Pietisms: Old and New

As with so many “isms” the root word often signifies a perfectly good thing. The trouble comes with that suffix—ism. Whether we think of an “ism” as a larger worldview, a religion, or an ideology, the function of the “ism” is to inflate the concept in the root word into an all-explaining narrative or way of life. 

The Essence of Pietism

Pietism takes as its root word piety. This is an antiquated word today. Piety is basically a synonym for godliness or one’s devotion unto God. To borrow a definition of one of my professors, Stephen Myers, whether of piety or spirituality, it is,

“An internal communion with the living God that brings one’s life into conformity with God’s will and fellowship with his people.”1

From a Christian perspective, we would have to conclude that piety is a very good thing. But then there comes that modifying “ism,” which takes personal piety and reduces everything else down to the level of the individual. The emphasis could be on religious feeling or on good deeds, or both. The consequence is that piety is now subjectivized. What that comes to mean is that everything most nearly associated with piety is now relative to the personal experience (and interpretation) of the one who would be pious.

An objective religion or an objective ethic would not be called personal piety. These would be called “religion” or “ethics,” the first of which is dismissed as cold and formal, the latter of which is thought to be authoritarian or even idolatrous.

The reasoning tends to go like this: If we simply act more like Jesus, people will come to faith; but if we invest in some overarching “right way” to worship or to behave or to structure society, well, that will just drive them away.

In this kind of thinking, one can even begin to see a close connection between pietism and man-centered approaches to salvation. That is ironic given pietism’s talk about avoiding this or that idol. 

Earlier Pietisms

We do have to be aware that the “pietism” label has been worn before—first among the Lutherans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such earlier iterations were not nearly as disastrous to Christian morality, even if they were often just as antagonistic toward rigorous doctrinal thinking.

A negative reaction to Lutheran scholasticism produced spiritualists like Johann Arndt, Philipp Jakob Spener, August Hermann Francke, Jacob Boehm, and Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, was very much influenced by some of their writings. Some of these churches have been credited with the re-emphasis on what we now call the “small group” meeting, whether the emphasis be on prayer or discipleship. There was much stress on rediscovering the spiritual disciplines and a genuine attempt to get the laity more involved in the substantive ministry of the church.   

Elements of the new frontier sects coming out of the Second Great Awakening have also been described as pietistic. Sometimes this is said by church historians who recognize the German influence as these groups traveled westward through Pennsylvania, where the Lutheran, Mennonite, and some Moravian Brethren strands wound up. More often than not, however, this description is identifying some common threads featured in the original pietism in Europe and this newer frontier spirituality.

It would be a mistake to think that these believers were not “socially involved.” Certainly the Mennonites thought politically. They withdrew not “from society,” but from that society they deemed to be compromised and so formed their own. Today’s pietists are very much “in the world” but draw the lines around one’s own piety a bit differently.

It should be said, however, that all forms of pietism tend to be founded in reaction. Some sort of intellectualism or politicization of religion is detected, and in the name of genuine spirituality or piety, some group begins to swing the pendulum from the radically objective to the radically subjective. 

Commercial, Suburban Pietism

In one sense, no one should have been surprised that pietism grew in the setting of the Seeker church of the late 20th century. There was already a new spirituality in the Jesus Movement and Charismatic Renewal movement of the 1970s. Pastors were replaced by life-coaches. Word and sacrament were diffused into programs. Local churches were more like parachurch outposts for larger evangelistic events. If the customer was not always right, he or she was at least never to be disappointed by the experience.

The basic approach of Rogerian psychology was the orthodoxy of the culture: Judge not, lest ye be judged; this is the first and only commandment. To speak authoritatively into the spirituality (we did not call it “piety” anymore) of another was—well, wasn’t. We don’t go there. Some find it unfair to compare this pietism to the more spiritually serious older brands. Be that as it may, like theirs, it was still reactionary and it still sealed off the “spiritual” from the corrective of truth and morality. 

The most recent pietism would be difficult to pin down if we made a study of it in the whole of Evangelicalism. Speaking as a representative of the Reformed churches, one fact that simplifies the question is that the Reformed, more than any other Protestant group, has a theology that is (or at least was) inherently hostile to pietism. Some critics of Puritanism, or even of Luther, would beg to differ with that claim; but I will leave that aside.

The New Calvinism that burst onto the scene in the first decade of the new millennium was a hodge-podge of influences from the Southern Baptists to independent Bible churches to urban missional groups to even the “charismatic Calvinists” of Sovereign Grace Ministries. And whether we want to admit the obvious or not, those churches shared many of the same assumptions and practices as the Seeker churches I just described. They just weren’t as good at finding a smoke machine.

