Episode 160: The Legacy of J. Irwin Miller with Geoffrey Kabaservice (REWIND)

[00:00:00] and the

[00:00:27] Hello and welcome to Church in Maine, the podcast at the intersection of faith and modern

[00:00:38] life.

[00:00:39] I'm Dennis Sanders your host.

[00:00:41] Church in Maine is a podcast that looks for God in a mist of issues affecting church

[00:00:45] and the largest society.

[00:00:47] You can learn more about the podcast, listen to past episodes, and donate by checking us

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[00:01:05] Well this episode is actually a re-broadcast of an episode from December 2021.

[00:01:10] It's with Jeffrey Cabo-Service, someone that I know very well, known of him over the years.

[00:01:17] He is vice president of political studies at the Niscanon Center, which is a think tank

[00:01:23] in Washington, D.C.

[00:01:26] He's best known, he's an author and one of his books that he's best known is For Is Rule

[00:01:31] and Ruin, The Downfall of moderation and the destruction of the Republican Party.

[00:01:38] In fact that kind of is related to what this episode was all about.

[00:01:44] He got to, this episode is actually kind of talking about Jay Erwin Miller who at one

[00:01:52] time was the head of Cummings Engine.

[00:01:58] But what was also fascinating about him was not only that he was a leader of industry but

[00:02:04] he was also something that is very uncommon these days, a moderate Republican, moderate

[00:02:11] to liberal Republican.

[00:02:13] He was also a mainline Protestant member of the Christian Church disciples of Christ,

[00:02:17] which happens to be my denomination.

[00:02:20] And so this episode is to talk a little bit about Jay Erwin Miller and about kind of

[00:02:26] the downfall of these two or I shouldn't say downfall but maybe the diminishment of these

[00:02:31] two traditions, moderate Republicanism and mainline Protestantism.

[00:02:37] I tend to believe that because of those two traditions in some ways have not as prevalent

[00:02:44] as they once were, that our society is kind of in the mess it is in because of that.

[00:02:52] I don't know if anyone can really prove that but that's kind of where I'm at.

[00:02:59] But I wanted to share this interview that it also comes with some thoughts that I shared

[00:03:04] at the end of that episode.

[00:03:07] But I do want to without further ado, have you listened to my conversation with Jeffrey

[00:03:14] Copper Service?

[00:03:16] Just also to let you know that some new episodes are coming down the pike.

[00:03:22] Those should be coming out next week but otherwise I hope that you're having a good Thanksgiving

[00:03:28] and we'll see you with new episodes hopefully next week.

[00:03:35] Just one quick note, you may be hearing in the podcast that I refer to the podcast as

[00:03:44] Enroute.

[00:03:45] That was actually the name of the podcast before it became Church and Main so if you're

[00:03:50] getting confused why are we hearing this word called Enroute, that's why.

[00:03:55] So without further ado, let's listen to this interview with Jeffrey Copper Service.

[00:04:35] Hello and welcome to Enroute a journey of faith and modern life.

[00:04:41] I am Dennis Sanders your host.

[00:04:44] Welcome, this is the podcast where we explore the who, where, why, what, and how of religion

[00:04:50] and other topics.

[00:04:52] This is episode 64 and I hope that your advent is going well.

[00:04:59] Well I've known Jeffrey Copper Service since we were both writers for David from news site

[00:05:09] from forum.

[00:05:11] These days Jeffrey is the vice president of political studies at the Nascannon Center and also host

[00:05:17] of the Vital Center podcast.

[00:05:20] He is also an author especially of for our purposes the book Rule and Ruin, the downfall

[00:05:28] of moderation and the destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.

[00:05:34] I brought him on the podcast today to talk about the intersection of two important streams

[00:05:39] in 20th century American culture, moderate republicanism and mainline Protestantism.

[00:05:46] Both of these movements drove much of American society at mid century and also shaped

[00:05:53] a lot of post-war America.

[00:05:55] And now both are in a weakened state.

[00:05:58] We will look at what's been lost as these institutions decline and we'll also focus

[00:06:04] on one person where these two streams met.

[00:06:10] Jay Irwin Miller was the CEO of Cummins engine.

[00:06:14] He was a Rockefeller Republican and a member of a mainline denomination, the Christian

[00:06:19] Church Disciples of Christ which so happens to be the denomination.

[00:06:23] I am ordained in a member of.

[00:06:28] If you are someone that is interested in American and political social history, what has changed

[00:06:36] in the ensuing decades, I think that you're going to love this episode.

[00:06:40] Now before we get to the interview just one note, please consider sharing this episode

[00:06:46] on social media.

[00:06:47] If you have an account on Facebook or Twitter, make sure to get the link and share it.

[00:06:55] I really want to get this podcast out to more and more people so please consider sharing

[00:07:00] this episode on social media.

[00:07:03] So now without further ado here is my conversation with Jeffrey Kovacervis.

[00:07:17] Well, thank you for joining me.

[00:07:33] It's good to check with you again.

[00:07:37] It's very nice to be here, does.

[00:07:39] Well, the first thing to talk about in these two subjects of the importance of and the

[00:07:50] history of modern publicism and then also mainline Protestantism.

[00:07:56] These are two things that have been important in my own background.

[00:08:02] Where have you and how historically have those two backgrounds kind of merged in American

[00:08:08] life and both politically and culturally?

[00:08:14] So I've written two books that touch directly on these subject standards.

[00:08:19] The first was the book that I basically made out of my Yale dissertation in history,

[00:08:24] which was called the Guardians, Kingman Brewster His Circle and the Rise of the Liberal

[00:08:28] Establishment.

[00:08:29] Kingman Brewster was president of Yale from 1964 to 1977.

[00:08:34] He then became ambassador to the Court of St. James in Great Britain under Jimmy Carter.

[00:08:38] He was an important figure in that group, the Liberal Establishment which I guess to

[00:08:43] put it most concisely was the successor generation to the wise men that Evan Thomas and Walter

[00:08:49] Isaacson wrote about.

