion provides a vital protective barrier against the full press of American culture, mainliners seem very lightly anchored by cultural or theological distinctives. Within the scope of this volume, they very ably hold down one end of a spectrum of approaches to the universal problem of modern American child rearing. This problematic picture of mainline churches is rooted in many different sources. The demographic evidence is particularly striking: over the past fifty years, the general departure of teenagers and young adults has left many congregations filled with elderly people. Indeed, by the 1980s, the mean age of members in the United Church of Christ was more than fifty, thereby identifying it as one of the oldest denominations in the United States.2 Critics have also noted the virtual absence of children from the past half century of ethical debates in national denominational circles, where adult-oriented concerns about divorce, homosexuality, and abortion gradually assumed center stage. Although, theoretically at least, children’s welfare should have figured prominently in these family-related discussions, younger church members found few active advocates. By the 1970s and 1980s, the silence of mainline churches loomed larger still as conservative Evangelical churches stepped quickly into the breach, spinning off a variety of family-based ministries across the age span, many of them specifically aimed at young parents with school-age children.3 But that bleak picture is hardly the full story; closer inspection reveals far more vitality and awareness than the current stereotype generally suggests . Indeed, as this chapter explains in some detail, over the course of the past two centuries, liberal and moderate Protestant churches have evolved a variety of understandings of childhood. The “liberal child” was a construct developed most fully by theologian Horace Bushnell in the mid-nineteenth century, as...

Share