Moreover, the older seminary curriculum even among Presbyterians—the intellectual blueprint that grounded apologetics and ethics in the Western tradition of classical metaphysics and natural law—was now a few generations removed. No one from the old world was driving the train and only a few conductors had any confessional standards in hand.

The “Grooming Stage” of the New Pietism

One final piece of the puzzle makes us ready to see the final picture. In that decade-and-a-half of transition (2000-2015), the conservative movement in American politics was making its last pretensions of being alive. The War on Terror was wearing thin and seen as a globalist power-grab, the housing bubble burst, and a surprising number of professing Evangelicals voted for Barack Obama the first time. It was becoming ever safer for Christian leaders to express their embarrassment over the Moral Majority and disown the Religious Right in the same way that Seeker methodology had already used the fundamentalism of “your dad’s church” as a foil in their shtick. Into the shallow fortress of New Calvinism, missional theology rode in like a Trojan horse, with “social justice” carried in its bowels.

But times in the suburbs were as good as ever. There was simply no motivation to think about things political in the context of the Reformed church, and anyone who tried was summarily put out of the camp. Yet in the host of very nuanced errors, a political error would be the most difficult to deconstruct of all, as talking about it was verboten. Into this void stepped what we now call the “Radical Two Kingdom” position, championed especially at Westminster Seminary in Escondido, California.

Its most basic elements are not new. Baptists like Mark Dever, Presbyterians like Ligon Duncan, and independent Bible church preachers like John MacArthur, had already taught the New Calvinists that “worldview matters are not the gospel,” and “there is no cultural mandate,” and “the American Revolution was sinful.” 

But now such loose constellations of pietistic sentiment would be given a high-octane Reformed academic garb. While Michael Horton had already popularized some of these same notions here or there in his books, the real architect of the doctrine is his fellow faculty member David VanDrunen whose pop-level Living in God’s Two Kingdoms (2010) introduces readers to what one finds in deeper scholarship in Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (2009), Divine Covenants and Moral Order (2014), and Politics after Christendom (2020).

This makes the pietistic captivity of the Reformed church that much more difficult to expose, as the average churchgoer is not going to read any of the headier material. If they did, they would be confronted by early chapter after early chapter of material that not many orthodox Reformed would disagree with. In other words: This ain’t your daddy’s pietism! This is all very subtle. For example, VanDrunen is for Christians being politically involved. He is conversant in the typical authors on the Right, in the arenas of economics and jurisprudence, whereas earlier representatives were not. He doesn’t simply assert “Romans 13” as a silencer, but roots it in Genesis 9 and the Noahic Covenant (as he does with natural law). Yet how he does this becomes the tell.

It becomes a foundation for the universal value of pluralism. The church, following Abraham, is the holy society made for a new world; and that covenant made with Noah, that is the common society for the preservation of this old world. There is no imposition of the new upon the old, saving grace upon common grace, or (just so you don’t miss it) Christian principles upon secular fellow citizens. We must never confuse “that kingdom” with “the kingdom” that is to come. 

The upshot of such misplaced and misshaped truisms is to shame Christians away from the kind of political reflection and activity by which the magistrate imposes the moral law in any “right way.” On the packaging it appears that this R2K view is just the traditional 2K view—that is, that the powers and prerogatives of the church are distinct from those of the state. Not so. All relevant parties agree to that.

It is opposed to the imposition of “our Book” as a political manual over the common sphere, as if Old Testament Israel was meant to be a template in this respect. It was not. So, at first it appears they are simply opposed to Theonomy. Today we might even say they are opposed to Christian Nationalism. Yet the historical record would show that this critical view is quite out of step with our Reformed forefathers.

In point of fact, according to R2K, this common community that God revealed through nature (and Noah) winds up opposing any objectively right way that society should be to the exclusion of many who have stepped outside the bonds of humanity (including many cultures that have devolved to the sub-human or demonic).

It turns out that this new pietism is really just a spirituality of civic neutrality foisted upon the church to prevent any real criticism of the reigning modern political philosophy of liberalism. What cannot be challenged by the church is that most basic equality of all people: their right to vote and express themselves, and identify themselves as whoever and whatever they prefer. After all, the church has no competency to speak with authority to any of these things.

So they tell us.

I said it many times during that first decade of the millennium to those in my young church. This is the grooming stage. Watch it. Mark these men. Today’s subtle pietist is tomorrow’s open Marxist, or at least a gatekeeper of the Globalist overlords. What the “grooming” amounts to is this. It is a kind of Overton Window in the church. They are shaming you. Not only are they dissuading you from reading certain books and thinking through solutions in a masculine way. They are creating categories for an entire generation that will define objective political speech to be outside of recognizably godly conversation and gospel concerns.

So it has been. 

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1. Stephen Myers, Lecture 1 of Introduction to Reformed Piety and Spirituality (August 2021), at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.