[00:08:51] The almost entirely wasp fairly upper class elites who had created American foreign policy

[00:09:00] and shaped its domestic policy in important ways in the post-World War II era.

[00:09:04] The second book I wrote was called Rule and Ruin, the downfall of moderation and the destruction

[00:09:09] of the Republican Party.

[00:09:11] And that was more specifically about the moderate Republican tradition that used to dominate

[00:09:17] the Republican Party until its displacement by conservatism starting in the 1960s but

[00:09:22] really gathering force from the 1980s and through to the present day.

[00:09:27] And most of the moderate Republicans that I wrote about were in fact mainline Protestants.

[00:09:34] It was not totally important to be a moderate Republican if you weren't a mainline Protestant

[00:09:38] that was fine but that was kind of the perception.

[00:09:42] And again it was sort of related culturally to the dominance of the wasp elite that I've

[00:09:47] written about in my previous book.

[00:09:51] Let's just leave it there and then I'll get into whatever specific questions you want

[00:09:55] to ask.

[00:09:56] Okay.

[00:09:57] Well, one of the things I guess I would want to ask is where do you think maybe to begin

[00:10:05] with talking a little bit about someone that I found just learning about in the last few

[00:10:11] months and that is Jay Irwin Miller.

[00:10:14] He was the CEO of Cummins Engine in Columbus, Indiana.

[00:10:20] He had an outside role in helping that town, especially kind of survive a lot of the

[00:10:27] changes that were taking place in the rust belt.

[00:10:31] And there I also have kind of a personal connection having grown up in the rust belt, having

[00:10:36] grown up in Flint, Michigan which had a very different outcome from Columbus.

[00:10:42] He was a moderate Republican and also Christian Church, this type was a Christ member of which

[00:10:49] is a denomination that I'm from.

[00:10:52] He told me a little bit about how his life kind of reflected these two backgrounds and

[00:11:01] how has that contrasted from leaders of the modern era?

[00:11:07] So, Jay Irwin Miller was a very interesting person.

[00:11:11] It was a privilege of mine to be able to go to his hometown of Columbus, Indiana and

[00:11:16] to have lunch with him and interview him.

[00:11:18] And I kept up with him in the years before his death.

[00:11:22] He was somebody who was from the leading family in that small town.

[00:11:28] His parents were bankers, his grandparents and great grandparents who had been early settlers

[00:11:32] as well as founders of the disciples of Christ Church in that area.

[00:11:38] As was the practice for many upper middle class Protestant families, they sent him east to

[00:11:44] Yale to do his undergraduate work.

[00:11:47] I believe he also went to Oxford to do postgraduate study.

[00:11:52] He served in World War II and then he came back to run the Family Business which was Cummins

[00:11:56] Engine.

[00:11:57] And, I say a family business but it was really not very well established at that point.

[00:12:01] He really built it into this enormous multi-billion dollar global company.

[00:12:09] And so, he had a lot of strength and credibility in American culture as by virtue of being

[00:12:15] one of these really dominant entrepreneurs of the era.

[00:12:19] And he channeled that largely into the interests in culture, in education, and in politics and

[00:12:25] religion.

[00:12:26] So, speaking most directly to the religion question, he was one of the people who was instrumental

[00:12:32] in founding the National Council of Churches in 1950.

[00:12:38] And then I believe he became the first lay president of that organization in 1960 and also

[00:12:44] chair the NCC's Commission on Religion and Race.

[00:12:49] Like many modern Republicans, and especially like many, many moderate Midwestern Republicans,

[00:12:54] he was acutely conscious of the civil rights heritage of the Republican Party.

[00:13:00] Civil rights was a cause for which he fought strongly.

[00:13:04] In fact, he met with John F. Kennedy shortly after the 1960 election to push for the legislation

[00:13:13] that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

[00:13:16] And he also was one of the critical sponsors of the March on Washington at which Martin Luther King

[00:13:21] gave his I have a dream speech.

[00:13:24] So this is somebody who actually is using his political cultural economic power to push the

[00:13:31] cause of civil rights, which he sees as being completely 100% aligned with his religious

[00:13:36] mission that he gets from being a devout member of the Disciples of Christ.

[00:13:41] And looking at his life, one of the things that I started to think about a lot was with

[00:13:50] both of these traditions in mainland Protestantism and modern Republican, is this kind of public

[00:13:58] nature of both of them, that there was a civic part of who they were, the ethos.

[00:14:07] Why do you think that both of these traditions, of course, now are kind of either on the decline

[00:14:11] or non-existent?

[00:14:13] Why do you think that they are not as vibrant as they once were and what has that meant

[00:14:19] to American society?

[00:14:21] Dennis, that's a deep and interesting question.

[00:14:26] I am just going to take a fairly random stab at it.

[00:14:32] If you go back to the formative period for this liberal establishment that I wrote about,

[00:14:38] it was the 1950s.

[00:14:40] And that was a time when like 95% of Americans would tell pollsters that they identified

[00:14:46] as religious.

[00:14:48] Of those about two-thirds were Protestant, I guess a quarter Catholic and maybe four percent.

[00:14:53] Jewish, and that was sort of the tri-part melting pot that people talked about back in those

[00:14:58] days.

[00:14:59] There was that famous Wil Herberg sociological study for 1955 called Protestant Catholic Jew.

[00:15:06] And that was a time when the mainline denominations were growing by leaps and bounds, sort of in connection

[00:15:12] with the move to the suburbs.

[00:15:14] But also because there was a great coming together around the American way of life, which was

[00:15:19] also a common religion in Herberg's terminology.

[00:15:23] Essentially ideas, rights, symbols that people looked to provide a sense of national unity.

[00:15:30] And that was very different from the kind of more radical revisionist energies of the

[00:15:37] 1930s.

[00:15:39] And one of the things that Americans are trying to do in the 1950s in both the establishment

[00:15:43] sense and also in the religious sense is to reestablish a sense of order that had been

[00:15:47] disrupted by the depression and the world war that had really shaken so many assumptions

[00:15:54] about human nature as well as American society.

