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Introduction - "Tradition" and "Traditionalism" after the 1920's
“Tradition,” Jaroslav Pelikan wrote in 1984, “is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”[1] The beguiling simplicity of this neatly balanced play upon words disguises the difficulty of discerning the difference between “tradition” and “traditionalism.” Where is the dividing line between these two?
That was the question facing the few critics who were intent on enlarging Protestant perspectives on giving in mid-twentieth century America. In the 1950s most Protestant churches were enjoying a religious boom of sorts. The denominations seemed to be recovering from setbacks encountered in the years between the two World Wars. The after-shocks of the “fundamentalist–liberal” tensions in the 1920s had abated somewhat and most Protestants were working hard to forget the eclipse of national cultural power so evident in the collapse of the experiment with Prohibition. A resurgent economy had partially erased memories of America’s great depression and of World War II.
These signs of recovery prompted a new willingness among some to criticize stale slogans about “tithing” and “stewardship”. The opening salvo in a decade-long effort to rethink tithing came in 1952 when the Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, Richard S. Emrich, gave a lecture at the Episcopal Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. ("The Theological View of Money" is included here as Resource 4.17
But the heart of the Bishop’s case for change resided in his intuitive reading of the ways in which American society had changed during the decades between the two World Wars. From the 1910s to 1943 only a small percentage of Americans – the wealthy or the very affluent – paid Federal income taxes. “Starting in 1944,” historian James T. Patterson has noted, Americans went along with the withholding of taxes . . . as a normal fact of life.” . . . Scarcely looking back, the nation went from a system of class taxation to one of mass taxation during the war.”[2]
By mid-century the Federal income tax was taking a sizable bite out of the income of even middle-class families. So it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s that increasing numbers of tithers began asking that now familiar question – “Do we tithe on our income once we have deducted all income taxes?” In short, “Gross or net?”
Emrich thought the question was a fair one. Times had indeed changed. And so could our calculations about tithing.
His more important contribution was a response to the increasing importance of non-profit organizations in American society. Later in the twentieth century, there was talk about the tripartite character of the emerging American society in three sectors – the spheres of government, the economy and the non–profit institutions. Such ambitious ventures as The Independent Sector (founded in the late 1970s) or the United Way aspired to embody the emerging “third sector.”
Emrich tried to anticipate the shape of things to come. “The ancient tithe,” he declared, “is not realistic for us today, because so many of the charities conducted by the Temple or the Church are now carried on by the community. What is realistic today is five percent of one’s net income for the Community Fund, the Red Cross and other community projects; and five percent for the church.”
Here we can see how Bishop Emrich was struggling to distinguish between “tradition” and “traditionalism.” The changes inherent in his version of the “modern tithe,” he believed, did not violate the venerable tradition of tithing. American Christians must find new ways of being both faithful to that standard and yet responsive to swiftly changing circumstances. “It was the practice, as we all know, in the Old Testament to give ten percent of one's income to the Lord.” That same standard, he said, was then reaffirmed in the teachings of the New Testament and the early Christian church.
The situation in the 1950s seemed quite different from even the immediate past. The previous generation’s insistence upon the ideal of a ten per cent tithe to the church might have made sense in 1914 when Harvey Calkins’ salute to tithing, A Man and His Money, appeared in print. In 1914 the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Federal income tax and it was well before the Community Chest – the precursor of the United Way – had become visible in every region of the country.
But now in the 1950s, only the “modern tithe” fit the circumstances of life in mid-twentieth century America. To cling to the old standards seemed like an act of what Jaroslav Pelikan would later call “traditionalism” or “the dead faith of the living.” In short, Emrich was confident that he knew the tradition.
Yet did he really understand the way the tradition of thinking about giving as it developed in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? If Emrich had been more aware of the complex conversation that spanned those years, he might have asked more questions about his “split the difference” solution.
Why replace one fixed percentage standard for another as the measure for the good giver? Is this gambit just another reminder that the tithe had largely become a malleable Biblical symbol that modern church fundraisers find useful in financial campaigns? What about Catharine Beecher’s admonition that there is “no duty more difficult to fix by rule” than the obligation to give (Resource 4.4)? Must we agree on one “rule”?
But if people insist upon a rule of giving, then why not explore the alternative of “fair share” giving? Isn’t progressive giving – the more you have, the more you give – more just and equitable? Can we learn anything from the advocates of “sacrificial” giving?
By the 1950s, however, such questions seldom surfaced in the “mainstream”[3] precincts of American Protestantism. Whatever one might have been learned from preceding generations now seemed suspect – the residue of “traditionalism.” For an example of this suspicion at work, the reader can consult
Joseph Fletcher, author of this provocative essay, became well known in the 1960s and 1970s as an advocate of “situational ethics.” America, he believed, confronted a new situation. His Cambridge neighbor, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard University, had just published a popular volume, The Affluent Society.[4] According to Galbraith, America was moving from an era of “Scarcity” to one of “Plenty.” In these new circumstances Americans faced a novel challenge: Could this society somehow close the gap between “private affluence” and “public poverty?”
