(1) If you're going to limit American Protestantism to the strains that were created here, then you're pretty much limited to Pentecostalism. (Mormons are American, but I wouldn't count them as Protestant.) Even Baptists and Methodists, by this standard, are English, not American. Charles Wesley's hymns would go out the door with Luther's. But you will find Luther's hymns and Bach's church music in American Protestant churches every week. Lutheran services have always closely followed the Latin liturgy, except that it's in the vernacular, so it's no wonder that Bach wrote a mass. Didn't make him any less Lutheran.
(2) Fill in the blank:" Big chunks of the American _________________ tradition are anti-aesthetic and anti-intellectual." Many things work here. Catholic. Liberal. Conservative. Leftist. Atheist. Movie. TV. Popular song. It's hard to find a noun that doesn't fit.
(3) Sarah Palin came out of Pentecostalism. She's no more a "traditional Protestant" than Narendra Modi is a "traditional Hindu". The most anti-aesthetic and anti-intellectual strains of the American Proddie tradition come from the revivalist strains. Until recently, these strains have not shaken the traditional Protestant establishment core of the US. Even in the most conservative of the mainline Protestant churches, the Southern Baptists, most institutions and all of the seminaries were in the hands of the moderate wing, a group of people as sensible as any other group of believers, until the late 1980s. And liberal, intellectual, and not-at-all anti-aesthetic clergy still rule the roost in the big old Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Congregationalist (UCC), and even American (Northern) Baptist churches. What we've seen recently is the large-scale desertion of these churches in favor of Pentecostalist, Evangelical/Fundamentalist, or non-denominational churches. If you really want to understand what's going on in American Protestantism, it would be more accurate to say that the mainline Protestant establishment was too liberal, too intellectual, too artsy, and too freethinking for a public that decided it preferred its churches reactionary, stupid, ugly, and bigoted.
[With the caveat that, yes, we are talking about White Protestant churches up and down the line here. We all seem to agree that Black Protestant churches have a distinct trajectory.]
MM
On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 20, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Michael McIntyre wrote:
>
>> Well, there can be a minimalist aesthetic. Think Shaker furniture.
>> And don't forget that part of the Protestant austerity was
>> egalitarian. The absence of an altar literally puts minister and
>> congregation on the same level. But, most importantly of all, you're
>> omitting Protestantism's musical side. Luther wrote hymns. Bach was
>> a Lutheran.
>
> I said *American* Protestantism. Neither Luther nor Bach qualifies (though
> Bach drew some on the Latin liturgy, e.g., The B Minor Mass).
>
> But big chunks of the American Proddie tradition are anti-aesthetic and
> anti-intellectual. Sarah Palin didn't come out of nowhere.
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