All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism

In recent years, direct-mail Christianity has extended a new kind of invitation to the Protestant faithful: slick brochures enumerating the social and psychological advantages of church attendance, with no mention whatsoever of spiritual striving, suffering, or faith in God. Does this kind of secularity prevail in mainline Protestant churches? Marsha Witten looks for an answer to this question through an in-depth analysis of preaching on an important New Testament text: the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Witten finds that the transcendent and awesome God of Luther and Calvin, whose image informed early Protestant visions of the relationship between human beings and the divine, has been greatly softened in demeanor in American Protestant churches, with only minor resistance from conservative traditions. As preached from the pulpits of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Southern Baptist Convention, God is a deity whose primary function lies in providing psychological benefits to individual church members: the Parable of the Prodigal Son portrays God as a loving and understanding daddy figure. The focus is not on the challenges that the church could pose to the secular sphere of life. Instead, individuals are encouraged to make the right choices among the secular world’s various offerings, or, as in many Southern Baptist messages, to accept God’s offer of rescue from the “lostness” of secular confusions.

Situating the sermon at the heart of Protestant worship, All Is Forgiven shows how complex rhetorical strategies continue to transform Christian faith and help it survive in a secular world.