The Protestant Idea

Are U.S. Protestants drawing more closely together? There are at least signs that-faced with the growth of the Roman Catholic Church &Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and the rest are spending more time and thought defining the heritage they hold in common.

This week, with more enthusiasm than ever before, U.S. churches celebrated Reformation Sunday. Another sign of the times is the growing number of books dealing with the Protestant tradition. One of the latest of these is a vividly written, amply illustrated survey of Protestantism's development and its role in the history of the U.S. Protestant Panorama, by Clarence W. Hall, managing editor of the Christian Herald, and Desider Holisher (Farrar, Straus &. Young; $4) makes some clear-cut assertions.

The Founders Knew. The idea of Protestantism, say the authors, is inescapably tied up with the word "freedom." The four pillars of Protestantism's "big idea" are "Freedom of Conscience: the right and responsibility of every man to worship as his conscience dictates, to make his own judgments . . . Freedom of Grace: with salvation the free gift of God, not to be earned by good deeds, not to be purchased with the coin of any realm . . . Freedom of Access to God: requiring no mediator save Christ . . . Freedom of Religion from Authoritarian Control: the vigorous denial to any government, whether political or ecclesiastical or both, of the right to dictate, underwrite or establish a 'state faith' to which all must adhere."

Wherever the idea of Protestantism goes, "it breaks men's chains, imparts freedom of soul and mind and body, lifts men ... to new and ever more creative patterns of social and spiritual responsibility." And "the American heritage is the Protestant heritage . . . Protestants came to America, settled America, made America after the likeness of their own ideal." Among the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 34 were Episcopalians, 13 Congregationalists, six Presbyterians, one Baptist, one Quaker and one Roman Catholic. Before affixing his signature, each man bowed his head in prayer.

Russia Knows. Authors Hall &. Holisher present nine different categories of the Protestant enterprise in the U.S. (worship, laymen, youth missions, etc.). In conclusion, they decide that, despite past sins of sectarian pride and middle-class smugness, the Protestant idea today has come to its greatest moment. "Protestantism," they say, "has been inevitably cast for its role as chief adversary of Communism. For it has been Protestantism in the main which first unleashed the ideal of freedom and set it singing in the hearts of men . . .

"Soviet Russia and her satellites know their real enemy. They freely acknowledge that the greatest barriers to the Kremlin's dream of world domination, are the freedom-loving Protestant countries. Peoples long trained in the acceptance of authoritarian control, whether temporal or spiritual, become relatively easy conquests for Communism. Peoples schooled in the concept of religious and political liberty are harder to handle."

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