Wall Street Opinion Journal | John Schmalzbauer | October 18, 2007

A look at the evangelical power elite.

Once upon a time, a Protestant elite ruled America. Its members were not just any Protestants, though. They came almost exclusively from the “main line,” a phrase borrowed from the affluent suburbs lining the Pennsylvania Railroad west of Philadelphia. Mainline Protestantism–encompassing the Episcopal Church, the Congregationalists and other liberal denominations–was far more than a cluster of churches. According to the historian William Hutchison, it “was a personal network” comprising “familial, social, and old-school-tie relationships,” including such clans as the Rockefellers and the Niebuhrs. It helped to build such progressive institutions as the University of Chicago and Union Theological Seminary. It was also capable of great bigotry, barring Catholics and Jews from its social clubs and law firms.

In “The Protestant Establishment,” E. Digby Baltzell chronicled the “growth and decay” of the WASP aristocracy, describing its patrician families, elite boarding schools and Ivy League universities and noting their waning influence. Writing in 1964, Baltzell saw the election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, as a hopeful sign. And, indeed, later researchers documented the opening of the elite to Catholics and Jews.

Missing from most accounts of America’s diversifying establishment is any discussion of what happened to the other Protestants–the fundamentalists and evangelicals outside the mainline. A few attained positions of power in midcentury America, but for decades most could be found near the bottom of the economic ladder in the South and Midwest. The victims of class and regional prejudices, these born-again believers had been christened the “gaping primates from the upland valleys” by H.L. Mencken. He wasn’t alone is taking such a view.

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