The Protestant Elite and the Crisis of Capitalism
Anthony Mansueto
President and Senior Scholar, Seeking Wisdom
The appointment of Elena Kagan to the United States Supreme Court marked a critical juncture in the development of
the North American polity. For the first time in our history, there are no longer any Protestants serving on the Supreme
Court. Most analysis of this development has focused on the immediate factors which contributed to this most unusual
phenomenon. In particular, only Catholics can be reliably counted on to be “pro-life,” so all recent Republican
appointments have been of Catholic justices. And Democrats have been concerned to extend representation on the
court to historically excluded ethnoreligious minorities, among whom only African Americans are likely to be Protestant.
This is no doubt true, but the departure of Protestants from the Supreme Court is part of a much larger phenomenon.
Along with the decline of liberal Protestantism and the collapse of the progressive wing of the Republican Party, it is a
symptom of the profound crisis of the U.S. ruling class.
The idea that there is a ruling class in the United States is not a popular one these days. Neoliberals and social
conservatives alike hold to the fiction that, because it is an electoral democracy, the United States is ultimately ruled by
the people as a whole. Those who recognize the existence of ruling class, on the other hand, continue to think about
class in exclusively economic terms. For historical materialism class is determined by who does and who does not
control the means of production. But neither approach is really very helpful. Even a cursory analysis of campaign
finance in the Untied States shows that while trade unions, middle strata groups such as physicians and attorneys, and
issue oriented groups across a broad political spectrum are all significant players; elections are overwhelmingly funded
and thus controlled by Capital. High technology, information sector, and (at least until recently) investment banking
support the Democrats; the extractive sector, defense/aerospace, health care, commercial banking, insurance, and low
wage, low technology manufacturing support the Republicans, with other sectors ranged in between.
But understanding rule in exclusively economic terms simply can’t account for the current political situation. Based on a
purely class analysis, the Democratic victory in the 2008 General Elections should have restored to power the
progressive, rising groups in the ruling class (backed, to be sure, by labor and most of the progressive middle strata,
but only as junior partners), ending an interregnum in which backward sectors, especially the extractive industries, used
demagoguery to temporarily secure control of the government. And those dominant groups in the ruling class should be
disciplining and reigning in the demagogues in the Republican Party, while helping President Obama resolve a difficult
economic crisis and begin to move forward on critical global and national problems such as climate change and the
problem of paying for civilization. Instead, Obama appears to be receiving very little in the way of either support or
guidance and the demagogues are setting the political agenda.
The problem with this analysis is that strictly speaking, while the US is certainly a capitalist society in which the political
structure is overwhelmingly controlled by capital, we do not currently have an authentic ruling class. This is because
rule, even in a capitalist society, is not merely an economic, but a political and ultimately a sacral function. Let me
explain.
Human civilizations grow up, to be sure, on a definite material basis. But they are, first and foremost, attempts to realize
transcendental ideals. Thus the Egyptians sought divinity for the elite through pyramid building and mummification. The
Hellenic and Roman civilizations pursued the humanistic ideal of rational autonomy and republican citizenship, in which a
sector of the population, at least (those freed from labor by the slave economy) devoted themselves to public
deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning, value, and public policy. Christendom sought to make
ordinary humanity capable of God. Judaism and later Islam sought to actually realize the will of that God, the first by
forming the people in ethical deliberation, the second by joining justice to power, commanding right and forbidding
wrong. Indian civilizations aimed at achieving liberation and enlightenment understood in various ways, Chinese
civilization at realizing the mandate of heaven. The modern West has aimed at nothing less than actually building God,
by means of scientific and technological progress or by constructing a collective political subject (the modern state or
the Communist Party) which can make humanity the master of its own destiny.
Social structures such as the tributary mode of production, slavery or feudalism, capitalism or socialism are simply ways
of realizing these ideals. When they fail to do so, they are called into question. When even revolutionary transformation
cannot create a structure which realizes the ideal which guides a civilization, or when the ideal succumbs to its own
internal contradictions, that ideal is abandoned and the civilization goes into crisis.
Ruling and prospective ruling classes –as opposed to those who are merely economically privileged-- are first and
foremost the leading agents and advocates of civilizational ideals. They must, to be sure, control or have a credible
strategy for gaining control of a significant share of the social surplus product. But they exist to advance their ideals and
possess “mana” or a sacral character because they are believed to realize their ideals in a qualitatively higher degree
than ordinary people.
Now the ruling class in the United States has, historically, been complex and heterogeneous, reflecting the formation of
the country out of the fusion of several different founding settlements. But its historic core was the old Puritan elite and
its broader English Reformed (Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopal) periphery. This ruling class emerged
during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in England. The English gentry, engaged in a rapid capitalist
transformation and modernization of agriculture, and the bourgeoisie, engaged in the early stages of manufacturing
development, embraced enthusiastically the ideals of Reformed Protestantism, which saw in economic productivity –and
more broadly in contributions to innerworldly civilizational progress-- a sign of divine election and a participation in God’s
plan for the universe. When the Reformation stalled in England, under the Stuarts, a small section of this group
migrated to North America, where they tried to create Holy Commonwealths which would embody the Reformed ideal in
its purest form –and ended up constituting themselves as the ideological core of the what eventually became the U.S.
ruling class.
