In Inside Higher Ed, Thomas Lindsay described how higher education should teach what it means to be an American citizen. He offers some excellent ideas, such as examining what was meant by “equality” in the Founding Era — not equal outcomes — but a couple of points can be made in response to his helpful article.

Lindsay uses as an epigraph the famous words of Lincoln about how in uniting with the principles of the Founding, people from different lands and backgrounds can become “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” with the first Americans. These words are often invoked to support the idea that no cultural forms underlie the universal ideals of the American founding, and that no cultural formation is needed in becoming an American — that becoming an American happens in the single moment in which one assents to the great proposition that all men are created equal. Lindsay does not seem to be an absolutist in this regard, but his suggestions do seem pretty much confined to the civic sphere.

It is worthwhile to point out, however, that the language Lincoln uses in these words derives from the Gospels, and he uses the language of the Hebrew Scriptures earlier in that same speech. In effect, Lincoln is paralleling the American story with the biblical narrative, and even as he defines America as built on a proposition, he uses the Judeo-Christian bible to formulate this concept. Ideas must be embodied in particular cultural forms and voiced in concrete rhetoric. In this regard, an outstanding article by Joseph Bottum in the latest First Things points out how mainline Protestant Christianity has supplied America with the vocabulary in which support and criticism of the nation could be voiced. Bottum writes:

That vocabulary was incomplete in many ways, and the churches often failed to provide true Christian witness. But in its everyday practice, Protestantism nonetheless gave America something vital: a social unity and cultural definition that did not derive entirely from political arrangements and economic relations. And America gave Protestantism something in return: a chance to flourish without state interference, a freedom to fulfill the human desire for what lies beyond the material world.

Bottum doubts that Catholicism or evangelicalism can replace mainline Protestantism in this matter because the “evangelicals may have too little church organization, and the Catholics may have too much.” Thus mainline Protestantism offered just the right balance of order and freedom to foster the vocabulary necessary to articulate American ideals and give them a cultural embodiment beyond mere politics and economics.

Bottum is perhaps needlessly pessimistic in proclaiming the actual “death” of the mainstream denominations — the word “decline” is more accurate, I think, and bad enough — but he is right to worry about the withering away of “the political theory that depended on the existence of the Protestant Mainline.” Indeed, how could Lincoln have voiced his great sentiments if he were not steeped in the Bible, and how could he have been understood by his listeners if they were not also?