[00:15:59] And religion isn't a necessary component to reordering society in that sense, but it

[00:16:06] is something that Americans historically had identified.

[00:16:10] I remember that when I was a graduating senior at Yale, we at commencement sang the traditional

[00:16:18] Yale commencement hymn, which if I remember correctly is called the O God beneath thy

[00:16:23] guiding hand.

[00:16:25] And sort of secondary because our exiled fathers crossed the sea.

[00:16:29] This has sort of been keeping with the whole Puritan and pilgrim heritage.

[00:16:33] And there's a line in there which is laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God came with those

[00:16:37] exiles or the waves.

[00:16:40] And it was that sense of order provided by religion that was so central to the American's idea

[00:16:45] of ordered liberty.

[00:16:47] And specifically religion provided, I guess you would say, restraints on the energy of

[00:16:54] the frontier, on the energy of individualism, the otherwise would have torn the nation apart.

[00:16:59] King Medruz for the subject of my first book was really quite taken by the fact that his

[00:17:02] Harvard Law degree and all Harvard Law degrees came with the motto about those wise restraints

[00:17:11] that make men free.

[00:17:14] And again, there was some sense that Protestantism specifically was the culture that channeled

[00:17:21] America's energies into productive paths and that absent that kind of restraint you would

[00:17:29] have an unruly and arctic society that ultimately might collapse.

[00:17:34] And that was also a sense that people like J. R. Miller had of themselves and their role

[00:17:39] as members of an establishment.

[00:17:42] And as Miller put it to me in one of our discussions, he's an engine maker.

[00:17:48] And engines can overheat and explode in some cases.

[00:17:53] And the thing that prevents them from overheating is what's called a governor.

[00:17:58] And Miller saw that as his role.

[00:18:01] He is part of the governor or the governing group that to some extent tamp down on the

[00:18:07] fissiporous energies of society that keep it moving forward rather than exploding.

[00:18:16] And it sounds like in our own modern days, we don't have those governors anymore.

[00:18:25] Well, you and I had talked once by the time about a review I wrote of Joseph

[00:18:31] Bottoms book An Anxious Age, which is his meditation on post Protestant America.

[00:18:39] And the analogy that he used, which I think is a very good one, is that Protestantism

[00:18:45] used to define American culture.

[00:18:48] It was the great cultural Mississippi running through the nation.

[00:18:53] And now that river appears to have run dry.

[00:18:57] But in fact, part of Bottoms claim, which was really sort of ahead of the time for 2014

[00:19:03] when he wrote the book, was that those essentially religious energies have been diverted into other

[00:19:08] channels given the decline of mainstream Protestantism.

[00:19:14] And he specifically thought that the people whose parents would have been the Discapalians,

[00:19:19] the Spatterians, Methodists, Baptists were going to college and then coming out and becoming

[00:19:27] secular and channeling those essentially religious impulses into social progress.

[00:19:37] And the kind of social gospel first articulated by Walter Rauschenbush.

[00:19:41] And political correctness he identified as a form of religion.

[00:19:46] And therefore he was one of the first, again to the four, to say that the energies released

[00:19:50] last year by the Black Lives Matter movement, the kind of racial and Ideritarian re-evaluation

[00:19:56] it went on had much akin to a kind of religiosity.

[00:20:02] And I've had a lot of people push back on me when I repeat things like that because they

[00:20:06] think that being identified as being moved by religious impulses is a way of diminishing

[00:20:11] their commitment and sincerity.

[00:20:14] But I think there actually is something to it.

[00:20:16] Oh, there's a lot to that.

[00:20:19] I think religion obviously if you're thinking it's just that it's about belief in God that

[00:20:26] might be offensive to some but religion also can be something that is the thing that orders

[00:20:32] our lives and that can really guide who we are and what we do.

[00:20:38] And as you even said earlier about a governor, it really kind of directs you.

[00:20:45] So and I do think that there is a lot of that when you see that in some of those social

[00:20:50] movements what has been kind of called quote unquote, woke culture.

[00:20:56] There is a religiosity to it that is very similar to what you would see in a church.

[00:21:05] There is sin.

[00:21:08] There is confession there isn't yet that much redemption yet, but those parts are there

[00:21:15] very much there.

[00:21:17] Yeah, I agree.

[00:21:20] I got to admit I am troubled when I think about this movement or religion or whatever

[00:21:25] you want to call it because the model that I have in mind for social progress is specifically

[00:21:31] the civil rights movement of the fiendies in 60s.

[00:21:35] And of course this moderate republicanism that I'm talking about, this liberal establishment

[00:21:41] I'm talking about did support the civil rights movement very strongly as well.

[00:21:47] But so to ultimately did society, the civil rights arguments of people like Martin Luther King

[00:21:51] ultimately proved to be very persuasive.

[00:21:54] And when one tries to think about what made the civil rights movement successful, you identify

[00:22:00] a number of actors that don't seem to be present in today's politics or today's society

[00:22:05] for that matter.

[00:22:06] One of them obviously is that the civil rights cause was deeply important in both parties

[00:22:15] and arguably stronger in the republican party precisely because it identified itself as

[00:22:20] the party of Lincoln that was founded to free the slaves and bring equality to Americans

[00:22:26] as against the Southern aristocracy.

[00:22:31] But another reason is that the civil rights movement operated on multiple levels.

[00:22:37] You'll often see essays nowadays about Martin Luther King as a radical and it's true.

[00:22:41] The idea in the early 1960s of a society in which black people participated equally was

[00:22:48] a radical idea.

[00:22:49] It represented a huge change in society.

[00:22:52] But at the same time, Martin Luther King especially was drawing upon biblical themes, biblical morality,

[00:23:01] channeling the profits.

[00:23:04] In that sense, civil rights movement was quite conservative.

[00:23:07] It was also deeply grounded in America's most treasured ideals of the constitution and

[00:23:14] the declaration of independence.

[00:23:17] And also at the same time, this civil rights movement was moderate because it was actively

[00:23:20] engaged and compromised.

