ON CULTURAL PROTESTANTISM
How often the Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism - by which cultural Protestantism is meant - is itself an expression of cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate. Not all though many of these antiliberals show a greater concern for conserving the cosmological and biological notions of older cultures than for the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The test of loyalty to him is found in the acceptance of old cultural ideas about the manner of creation and the earth's destruction. More significant is the fact that the mores they associate with Christ have at least as little relation to the New Testament and as much connection with social custom as have those of their opponents. The movement that identifies obedience to Jesus Christ with the maintenance of early American social organization, is a type of cultural Christianity; though the culture it seeks to conserve differs from that which its rivals honor. The same thing is true of the Marxist-Christian criticism of the "bourgeous Christianity" of democratic and individualistic liberalism. Again, Roman Catholic reaction against the Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems often to be animated by a desire to return to the culture of the thirteenth; to the religious, economic, and political institutions and to the philosophical ideas of another civilization than ours. In so far as the contemporary attack on Culture-Protestantism is carried on in this way, it is a family quarrel between folk who are in essential agreement on the main point; namely, that Christ is the Christ of culture, and that man's greatest task is to maintain his best culture.
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 1951