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The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church by Peter J. Leithart (review)

Evangelical author Peter Leithart urges Protestant denominations to reunite (5). He contends that Protestants are bankrupt when they claim that they are “spiritually united” while empirically divided (1). Civil with each other, many Protestants are nevertheless unable to acknowledge each other’s sacraments and ordination. For Leithart, the church should be a visible, unified society, an alternative to other publics (1), particularly as the world grows more and more secular. To tolerate visible division runs counter to the church’s spiritual destiny in which a divided humanity will be reunited in the life of the Triune God (16). Leithart proposes that the future united church will not hold to absolutely uniform beliefs. But it will prize the unity it has in Christ; thereby, dissenting voices will be reluctant to break from the church (29). The ideal church will be “Bible-saturated” (30). But it will honor the wider catholic tradition as a “treasure” (27), retrieving, not rejecting catholicity (41). It will also be a political church, not because it takes specific political stances, but because it will serve as an alternative public within the wider public, a concrete form of civil society (36). Leithart claims that the proliferation of Protestant groups in the English-speaking world was in part due to the “dissenting brethren” at the Westminster Assembly (1643–1653) who saw no single model of church government prescribed in scripture and who did not want present doctrinal judgments to be binding for the future (61). These dissenters advocated that Christians could co-exist in peace despite their differences (63). But the unintended consequence of this tolerance is a pluralism which reduces the faith into a “shopping mall” for religious consumers. Leithart claims that thereby tolerance increases, but zeal for faith decreases (65). He does not discuss the view that Christian faith remains vital in North America precisely because differences among churches are tolerated and in fact evoke competition between them. In the United States, the assumption grounding this religious pluralism is that there is no one established church. But Leithart challenges this. While the US has no de jure established church, Leithart