One winter night in Brooklyn in 1974, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus played a game. As Berger later recalled, “Neuhaus and I thought it would be fun to make a list of the major themes in mainline Protestantism that irritated us.” At the time, Berger was on track to become one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. Neuhaus was the pastor of a church in Brooklyn and a prominent voice in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. Both were Lutherans deeply concerned about matters of religion and public life. Later they would say that they put into writing the “pervasive, false and debilitating” notions which they believed were undermining contemporary Christianity and its influence in society.

Over the course of the year, Berger and Neuhaus circulated their list of misguided beliefs among more than two dozen theologians and religious thinkers, many of whom expressed an interest in meeting to discuss the issues they raised, and possibly issuing a public statement. James Gettemy, president of the Hartford Seminary Foundation, agreed to host the group. After three days of meetings and discussion in January 1975, the eighteen participants (seven additional contributors signed on after being unable to attend in person) unanimously agreed on the text of what became “The Hartford Declaration: An Appeal for Theological Affirmation.” The names at the end included great American theologians of the twentieth century: Avery Dulles, Stanley Hauerwas, George Lindbeck, Richard Mouw, Thomas Hopko, Alexander Schmemann, and Robert Louis Wilken.

The Appeal was novel in many respects. Its signatories were not official representatives of Christian communities, as was standard for official ecumenical statements, and it offered no creed of beliefs to be held, nor a list of heresies – or heretics – to be anathematized. Instead, it declared: “Today an apparent loss of a sense of the transcendent is undermining the Church’s ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in the world.” This loss was outlined in thirteen anti-theses, or “themes,” on which the Appeal then offered commentary.

In a subsequent volume, Berger clarified what they meant. Christian intellectuals and leaders had begun to take their cues “more and more from the ‘official reality-definers’ – that is, from the highly secularized intellectual elite.” Their “accommodation to secularity” looked like this: “A secular definition of reality is posited as normative and the religious tradition is translated in such a way as to conform to this norm.… Transcendence is translated into immanence. The real content of the tradition is then identified with human authenticity, say, or personal fulfillment, or liberation (be it political or psychological).” Church programs were being reshaped to achieve these secular goals.

Neuhaus would put it more directly. The Appeal proposed as a place for common Christian thought and action, “the universe of prayer and discourse constructed by the truth claims of a transcendent reality; namely, that the whole world is awaiting the fulfillment signaled in Jesus of Nazareth who is the Christ.” It claimed that Christian truth stood over and against secular wisdom – “against the world for the world.”

Looking back on the Appeal, Theme 3 gets most directly to the heart of the matter. Does the Christian faith articulate a reality that has authority over our own experience, or not? The Appeal is clear: “What is here at stake is nothing less than the reality of God: We did not invent God; God invented us.” This brings to mind the time when one of the signatories, Avery Dulles, entered a church to celebrate Mass and saw a banner hanging over the altar that read “God Is Other People!” Dulles later remarked that he wished he had an enormous marker so that he could have added a comma, rendering it: “God Is Other, People!”

Later themes engaged the relationship between Christianity and politics. Neuhaus in particular believed that traditional, orthodox Protestant theology was the strongest foundation for activism that spoke out about civil rights and the Vietnam War. Hence the appeal argues: “From a biblical perspective, it is precisely because of confidence in God’s reign over all aspects of life that Christians must participate fully in the struggle against oppressive and dehumanizing structures and their manifestations in racism, war, and economic exploitation.” And Theme 9 cautions against instinctive opposition to institutions and traditions. “Without them,” the Appeal states, “life would degenerate into chaos and new forms of bondage. The modern pursuit of liberation from all social and historical restraints is finally dehumanizing.”

The Appeal never named names, but was obviously aimed at the spirit of the age captured by Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian and author of The Secular City; Catholic liberation theology; and the World Council of Churches, which Neuhaus described to Time magazine as “a gargantuan exercise in [the very] cultural capitulation” that the Appeal protested. This spirit perhaps achieved its apotheosis in the “Death of God” movement, which Time had famously chronicled almost ten years before. These theologians argued that modern humans had come to understand their lives and order their world apart from God, and that Christianity would be most truthfully lived by abandoning its creeds and instead focusing on practicing its moral teachings. Most Protestants would not have put it so bluntly, but my colleague Matthew Rose captures well the trajectory of the thinking dominant among many mainline leaders and theologians:

Christianity is not about possessing knowledge of God or salvation in a world to come; it is about the inauguration of a new way of life that breaks down every barrier to inclusion. Inspired by the New Testament’s vision of human community, they argued that Christianity is a fundamentally social movement, and the job of theology is to purify the Christian tradition of its interest in heaven above.

