What exactly did legal establishment mean? It is so far removed from our own experience that we may not realize what an intensive role the government played in administering the churches. Typically, the state collected tithes (which all citizens were legally required to pay, whether they attended the established church or not). The state also laid out new parish boundaries, subsidized new church construction, maintained parish properties, paid clergymen’s salaries, hired and fired them, and even took measures to suppress dissenters. (Baptist preachers, for example, were sometimes jailed and beaten. Yes, here in America!) Finally, in many states, government positions were limited to church members—there were religious tests for office.
It might seem that having the government on their side would have given the established churches quite an edge, and to some extent it did. But ultimately, it weakened them. Monopolies tend to be lazy, whether we’re talking about businesses or schools or churches. The established clergy often lived like members of the gentry (the class that did not work but lived off of investments and rents), enjoying ample time for leisure activities. For example, in Scotland’s state church, which was Presbyterian, Thomas Chalmers observed that after holding worship services, “a minister may enjoy five days in the week of uninterrupted leisure.”
By contrast, the evangelical ministers were enthusiastic activists, throwing themselves into ceaseless efforts to spread the gospel. They set up additional worship services, started Sunday schools, taught Bible classes, made personal visits, established charities, and founded missionary societies. Chalmers himself later became an evangelical, after which he is reputed to have visited 11,000 homes in his Glasgow parish during a single year! Becoming an evangelical made a significant difference in one’s style of ministry.
People at the time were keenly aware of the difference in ethos. A document from 1837 (after all American churches had been disestablished), describes the vivid contrast between America’s free churches and England’s established church. Having seen both firsthand, the writer observed that legal establishment made the clergy “indolent and lazy,” since a person with a guaranteed income would never “work as hard as one who has to exert himself for a living.” As a result, the writer concluded, the Americans had a threefold advantage: “they have more preachers; they have more active preachers, and they have cheaper preachers than can be found in any part of Europe.”
A monopoly faith breeds religious indifference not only among the clergy but among members as well. This is one reason rates of religious adherence were lower in colonial days than we typically suppose. A modern analogy might be societies like Sweden where everyone is putatively Lutheran, or Italy where everyone is Roman Catholic. The level of religious participation in these countries is astonishingly low compared to that in America.
Finally, the established churches tended to be the first to drift into theological liberalism. The wealthier the church, the more likely its clergy were to enjoy social status and formal academic training—and thus also the more likely to welcome the liberalism emerging from European universities at the time. Well before the American Revolution, leading scholars at Harvard and Yale had become Unitarian. Instead of exhorting their congregations to repent and be saved, they delivered elegantly styled lectures on “reasonable religion,” with the supernatural elements increasingly stripped away. When the First and Second Great Awakenings broke out, the liberal clergy firmly opposed them, declaring themselves on the side of “Reason” against the revivalists’ “religion of the heart.”
That was a sure recipe for failure. It is a common assumption that, in order to survive, churches must accommodate to the age. But in fact, the opposite is true: In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture. As a general principle, the higher a group’s tension with mainstream society, the higher its growth rate.
- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004