[00:23:22] There was a maximalist set of demands that people within the movement put forward and those

[00:23:26] were mediated by the leadership negotiated with leaders in both parties and ultimately

[00:23:31] what came out was something that fell short of maximumism but still as I said, represented

[00:23:35] a radical advance.

[00:23:37] I don't see the current drive for racial equality operating on all three of those levels.

[00:23:42] I see mostly radicalism and if anything, it's a kind of radicalism that is antagonistic

[00:23:47] to American history rather than presenting itself as a logical outgrowth of our history

[00:23:52] and ideals.

[00:23:54] Neither do I see the kind of bipartisan consensus that ultimately came together to support the

[00:23:59] passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[00:24:04] If anything, there is the kind of division that is being operated into and it's a division

[00:24:10] that also in some sense involves religion since so much of the evangelical Christian

[00:24:15] vote is so enthusiastic for Donald Trump.

[00:24:19] Yeah, I think one of the things that we tend to forget and I remember reading this from

[00:24:26] one of Taylor Branch's books on the Civil Rights Movement, it was specifically about Martin

[00:24:30] Lerking, in many ways he was actually steeped in mainline Protestantism.

[00:24:36] Obviously, he came from the Black Church that is we know but you know, he went to an American

[00:24:44] Baptist seminary and he was very much steeped in that culture in a way that he, I think,

[00:24:52] also made him who he was.

[00:24:54] I think that also then in turn shaped the Civil Rights Movement in a way that was, as you

[00:25:00] said, geared towards compromise, that was believed in some sense of radicalism but yet it

[00:25:07] was also tempered and hooked up to really appealing towards helping America live up to its

[00:25:18] ideals where it seems like this current movement isn't really about that.

[00:25:23] It's not connected about trying to help the nation live up to its ideals instead of in

[00:25:29] some ways just basically condemning the nation for past problems and in some ways not having

[00:25:37] faith that it can, as a nation we can be more than our past.

[00:25:44] That's very well put Dennis.

[00:25:46] Martin Lerking again got his PhD in Divinity from Boston University and he was deeply versed

[00:25:54] in all of the sophisticated theological discussions of the day.

[00:25:58] Curiously so too, where most of the leaders of the liberal establishment that I was looking

[00:26:02] at, make George Bundy for example who was dean of the arts and sciences at Harvard University

[00:26:11] in the 1950s then became national security advisor to John of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson

[00:26:16] then became head of the Ford Foundation, a sort of critically important person in the

[00:26:20] establishment but he would recite a Reinhold Never at the drop of a hat.

[00:26:26] And indeed many of the leaders of that era thought it was deeply important that they

[00:26:29] grapple with the moral conundrums that World War II had presented to the kind of benign,

[00:26:35] progressive view of human nature that had prevailed before the war.

[00:26:39] And I just don't sense, it's not just that I don't sense that kind of theological

[00:26:44] sophistication coming from much of the discussion on the left where which I feel is really marginalizing

[00:26:50] religion as the country becomes more secular.

[00:26:52] I just don't think there's an interest in that kind of dialogue.

[00:26:55] And this is leaving the religious dialogue almost entirely to conservatives of a pretty

[00:27:00] radical kind like the intergalists such as Adrian Vermeule at Harvard.

[00:27:05] And I think this ultimately could end badly for all sides.

[00:27:11] And one of the other points that John the Bottom made in his book Anxious Age was that

[00:27:17] the decline of religion could go very badly for the left in the sense that most of our

[00:27:23] liberal beliefs and principles and norms are based on Christian metaphysics.

[00:27:31] And the belief that you can preserve Christian ethics without Christian metaphysics may be

[00:27:36] doomed.

[00:27:37] We don't know the answer to that.

[00:27:38] Well, I believe it was Ross Dahlford that has said that if you don't like the Christian

[00:27:45] right, wait until you meet the post Christian right that having a conservative that is kind

[00:27:54] of not really Christian in many ways or post Christian is going to be far more dangerous

[00:28:01] than one that is in some ways I think tempered by by religion in some ways from doing and

[00:28:08] being kind of letting kind of their feelings fly or their were sides will be shown out

[00:28:16] without being kind of tempered back.

[00:28:20] Emily Eakins at Kato has actually done a number of interesting polls and studies of the

[00:28:26] split between Christian trumpists and post Christian trumpists to use your terminology.

[00:28:32] And the post Christian trumpists are much more radical on any dimension you care to look

[00:28:36] at whether it's a lack of sympathy and empathy for migrants in cages, whether it's a belief

[00:28:42] in the need to punish the opponents of trump, whether it's a belief that the opponents of

[00:28:50] trump politically are not just wrong or mistaken but in fact evil and maybe a need of being

[00:28:55] destroyed.

[00:28:56] Yeah, and you know, the thing about that is that if you are someone that goes to church

[00:29:03] you're going to hear things about a God of love or that you should love your neighbor.

[00:29:08] All of those things that you will hear and you will take those to heart so that kind

[00:29:13] of kind of makes you not as radical in some ways that you start to care for other people

[00:29:21] because that's what you've learned.

[00:29:23] But if you're someone like a post Christian trumpist that maybe goes to church once a month

[00:29:29] or has never gone to church, there's nothing there to hold you back.

[00:29:35] You're just kind of taking all this in and anyone that is different from you is not simply

[00:29:42] wrong but is someone that's evil and basically needs to be challenged if not eradicated.

[00:29:50] Yeah, it's something I think we both worry about.

[00:29:54] It is something that is incredibly worried.

[00:29:58] One of the things though that I've been wondering between and looking at both liberals and conservatives

[00:30:05] today or conservatives and progressives today is that there seems to be a lack of a civic

[00:30:12] nature.

[00:30:13] And obviously that's showing itself on the right in not putting a whole lot of support

[00:30:20] in public services and kind of cutting of those services lower taxes seems to be the only

[00:30:28] thing that matters.

[00:30:30] But it seems to also be found on the left and not as much on the role of government as is

[00:30:37] the role of civic society.

[00:30:41] To go back to Jay or Miller he seemed to be someone that was obviously believed that

[00:30:45] government had a role in our society but he was also involved in other institutions

[00:30:51] that were also beneficial for society whether that was the arts or education.