The Hartford Appeal hit its target. One month after its release, Time reported on the signatories’ “weekend war council” and ranked the Appeal as the latest of Christian history’s "bone-rattling documents of theological protest that capsuled the pressing issues of the day,” in the same company as the 95 Theses, the Syllabus of Errors, and the Barmen Declaration. The article’s title, “The Hartford Heresies,” became a popular moniker of dismissal by its progressive critics. But Neuhaus would note with satisfaction that the response from many laypeople was “an enormous sense of relief that ‘somebody finally said what needed to be said.’”

Reading about the Hartford Appeal fifty years later feels like flipping through an old photo album. The world in which mainline Protestantism serves as a dominant and formative institution, especially for elites, is gone. At the time, Neuhaus noticed that the leaders of the Protestant establishment were eager to be seen as keeping in step with “the Movement” of the 1960s and ’70s. In 2006, he wrote, “I wondered what was going to happen to the institutions that they headed – the institutions that I had thought were running the world. Now we know.”

One could argue that the Hartford Appeal diagnosed the departures from historic Christianity that would lead to the mainline’s collapse into obsolescence. But more precisely, the Appeal described the beliefs that would lead to mainline Protestantism’s successful transformation into secular progressivism, which still reigns in the same elite circles. While the Death of God theologians were rejected as extreme, Rose argues, they ended up describing the trajectory of the mainline as a whole. For these thinkers:

The Gospel forms a community that, following the biblical injunction to die in order to live, extinguishes itself so as to spread its message into the secular world. And has not exactly that come to pass? The central fact of American religion today is that liberal Protestantism is dead and everywhere triumphant. Its churches are empty, but its causes have won.… Mainline Protestantism has succeeded in communicating its progressive moral and political values to the surrounding culture.… At the same time, [its] membership has evaporated.

In other ways, too, the Hartford Appeal describes a world that is still very much with us. In his essay on the Appeal’s ecumenical implications, Avery Dulles writes, “The effort to grapple with latent heresy is probably the most striking dimension of the ecumenism of the Hartford Appeal.” The term “latent heresy” comes from the twentieth-century German theologian Karl Rahner, who was describing the way in which many Christians unconsciously adopted the frameworks and beliefs of the secular world, thereby rejecting (without realizing it) the traditional Christian beliefs they ostensibly held. In earlier times, heresy entailed explicitly claiming doctrines contrary to the faith. Now it entailed not paying attention to the air you breathe.

If you spend time among young people, you notice that the latent heresy that irritated Berger and Neuhaus in 1974 is still irritating today. When I taught introductory theology at Boston College, it was difficult to convince the students that Saint Paul, Teresa of Ávila, or any other canonical Christian author wasn’t saying that as long as they tried hard in school and were kind, they were basically good people. Originally, the Appeal was intended to be a compendium of bad ideas; today, it reads like a creed for the kind of self-actualizing, individualistic religion that Tara Isabella Burton catalogues in Strange Rites.

And yet, as Dulles, Berger, and Neuhaus recognized, Hartford was one of the first examples of a new kind of ecumenism. In the decades since, some Catholics and Protestants (and, to a lesser degree, Orthodox) have realized that whatever their confessional differences might be, they share a common set of doctrines and dispositions toward their faith. It’s difficult to find a good adjective for this phenomenon – “conservative” is typical but too political, “traditional” is an improvement but still imprecise – but the Hartford Appeal captures it well: a desire to affirm God’s transcendence and the truth and authority of his Word, as handed down from the time of the Apostles.

Since 1975, such Christians have come together to collaborate on new projects, religious and political, and to enjoy fellowship because they shared this affirmation. These initiatives usually are unofficial: they are not led by leaders of a church or community, and their end goal is not a formal declaration of unity but common fellowship, deliberation, and action. Plough is itself an example of this ecumenism. In this sense, the Hartford Appeal is not just a moment from America’s religious past, but more prophetic of its religious future than Berger and Neuhaus could have known.

These are the thirteen “false and debilitating” ideas that the Appeal’s signers opposed:

Theme 1 • Modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality, and is therefore normative for Christian faith and life.

Theme 2 • Religious statements are totally independent of reasonable discourse.

Theme 3 • Religious language refers to human experience and nothing else, God being humanity’s noblest creation.

Theme 4 • Jesus can only be understood in terms of contemporary models of humanity.

Theme 5 • All religions are equally valid; the choice among them is not a matter of conviction about truth but only of personal preference or lifestyle.

Theme 6 • To realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation.

Theme 7 • Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize potential.

Theme 8 • The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.

Theme 9 • Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and inimical to our being truly human; liberation from them is required for authentic existence and authentic religion.

Theme 10 • The world must set the agenda for the church. Social, political, and economic programs to improve the quality of life are ultimately normative for the church’s mission in the world.

Theme 11 • An emphasis on God’s transcendence is at least a hindrance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social concern and action.

Theme 12 • The struggle for a better humanity will bring about the kingdom of God.

Theme 13 • The question of hope beyond death is irrelevant or at best marginal to the Christian understanding of human fulfillment.