Now the Puritans never enjoyed uncontested hegemony in North America. From the very beginning they shared power
with an array of other elites, from the much more moderate Calvinists who dominated the middle states to the landed
elites of the South. Radical Puritanism, which made a convincing narrative of a conversion experience a condition of
church membership, and church membership a condition of franchise, had lost control even in Massachusetts by the
1660s. And the Puritan elite itself went through a gradual transformation as well. While a minority –mostly those “left
behind” by the development of mercantile capitalism—clung fast to the Evangelical emphasis on conversion, most
looked to “usefulness to society” as the most compelling sign of election. They became, in other words, liberal
Protestants. This, in turn, served as the basis for alliances with other progressive elites and to the gradual formation of
a ruling bloc. After a number of failed attempts to govern without making significant concessions to the working classes
(the Federalist and then the Whig Parties) this ruling class finally came to power in 1860 on a platform of public
investment in science, technology, and infrastructure and the closure of the West to slavery in favor of the creation of a
mass base of yeoman farmers. It was this ruling class which led the United States to global dominance, “proving” its
founding claim that leadership in the Anglo-American imperium should be vested only in those who actually embodied its
civilizational ideal, and not in an hereditary aristocracy with feudal origins or a monarchy with suspect religious
credentials. And the political organization of this ruling class was the Republican Party.
It is important to understand that the Protestant Elite was never a pure “high modern” ruling class. Even as it drew
further and further away from its Evangelical roots, it never fully embraced techno-political god building, even covertly.
Rather, it understood civilizational progress as first and foremost an extension of divine sovereignty which would
ultimately usher in the millennium. Evangelization, scientific and technological progress, the political advance of the
Anglo-American imperium, and a process of economic growth and development which ultimately gave birth to capitalism
were all part of a single process.
Several factors conspired to undercut the hegemony of this ruling class. First, and most important, was the fact that the
civil war failed to usher in the promised millennium of prosperity and social justice. This led to a rupture in North
American Protestantism which is still with us. Those left behind by successive waves of capitalist modernization turned to
a pessimistic dispensationalist fundamentalism which abandoned hope in innerworldly civilizational progress in favor of a
literal Second Coming which alone would usher in the millennium. But even those who profited from industrialization and
capitalist development could not help but recognize that it fell far short of the ideal it had been intended to serve. Thus
the rise of the Progressive movement and the Social Gospel. Indeed, a few went even further than this, embracing
socialism (the American left has always had its share of trust fund cadre) or otherworldly spiritualities from Asia. This
latter process began with the Transcendentalists and Theosophy in the nineteenth century and ultimately culminated in
the New Age and the broad embrace of Hindu and Buddhist spiritualities by a section of the old elite.
The majority of the elite slugged on, however, confident that reforms within the context of capitalism would rescue their
ideal and unleash a (much secularized) millennium of peace, prosperity, and justice. It was not until the 1910s that this
confidence really began to be shaken. Two factors were important here. First, the Progressive movement failed to gain
hegemony over the Republican Party. This in turn led to Herbert Hoover’s tepid response to the Great Depression,
which in turn allowed the Democratic Party to capture what had been the Republican Party’s historic position as the
party of the advanced, progressive sectors of capital. Many Republicans believed, to be sure, that their own party had a
deeper tradition of capitalist reformism and provided critical, creative support for the New Deal and the Great Society
while clinging to their Republican identity. But after 1914 Progressive Republicans were always junior partners in the
ruling bloc, supporting Democratic-led governments from 1932 to 1980 and leading a couple of governments
themselves, albeit from a minority position. The Democratic Party, shackled with a powerful Southern faction still loyal to
the old landed elite, and resistant to the civil rights movement and the Great Society, depended on this support. But
clearly something had happened. The core of the US ruling class no longer fully controlled its own political party.
The second dimension of the crisis, and the more important one, was religious. This crisis dates, in fact, from the same
period as the crisis of progressive Republicanism: the 1910s. In this case, it was reflected in the global rejection of
liberal and social gospel theologies in the wake of the horrors of the First World War. Neo-orthodox theologians such as
Barth, Brunner, Tillich, and Niebhur, stunned by the descent of the West into horrific warfare, all rejected the easy
identification of Christianity with the achievements of the Modern West and argued for a return to the ideals of the
Reformers. Politically, they remained firmly on the Left, but rejected the idea that any social reform or any social
revolution, capitalist or socialist, represented the establishment, even incipiently or gradually, of the Kingdom of God. In
this they were well in advance of Catholic theologians, who were still looking for ways to accommodate modernity, a
pattern which continued up until the crisis of liberation theology in the 1980s.