This question inspired Fletcher to revisit the ancient theme of stewardship. Therefore, when a National Council executive invited him to present a paper at a 1959 conference, he seized upon this occasion as a double-edged opportunity to criticize inherited Protestant teachings about stewardship as a code word for giving and also to offer a fresh interpretation of this much-abused word. The mainstream churches, he declared, can only help American society if they recognize, however belatedly, the “organizational revolution”(a phrase popularized by Kenneth Boulding[5]) that seemed to be transforming life in this country. No longer can stewardship “remain a private, small-scale, individualistic affair – in the form of purely voluntary and private ‘tithing’ or anything of that kind.” Twentieth century Christians have forgotten the “corporate character” of life in Old Testament times. “Biblical sharing,” Fletcher wrote, “was a matter of the law of the whole ‘secular’ community, and the tithe was used for vastly more than ‘church’ costs.” In place of that magnificent ethical tradition is now a “moralistic insistence upon giving” to the churches, a traditionalism of the most banal kind.
Therefore, Fletcher pled, let us remember and renew the great tradition. Stewardship in the twentieth century means “Christian support for increased taxation and funding, aimed at a wholesome investment balance” between the private and public spheres. “Thanksgiving baskets and Christmas coal bags are gone with the horse and buggy.” Our personal giving is largely irrelevant. What America needs is a “tax on opulence” and not the “petty moralism[6]” inherent in the usual church talk about stewardship. “Private self-taxation at the level of grace, as in tithing, is too little and too spotty.”
Joseph Fletcher's exuberant pronouncements extended the reach of the idea of “stewardship” far beyond what any church leader had claimed during the first half of the twentieth century. He also took for granted what few of his predecessors had ever dared to believe. Earlier advocates of stewardship, for instance, usually included appeals for support of church institutions. In contrast, Fletcher seemed confident and even nonchalant about the durability of mainstream Protestant organizations. The issue was not the churches' survival, but their relevance. Above all, he believed in the benign power of the state and the possibilities of achieving high moral ends through political action. American politics would become the testing ground for any aspiring “good steward” in the years to come.
While Fletcher's piece had little discernible impact upon Protestants’ visions of giving, it nevertheless accurately forecast what would be “blowing in the wind” in the 1960s and afterward. His essay anticipated a turn toward interpreting “stewardship” as political action in the 1980s.
Consider, for instance, the work of Douglas John Hall, a Canadian theologian. Some twenty years after Fletcher had his say, Hall published The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age.[7] Hall's subtitle – A Biblical Symbol Come of Age – tells the story of the book. Although the notion of stewardship had long been a feature of North American church life, it now deserves to be rescued from permanent banishment to what he called “our theological idea-attic” where we place all those notions that “seemed embarrassing or out of fashion.[8]”
In its earlier incarnation, according to Hall, stewardship (or a “greatly reduced version of the biblical concept[9]”) had come to mean fundraising. Consequently "the term has a decidedly distasteful connotation. It at once conjures up the horrors of every-person visitations, building projects, financial campaigns, and the seemingly incessant harping of the churches for more money. Ministers cringe at the mention of Stewardship Sundays: must they really lower themselves to the status of fund-raiser once more? Must they again play the role of a Tetzel?[10]"
Douglas John Hall left no doubt about the need to break the habit of equating this “Biblical symbol” with the routines of “church finances.” Once freed from that distasteful association, the idea could achieve “its historical destiny.” The recovery of the Biblical meaning of stewardship would free modern Christians from the traditionalism that had so long obscured a great tradition.
Stewardship, he believed, made sense in a world where the folk-ways of affluence threatened a fragile environment and where the growing economic chasm between the First World and the Third World assumed troubling proportions. The faithful steward would wrestle with such multiple challenges as “secularization,” “globalization” and “futurization.” (The “izat”s dominated this swift survey of the world.)
Like Joseph Fletcher, Hall stretched the meaning of stewardship to cover a vast array of responsibilities. The refurbished idea had now become a “big tent” concept. Under its spacious canopy one would then encounter many of the global problems that troubled thoughtful Christians in the last decades of the twentieth centuries.
Hall’s slender volume attracted considerable attention in the 1980s and 1990s, especially from leaders responsible for “stewardship” programs in giving in Protestant churches. Many of these educators hoped his perspective on stewardship would inspire new visions of giving among mainstream Protestants. But that transfusion of energy never took place.
Meanwhile the search goes on for new ways of thinking about giving. Where do we begin? What about “gratitude” or “generosity” or “praise” as the point of departure? Each of those lines of inquiry deserves further exploration.
Yet while investigating these ways into the future, we might also look retrospectively at the visions of giving that flourished between the 1820s and 1920s. The story of those years suggests a legacy of promising questions. That inheritance can help us search deeper for the dividing line between traditionalism and tradition. The power of traditions often resides in the questions that we are prompted to ask.
Our purpose in launching this website is to encourage you to study these questions. You will find a summary of them on the homepage. That list is only the beginning of the questions that you can discover on
[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 65.
[2] James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945 – 1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 56.
[3] The word "mainstream" represents a compromise with current usage. It became part of our language somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. I readily admit that this term indirectly claims more knowledge than most of us can claim. Where, after all, does the religious mainstream flow in contemporary American society? The answer to that question is not at all clear, at least to me. Even so, most observers today refer to the major denominations associated with the National Council of Churches U.S.A. as "mainstream" religious institutions. Therefore I will go along with that custom, although it clearly implies certain dubious claims.
[4] John. Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958).
[5] Kenneth Boulding, The Organizational Revolution ( New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953).
[7] Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Comes of Age (New York: Friendship Press for Commission on Stewardship, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1982).
[8] Hall, p. 11.
[9] Hall, p. 6.
[10] Hall, p. 6.
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