The Weekly, January 13, 2025
Hi all,
Matthew Schmitz had a recent piece in First Things on what he called “middlebrow Protestants” that has been on my mind lately. It’s linked below.
The basic thesis is that there was a generation of prominent American Protestants who took positions of leadership in civic life that was defined by a deep personalized faith that motivated public action while being fairly quiet and even under-developed in its actual theology. Schmitz:
Middlebrow Protestants embraced a pragmatic creed that saw Christianity less as a summons to individual salvation or social transformation than as a guide to living a better life—as a spouse, parent, and member of the community. Theirs was a tolerant, optimistic faith. It placed less focus on doctrinal points than on a certain cultural sensibility rooted in the mores of the Midwest, where many middlebrow Protestants had their roots. Its paragons included Branch Rickey, the baseball manager and devout Methodist from Ohio who signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers; Tom Osborne, the soft-spoken Nebraska football coach and Methodist Sunday School teacher; and John Wooden, the Indiana-born basketball guru and Disciple of Christ who taught that small-town virtues like industriousness, cooperation, and self-control were crucial to scaling the “pyramid of success.”
What made these Protestants “middlebrow” was their response to the rise of mass culture and consumer society, one of the major elements of which was a sudden surge in the popularity of spectator sports. Leading modernist thinkers of the twentieth century tended to be uncomfortable with the crass commercialism of major sports. Fundamentalist leaders, for their part, worried that sports detracted from sabbath observance. Middlebrow Protestants adopted a more open attitude. They saw sports as an arena in which the virtues they valued—discipline, hard work, tolerance, and fair play—could be pursued and developed. They discovered an elevating function in mass culture. They thought a ballplayer could direct the eyes of men heavenward.
That Schmitz (and Paul Putz, the scholar whose work he is drawing on) are describing something real is not at all in doubt, at least in my view. What I do wonder, however, is whether such a Protestantism was ever sustainable. It looks to me like a thing that relies upon a deeper, more theologically rooted faith (and perhaps even more so a unique cultural moment) to create the practices and culture that can sustain it.
Without the robust theology (and church life) of older Protestantisms, the midcentury middlebrow Protestantism could not really sustain itself. It could last roughly 1.5 generations as it drew down the capital accumulated by previous generations, but it couldn’t replenish the funds, so to speak. It’s worth noting in this context that the oldest figure in Schmitz’s list, Branch Rickey, was born in 1881, and the youngest, Tom Osborne (who is still living), was born in 1937.
Essentially, you’re capturing a 50 year snapshot of American Protestantism as it existed after the Civil War and prior to World War II. (This is mostly before the modernists had thoroughly gutted the mainline’s theological life.) After the war, you had a decade long boom in American religion in which the Mainline and Evangelicalism alike were both quite robust, but then both began to taper in the 1960s, with the Mainline’s decline being the sharper initially but evangelicalism following in time.
The generation after Osborne, the generation that grew up mostly in the 60s, grew up in a wildly different world and, for a variety of reasons I’m sure, never seemed to develop the deep well of personal discipline and deep private faith that defined someone like Osborne or, to take another example, someone like Jimmy Carter.
One place my mind goes in considering this shift is the relative comfort of the 50s and early 60s (for well-to-do white Christians, anyway) compared to the generally more difficult years in which figures like Rickey, Wooden, and Osborne came of age. Those men grew up in the Gilded Age, the early years of industrialism in America, and then the years of the first World War and then the Great Depression. Their lives were pervasively marked either by deep material insecurity themselves or by a keen awareness of the insecurity and suffering of others. I wonder if, in a more affluent era, it is easier to cloister oneself off from such things and therefore to grow up and mature without the high awareness of the sufferings of one’s neighbor and, therefore, without a deeply held private drive to alleviate that suffering in some way, as Rickey, Wooden, and Osborne all did in their own ways.
But if that is the case, then it would seem that the Middlebrow Protestant can be an admirable figure, but not a replicable one—in which case those concerned with the future of American Christianity may, in some ways at least, be forced to look elsewhere for guidance as we consider the future.
Books
I finished Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking which I read because The Dispatch offered to pay me money if I read Peale and then wrote a piece for them about him, President-elect Trump, and American Christianity. Look for that the day before the inauguration.
I also wrapped up Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Justin Phillips’s C. S. Lewis in a Time of War. The Phillips book also includes quite a lot about British broadcasting during WW2 and about Dorothy Sayers, as her series of broadcast plays about the life of Christ were also a major part of the BBC’s wartime broadcasts.
I’m trying to read more books this year and as much as I can stick to a routine of reading 100 pages a day, as Matt Walther wrote about recently in The Lamp. So the start of the year has been good for me as far as book reading goes.
Articles
Michael Sacasas on the cat in the tree
Andy Crouch on magic
Matthew Schmitz on middlebrow Protestants
Ted Gioia on Anna Akhmatova
B. D. McClay on writers and authority
Justin Vassallo on the prophet of left wing conservatism
Leah Sargeant on IVF
Chris Cillizza on the media landscape in 2025
Elsewhere
Here is a picture of a black squirrel in a tree eating a donut:
I saw this guy on my morning walk last week near campus. When I first spotted him he was on the ground eating the donut, but then a few other squirrels got too close so he ran up into the tree so he could have his donut in peace.
I imagine any parent of small children will feel some measure of sympathy for the black squirrel in this scenario.
Anyway: My parents got me some tools over the holidays to make smoked cocktails at home. Unfortunately, the first time I attempted to make a drink I was talking to my kids while lighting the lighter and did not realize that the end the flame came out of was not sticking out of my hand but was actually pointed directly into my palm. So we got off to a rough start with the smoked cocktails concept.
That said, once I learned my painful lesson and paid more attention to what I was doing while handling a lighter, I’ve had some fun and some success with the drinks. My favorite so far has been a manhattan variant made with Lillet Blanc (the only vermouth I had on hand) and Old Grand Dad bourbon. For bitters, I used Boker’s bitters, which were also a gift over the holidays. (I’m a very simple man when it comes to gifts: Books and mixology stuff are basically all I ever ask for.) The combination of the Boker’s, which have a much earthier taste than Angostura or Orange bitters (which are the more common choice for a manhattan), and the smoke from the cherry wood I used, was really pleasant. It just rounded out the flavors you already get from the whiskey and vermouth in a really enjoyable way. If you get a chance to try it, I’d recommend it.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake