Chesterton was half-right: America is a “nation with the soul of a church.” The other half of the truth is that many of our churches lack basic features of historic churchiness: sacraments, liturgical forms, settled creeds, authority. Like America itself, the American church seems a novus ordo seclorum. Our churchy national soul weirdly inhabits a body of peculiar, borderline-heretical actual churches.
In some respects, our unchurchy churchiness is no surprise. We’re Protestant, and Protestants have always been, as Alec Ryrie writes, radicals, lovers, and fighters, restlessly carrying on a centuries-long “open-ended, ill-disciplined argument,” churning out new ideas and rehabilitating old ones with “a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability.” A “self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning,” the Protestant churches have been “one of the engines driving modern history.”