The effect of this theological move, at least in so far as it was embraced by the Protestant Churches, was to strip the
Protestant Elite of its mana. Protestantism no longer offered a civilizational ideal of its own, but rather adopted a critical
position in relationship to the human civilizational project itself. In its most radical form –e.g. the work of Jacques Ellul,
this amounted to a rejection of human civilization as itself a rebellion against God and a direct consequence of the fall.
But even relative moderates such as Barth, Tillich, and the Niebhurs, whose theology dominated Protestant Churches in
the US from the 1930s on, positioned themselves very carefully so as not to provide unconditional religious legitimation
for any political agenda whatsoever.
The decline of the Republican Party and the Liberal Protestant Churches followed inevitably from this crisis. The
progressive sectors of capital, concerned more for political clout than aristocratic lineage, invested more and more in
the Democratic Party, which transformed itself from a party whose boundaries were defined in ethnoreligious terms (i.e.
as the party of those outside the Anglo-American Protestant consensus, and therefore of both Jewish and Catholic
immigrant workers and Southern planters), into the party of progressive capital, with labor and the progressive middle
strata as junior partners. And the Republican Party became by default the party of the left behind, led by backward
sectors of capital (low wage manufacturing threatened by both labor and foreign competition, the extractive sector, etc.).
The Liberal Protestant churches have, in this sense, fared better than the progressive wing of the Republican Party. But
Liberal Protestant numbers are bolstered by churches outside the historic core elite (such as the Methodists, who have
historically served as a way of incorporating the working classes into the English Protestant project) or outside the Anglo-
American cultural stream entirely (the Lutherans). Some still offer a self-critical neo-orthodoxy. President Obama has, in
fact, declared himself a disciple of Reinhold Niebuhr. But many survive by offering something quite different from
historic, especially Reformed Protestantism: nearly Catholic liturgy, Buddhist or Hindu spirituality, interfaith engagement,
especially with Jews and Muslims (a central issue for the dislocated elite, anxious to know where they went wrong in their
bid for a fully humane and just global imperium), together with openness to gays and others historically excluded from
the church and to the ordination of women. It is not a bad mix, but it is hardly a recipe for rule.
The Protestant Elite still exists, to be sure, and is still highly privileged. Economically, they seem to have retired,
progressively, first from direct production and then from active involvement in finance, living off their investments and
leaving both entrepreneurship and management to the nouveaux riches. Instead, they devote themselves to
philanthropy, scholarship, and public service. The Protestant Elite still controls most of the great research universities
and liberal arts colleges and the network of preparatory schools which feed into them, preferential admission to which
they secure for their children through legacy admission programs which, according to one estimate, gives students a
160 point advantage on the SAT. They also control most of the largest private foundations. They fund –and control—
the arts and humanities and social sciences in the United States as well as their political expression in left/progressive
activism, setting firm limits to the latter which keep it with in bounds acceptable to capital. But they no longer have the
vision –or the mana-- to rule.
What does this suggest about the current political situation? No party can establish hegemony without a credible
civilizational ideal. The “progressive” forces in the United States lack such an ideal and are, instead, committed to
preserving the infrastructure of human civilization without one. This is the meaning of the postmodern condition, but it
was already the attitude of Protestant neo-orthodoxy, which was the first religious postmodernism. It is a vitally important
task –but one which is unlikely to inspire devotion or economic sacrifice on the part of the people. The Right is divided
between those who believe that Western civilization can be saved only by restoring some older ideal –generally either
Evangelical Protestantism or Augustinian Catholicism—and anticivilizational opportunists who are capitalizing on the
civilizational crisis for personal gain. The first –the core social conservatives-- are essentially pronatalists who believe
that the West can support itself and retain its identity only if women return to traditional gender roles and bear and raise
enough children to prevent demographic collapse and to sustain Western identity in the face of growing Islamic, Hindu,
and Chinese populations. Their numbers are actually quite small. The opportunists use them to provide moral cover for
their efforts to cut taxes and protect low wage, low technology economic activities that are of questionable viability even
in places like China, much less in the United States.
Seeking Wisdom remains dedicated to the task of charting the next steps in the human civilizational project. This means
defining a new civilizational ideal which conserves what was sane and whole in modernity –the value it placed on
innerworldly human creativity— while rejecting technopolitical god-building and situating human creativity in a broader
spiritual context. We also re-affirm the importance of conserving the infrastructure of human civilization while addressing
such critical questions as climate change and the demographic imbalances which are making it more and more difficult
for the economically advanced to pay for civilization. It is especially important, in the latter regard, to develop compelling
alternatives to the combination of pronatalism and fiscal austerity advocated by the Right.
Ultimately, these tasks are inseparable. The people (quite literally) won’t buy civilization as an end in itself. We need to
articulate an ideal in service to which civilization is a means. It is the articulation of that ideal which is the only stable
solution to the current political crisis and the first step in constituting a new leadership for humanity.