[00:30:58] Obviously, different civil rights organizations, church organizations.

[00:31:05] I mean, I guess I'm just wondering do you feel that we have lost this sense of civic

[00:31:12] nature of our society that we may have had 30, 40 years ago?

[00:31:21] So one of the most depressing books that I read in the past year was a book with a fairly

[00:31:26] optimistic title, The Upswing.

[00:31:29] And this is by the eminent Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam with the assistance of I think

[00:31:34] Shaylin Romney Garrett.

[00:31:36] And it starts out with the description of the political scene during the Guilded Age

[00:31:40] in late 19th century America.

[00:31:42] And this was a time much like ours in the sense that there was very little social trust.

[00:31:48] There were bitter social divisions.

[00:31:51] There were very few national institutions or individuals in which people believed it

[00:31:56] was time when America really seemed to be coming apart.

[00:32:00] And then what actually happened over the next 70 years or so was the progressive movement

[00:32:07] which directed people's attentions into reforming and improving America's institutions.

[00:32:14] And you had a kind of increase in social trust that was shaken by the Great Depression

[00:32:19] but strengthened by World War II.

[00:32:21] And emerging into this period in the 1950s and 60s when Americans really did express

[00:32:26] high levels of trust in the government, in the institutions that serve them, and in each

[00:32:33] other.

[00:32:34] Obviously, this was an imperfect time.

[00:32:36] There was still Jim Crow segregation in the South.

[00:32:38] You can't overlook that.

[00:32:40] And it also was a time when the civil rights movement was growing by leaps and bounds.

[00:32:44] And you had incredible African-American achievement in all manner of areas of American life that

[00:32:51] was also being recognized at that time.

[00:32:54] Just to give an example that I've been thinking about lately, in the early 1950s.

[00:33:00] To judge by testing the best high school in Washington DC was Dunbar High School which

[00:33:04] was the country's oldest public high school for African-Americans.

[00:33:10] And there are reasons why it was better perhaps than typical white schools in Washington DC

[00:33:15] at that time because so many African-American PhDs were barred from other areas of American

[00:33:22] life.

[00:33:23] They had to teach at high schools rather than at universities or in businesses.

[00:33:28] And that meant that the students at Dunbar High School were just given this incredible

[00:33:31] level of education.

[00:33:32] And a lot of them went on to do tremendous things.

[00:33:35] I mean, this is the school that actually produced first African-American member of a presidential

[00:33:41] cabinet.

[00:33:42] It's first Attorney General, one of the great civil rights leaders in Walter Houston.

[00:33:47] I mean, it was just an incredible school.

[00:33:49] Now, you can't say that the achievement of that school makes up for it anyway, the segregation

[00:33:56] of the era.

[00:33:57] But it was time when actually African-Americans were deeply optimistic about the future.

[00:34:02] And their own chances for progress and equality.

[00:34:05] And this movement of social trust and national unity in coming together and optimism about

[00:34:09] the future peaks in the late 1960s, and it has been all downhill ever since.

[00:34:14] And there are political reasons.

[00:34:15] You can ascribe to that certainly.

[00:34:17] There are economic reasons.

[00:34:18] You can ascribe to that such as the stagnation of working class wages, the disappearance

[00:34:23] of jobs, particularly the kind that didn't require college educations.

[00:34:29] But there's also a political dimension in the sense that the Republican Party really

[00:34:32] did attack a lot of America's belief in government and its possibilities.

[00:34:36] And Americans also fell away from a belief in collective effort and civic activism, which

[00:34:42] is deeply connected with the decline of mainline Protestantism.

[00:34:47] Some of the old enthusiasm for mainline Protestantism, particularly the 1950s, had a bit of a conformist

[00:34:54] aspect to it, maybe even a socially coercive element.

[00:34:57] Used to see signs and businesses that would say it's good business to go to church.

[00:35:02] People don't really believe that anymore.

[00:35:04] But whatever the reason the race dealt was in large part of this kind of national unity,

[00:35:10] the sense that we could overcome our problems, a can do sense that America can solve any problem

[00:35:15] that's put before it.

[00:35:17] And we really have lost that as we have lost that mainline Protestant and mainline Catholic

[00:35:24] and mainline Jewish participation.

[00:35:27] And the problem with the book, The Upswing is that the authors don't really give you

[00:35:31] any indication as to how we're going to reverse this euker, this soaring upwards throughout

[00:35:37] the 20th century.

[00:35:39] It's cresting in the 60s and then it's downfall to where we are today.

[00:35:42] How do we get out of this second-gilded age?

[00:35:45] Some of it could be through policy, but I think some of it is going to be through the

[00:35:49] conscious rededication to the institutions of our collective civic life, which definitely

[00:35:56] could include churches and religion.

[00:35:58] But it seems that for that to happen, people have to really want to put the time into

[00:36:05] that.

[00:36:07] And I worry that people aren't willing to do that just because I follow a lot of center

[00:36:13] right politics.

[00:36:15] One of the things that I tend to think this has to happen is that you, the only reason

[00:36:23] the only way that you can pull back from, I think, Trumpism is by having a counterforce

[00:36:30] within the party and having enough people and enough institutional fortitude that can

[00:36:40] kind of present an alternative, present a better way of being, of what it means to be

[00:36:49] a Republican.

[00:36:51] And I don't know if people are willing to put in that time.

[00:36:53] I mean, I think there's a lot of a sense that for all of that change to happen, it has

[00:36:59] to change, it has to come out from the outside.

[00:37:02] And I don't know if that always will work.

[00:37:04] It feels like there has to be this kind of willingness to get involved in the organization

[00:37:10] in the institution of the Republican Party to change the party.

[00:37:14] Maybe I'm being polyannish in that way.

[00:37:18] But it just, I think the way that I hear people saying it is basically if they can be,

[00:37:25] if we can outvote the current Republicans that will solve things.

[00:37:29] And I don't think that it will necessarily.

[00:37:32] I mean, you and I, Dennis are disadvantaged by being stuck in our time right now.

[00:37:37] It's the tail end of 2021.

[00:37:40] I can make informed predictions about the Republicans taking back the House of Representatives

[00:37:45] in 2022 and what might follow from that.

[00:37:48] But the reality is we don't know what's going to happen.

[00:37:53] So personally, I have become very pessimistic about the probabilities of reforming the Republican

[00:37:59] Party from within.

[00:38:01] Even though this is a course of action, I myself have counseled for low these many years.

[00:38:06] I think the reality is that Democrats cannot deliver a defeat to the Republican Party

[00:38:11] on the scale that would actually cause the party to reform and redirect itself even back

[00:38:16] towards its own traditions and heritage.

[00:38:20] In 2020, you have probably the most unpopular president seeking renomination throughout

[00:38:26] the entire time that we've actually done polling.

[00:38:28] And Republicans actually gained in the House and became pretty darn close to having Trump win

[00:38:35] re-election.

[00:38:36] I mean, the reality is that just by virtue of the constitutional system that we have inherited,

[00:38:42] it's going to be very difficult for Democrats to overcome the Republican's structural advantage

[00:38:46] in these underpopulated states which give them a better chance and a majority in the Senate

[00:38:51] with every election that passes.

[00:38:53] And the same thing is true, Jerry Mantering at the level of the states and the whole nature

[00:38:58] of the Electoral College.

[00:39:00] So I am pessimistic on that score.

[00:39:03] On the other hand, if you are at all a student of America's history, you realize that change

[00:39:10] comes from places that could not have really been predicted at all.

[00:39:16] So although I don't actually study religion in American history specifically, I was actually

[00:39:22] writing about two years ago a book about the life of women in a particular community

[00:39:29] in upstate New York.

[00:39:31] And it happened to be in that part of sort of central and western upstate New York that

[00:39:36] Whitney Cross in a book in the 1950s called The Burned Over District.

[00:39:41] And this is what cross called the psychic highway of American life.

[00:39:45] And what you have there during the second great awakening of the early to mid-19th century

[00:39:49] was the creation of whole new religions, the Church of the Latter-day Saints in Palmyra

[00:39:55] better known as the Mormon Church.

[00:39:57] The shakers were active there.

[00:39:58] And Miller writes, I want to say we are created in upstate New York at that time from which

[00:40:02] we got the Jehovah's Witnesses and 7th Day Adventism.

[00:40:05] You also had this spiritualist movement being very active there.

[00:40:10] And also just utopians like let's say the four-yearists or the Anitus Society.

[00:40:16] And so although we've mostly been discussing religion as a conservative force, obviously

[00:40:20] it also has within it the potential for radicalism.

[00:40:25] And it could be that the scale of our problems seems so insurmountable through politics that

[00:40:29] people are going to channel the desperate need to reform into other dimensions, one of

[00:40:34] which could conceivably be a religion.

[00:40:36] So I try not to be super pessimistic.

[00:40:39] You know, I am a pessimist by nature and looking at American history, I see our country declining.

[00:40:46] I don't know if you're familiar with Rudyard Kipling's poem Recessional.

[00:40:50] He was asked to write a poem in the Great National Celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond

[00:40:54] Jubilee in 1897.

[00:40:55] And instead of a celebratory poem, he came out with essentially a vision of the British

[00:41:01] Empire going the ways of fallen empires of past human history.

[00:41:06] And it's a great poem and it directly connects the British people's lack of faith in God

[00:41:12] to the decline of their empire.

[00:41:14] And you know, I used to know it by heart, I still remember parts of it.

[00:41:19] Far called our Navy's Meltaway on Dunin, Hedland sinks the fire.

[00:41:23] So all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.

[00:41:27] Judge of the nation's sparrass yet, lest we forget, lest we forget.

[00:41:32] And you know, I really do feel that America's decline comes from forgetting what spurred us

[00:41:38] to greatness in the first place.

[00:41:40] In the Republican Party, that means forgetting what it meant to be a Republican to be the

[00:41:45] standard bearer of the heritage of Lincoln and the Union that won the Civil War.

[00:41:51] To forget the legacy of the civil rights movement across the centuries.

[00:41:56] And I do feel that that's also connected with the falling away from religion, but I'm

[00:41:59] not pessimistic about the possibility for renewal yet.

[00:42:05] So I think what do you think it's going to be?

[00:42:11] What do this would we, as you said, we can't know what's going to happen.

[00:42:17] Anything can happen in the next few years.

[00:42:21] But we can at least have some kind of contours of what's possible in the next few years.

[00:42:30] And so where do you think we as a society are headed?

[00:42:39] And where do you think there are those nuggets of renewal of civic life that you may find

[00:42:48] coming from religion or coming from politics, maybe cultural?

[00:42:56] Probably it would be the better word.

[00:43:02] I'm not optimistic about what's happening at the national level and the political level.

[00:43:06] You have a Republican Party that is going in an ever more radical and even authoritarian

[00:43:10] direction under Trump but not entirely due to Trump.

[00:43:14] At the same time, you have a Democratic Party where the leading faction is a progressive

[00:43:18] movement that is going way out over its skis in terms of what the American people are prepared

[00:43:23] to accept even lying inside some other problematic aspects of it in terms of its post-liberalism

[00:43:31] and its post-racial liberalism.

[00:43:33] So if you follow that line of argument long enough, you get to civil war and nothing good

[00:43:38] comes from that.

[00:43:39] But if you're looking for optimism or at least encouraging signs, I think the most encouraging

[00:43:46] are to be found at the local level.

[00:43:48] If the upswing was the most pessimistic book I've read in the last few years, one of

[00:43:51] the most optimistic is the book by James and Deborah Fowlows called Artowns which is

[00:43:57] a record of their travels in their spiffy little small plane across the United States

[00:44:03] going to places that don't usually make the news.

[00:44:07] They're not polyenish about it.

[00:44:10] They see the decline of industry in many of these small towns they see, the decline of local news,

[00:44:17] the way in which social media is making people crazy.

[00:44:21] But if there's anywhere in America where people of disparate views can come together to create

[00:44:25] progress, it is at the local level.

[00:44:28] That's where your partisan affiliation makes the least difference if you're trying to

[00:44:32] solve something even as mundane as a pothole or as profound in the way is how do we regenerate

[00:44:39] this town which has fallen upon hard times.

[00:44:42] And I think religion has a very important role to play there and I think small institutions

[00:44:47] of all kinds have a profound importance, small churches such as your own.

[00:44:54] People coming together and willing to see even people within the disagree politically

[00:44:59] as allies at least on a particular cause and a willingness to communicate with each other

[00:45:03] in these smaller forums out of the glare of social media and the anger and frustration

[00:45:10] and division that come with channeling the national dialogue into our own local dialogues.

[00:45:16] If we can create space sort of bubble let's say in which people can at least temporarily

[00:45:22] enter into and talk with each other as human beings then I think that's where the possibility

[00:45:27] of national regeneration exists.

[00:45:31] Going back to what you talked about earlier in how basically the left have kind of gone

[00:45:40] into this, have moved away from faith but they've channeled that faith into social issues.

[00:45:49] On the other side we've kind of seen religion kind of change and with the rise of the people

[00:46:00] by the interglots such as Adrian Vermeule.

[00:46:06] What do you think is the award of that movement and it is a movement within the American right

[00:46:12] that seems to want, I'd have obviously in some ways they want religion to have a public role

[00:46:20] but not in the way that you or I would envision it.

[00:46:25] It seems to be a much darker way of having religion be a force in society.

[00:46:33] So I'm in Florida and the national conservatism second big national conference happened in Orlando

[00:46:41] just about a month ago and clearly the intellectual energy on that new right is coming from

[00:46:52] the interglists and these kind of very orthodox, radically orthodox Christians you might say.

[00:47:00] Adrian Vermeule obviously would be one of them so too what brought a dryer who took a sort of

[00:47:06] hedgera to Hungary to see his vision of the good society. So too with people like Patrick Deneen

[00:47:14] who's one of the most prominent critics of the liberal order so too with people let's say

[00:47:20] who are a bit more obscure like Gladden Pappin. These are the people who I think have a lot of

[00:47:27] poll in American culture and things seem to be going their way as people become disillusioned

[00:47:33] with what the liberal order seems to have wrought. You know to put in a brief plug for my employer

[00:47:39] than a scanning center we have started the state capacity project to complement our open society

[00:47:44] project. The open society project is essentially a defense of liberal democracy. The state capacity

[00:47:49] project is the defense of liberal democracies through strengthening governance performance if

[00:47:54] you want to put it that way because what we've seen in the wake of the global financial crisis

[00:47:58] of 2007 to 2008 is that when our ability the ability of liberal democracies to

[00:48:06] provide a decent standard of living for its citizens comes into question. That's when you get

[00:48:11] the rise of populism, nationalism, ethnic chauvinism all of these other sort of forces on the right

[00:48:18] and ultimately one of the places that people look for a reordering of society along more just lines

[00:48:24] will be something like integralism. You know, integralists make a number of

[00:48:29] trenchant criticisms of liberal order. There is no doubt that there is atomism in our communities.

[00:48:35] There's no doubt that Americans are leading unhappier lives than their parents in many cases.

[00:48:41] You know a lot of commentators like to poke fun at the younger generation who don't seem

[00:48:45] to be able to date or have sex or marry in the same proportions as their parents but you know

[00:48:51] this is actually a real societal problem. This is a problem that if you actually looked at

[00:48:54] a society in the past, you could say wow that's not going to end well at all. So the question is

[00:49:00] can these problems be addressed within the liberal order or do we need an alternative to that

[00:49:05] liberal order? When I read the interglists when I hear them, I cannot feel that their prospect of

[00:49:12] creating a hungry in America, creating a hungry of America or trying to return to the middle ages.

[00:49:18] Number one can succeed or number two would actually result in a society in which anyone

[00:49:23] who's currently in America would really want to live. I admire the architecture that the

[00:49:28] Austrian Hungarian Empire created in Budapest but also if you're opening your eye, it's

[00:49:33] going to help to notice that as a poor society and that it's lack of liberalism and democracy is

[00:49:38] actually part of what creates its poverty. And you know to actually follow these kind of authoritarian

[00:49:47] visions put forward by these post liberals of both the left and the right. I think would only

[00:49:52] lead to disaster and no one would actually say that this was an achievement of Utopia but you know

[00:49:58] at the same time it's incumbent on those who are defending the established liberal order to

[00:50:03] acknowledge criticisms where they're valid and try to improve them in well ways we can.

[00:50:09] And I think that's the project that you know my center and others are trying to advance

[00:50:17] I happen to be on the center right. I have a lot of criticisms about the Republican party.

[00:50:22] I feel it's not my role so much to criticize the Democrats that should come from within in a sense

[00:50:27] but at the same time you know they need to realize if they do not actually reform voting rights

[00:50:32] disaster looms, if they do not do a better job of responding to the America people's concerns about

[00:50:37] crime and inflation immigration disaster also looms. So you know I think that essentially

[00:50:45] totalitarian visions whether of religion or of secular ideologies they they back in most strongly

[00:50:54] when the liberal order is faltering and failing. And if we are to forestall those dystopias then it's

[00:51:00] up to us to try to strengthen the liberal order here now while we can. Yeah I have I know that

[00:51:06] there has been some talk about you know these love of the Middle Ages and how wonderful that was but

[00:51:12] I like my antibiotics so you know I don't think that that was a great time for people.

[00:51:20] I yeah there's some kind of interesting weirdness about that and but it also again leaves me to

[00:51:28] go back to what we've been talking about with Miller and some other people is that they truly

[00:51:35] believed in in state capacity and the belief that government had to perform well.

[00:51:43] And it seems like that is lost especially on the center right that we've become so obsessed with

[00:51:54] limited government small government and not to say that's a bad concept I think the

[00:51:58] there is some good in that but it's become such a overwhelming concern that we no longer seem to

[00:52:05] be interested in how well government performs and I think that that was that example definitely came

[00:52:13] out during the coronavirus pandemic and that there have been many examples where the government

[00:52:21] didn't work well. And you know there are lots of reasons why that happened some of it you

[00:52:28] can go down it comes down to investment that hasn't been we haven't really focused a lot on

[00:52:35] investment but it seems like we've lost that sense on the center right for the importance of state

[00:52:41] capacity that you don't have to be a believer in quote unquote big government to believe that

[00:52:45] the government we have has to operate well for it for for it to function and for people to

[00:52:53] continue to believe in deliver order. Yeah there's a lot in their dentist that we can't address

[00:53:00] in the remaining few minutes we have. I know but you know let me let me just talk about Irwin Miller

[00:53:05] because I did know him pretty well and Columbus Indiana if you've ever been there is a pretty small

[00:53:13] town I doubt if even now it has more than 50,000 people there and you would think that it's really

[00:53:21] too small and probably too isolated of town to actually be the headquarters of a world spanning

[00:53:30] major corporation but it's there largely because that was the wish of Irwin Miller

[00:53:38] and he felt that he would betray the betraying the citizens of his town and even to some extent his

[00:53:45] family that had settled there if he were to allow the company to be moved.

[00:53:49] Irwin Miller matered in Greek in college and he used to read the New Testament in its original

[00:53:56] Greek while he well not while but shortly after he would play his Stradivarius Violet. I mean

[00:54:02] he was an unusual guy but he also read Tacitus and often would quote from him and I particularly

[00:54:09] remember that he would say that the good life is one lived in praiseworthy competition with

[00:54:14] one's ancestors and you know he wanted to live up to the model they had set but also to

[00:54:22] advance it and he felt that was also the same way that we ought to approach patriotism. Patriotism is not

[00:54:29] resisting change it's not just repeating what had worked in the past or wrap in the flag around you

[00:54:36] but saying that you know you want to accomplish something in your time that is comparable

[00:54:41] to the accomplishments of your ancestors in their time. But also then at the same time he realized

[00:54:48] you know in the 1950s it's fine you actually have this big company going in common engine in

[00:54:54] Indiana but ultimately this is really too small a place to get world-class talent if you're just

[00:54:59] going to let it be that ordinary small town so through his company foundation he supported

[00:55:07] great schools he brought in great teachers small over the country. He had the city and county

[00:55:14] agencies hire the best architects in the entire world to design the buildings in this little town.

[00:55:20] Yes that's that he did pay their fees but you know it's like that's why you actually will find some

[00:55:26] of the world's greatest mid-century architects represented in this tiny little place

[00:55:30] of Columbus Indiana and nowhere else in the world practically. This is why he supported

[00:55:36] civil rights you know partly because the bible said that was the way to do in American democracy

[00:55:41] it but he also believed that civil rights was actually good for the American economy that in fact

[00:55:45] it was you know kind of a crime against the republicans belief in capitalism if you let talented

[00:55:51] people lapse for no better reason than senseless discrimination. And you know he really also did

[00:55:59] do what he could to look into the future and to make the changes now that people a hundred years

[00:56:05] from now would feel were the best changes to make. We're all imperfect when it comes looking into

[00:56:11] the future but you know we can be guided both by our sense of what's needed in the here and now

[00:56:18] and also by our sense of what worked in the past and I suppose that's also where religion comes in

[00:56:23] religion that is best is calling us to be our best selves and to do the difficult thing

[00:56:28] not the easy thing religion shouldn't flatter our prejudices it's challenged them

[00:56:32] it should encourage us to look beyond the present moment and I think that's ultimately where

[00:56:38] you know I hope to see a union of politics and religion in that kind of looking beyond something better

[00:56:46] and I think that's a good way to end which is on a sense of hope even though things do look dark

[00:56:52] right now and I will be honest it is dark there is still hope and so that's about all we can do

[00:57:00] and you give me hope to Dennis. No thank you thank you and thanks you for taking the time to

[00:57:06] talk to me today Jeffrey it was a pleasure all right take care bye

[00:57:23] you

[00:57:29] You know, sometimes you really don't know what has been lost until it's gone.

[00:57:54] Maynorn Protestantism and moderate republicanism have been maligned over the past decades for not being clear on what they stood for.

[00:58:02] Sometimes that criticism was for good reason, but I think most of the time that criticism was unfair.

[00:58:09] As a life of J. O'Rourke Miller shows these two traditions basically built 20th century America.

[00:58:18] Miller was able to support his hometown. He invested in his hometown of Columbus, Indiana at a time when other cities in the respelte were left to wither on the vine.

[00:58:33] When you look at Miller and also these two traditions from the early of 20th century from our standpoint, it's hard not to look around and see the poverty of our present age.

[00:58:47] The institutions that were built decades ago are now failing. And we're seeing the rise of illiberal movements that could threaten the very nature of America itself.

[00:59:02] There is a temptation to say it would be nice if we could go back to that era, that era when these two traditions were still strong,

[00:59:13] when there were men like J. O'Rourke Miller who saw that took their religion and their politics seriously, but the reality is we can't go back.

[00:59:27] The past is meant to be a teacher, not a place to return. And the past is there to teach us how to build and rebuild institutions for a new day in time.

[00:59:43] But can we build new sex within religion or new political parties in a time that we can challenge those forces on the left and the right, both Mata and the woke?

[00:59:59] I don't know.

[01:00:02] But I do know is that we can mourn the past and we can also use it as fuel to power us in this day and age because we need all the help that we can get.

[01:00:14] The fight is on to create lasting institutions that can benefit society well into the 22nd century, and we have to do it soon.

[01:00:26] Before authoritarian leaders sink their poisons and roots into American society.

[01:00:33] Mainline Protestantism and modern republicanism may not make a comeback, and they may not even continue or may not return in the form of they once were.

[01:00:45] But I do hope that they can continue to teach us how to be a better society.

[01:00:51] And I am so thankful for Jeffrey for reminding me about the value of these two traditions.