Le suicide des protestants aux Etats-Unis

Si Elena Kagan est nommée à la Cour suprême, son arrivée marquera la fin d'une époque, celle des protestants aux Etats-Unis.

Quel chemin parcouru depuis la création de ce pays, entièrement de la main de protestants. Voici encore trente ans, cette évolution aurait été tout simplement impensable.

Ne les plaignons pas. Ils ont creusé leur propre tombe.

Bon reportage de Robert Frank dans les colonnes du Wall Street Journal.

That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP


On a recent morning at the Links Club, New York's wood-paneled preserve of the old banking elite, a small crowd of white-haired members gathered for breakfast.

The talk around the tables, over poached eggs and toast, was of Europe and sovereign-debt markets. Some were quietly negotiating deals. The crowd was mostly older, though it included a smattering of 40-something and 50-something members.

While undeniably upper-crust, the scene, which included a Latin American and an Asian, was a far cry from the Links Club of 20 years ago, when doing business was forbidden and the strictly homogenous crowd of Protestant blue-bloods spent their mornings comparing golf scores and vacation homes.

"It's changed with the times," said one former member. "That's both our gain and our loss."

In the long downward spiral of what used to be known as America's Protestant Establishment, there have been several momentous milestones: Harvard's opening up its admissions policies after World War II. Corporate America's rush in the 1980s to bring more diversity to the corner office. Barack Obama's inauguration as the first African-American president.

History may reveal another milestone—Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. If she is confirmed, the nation's nine most powerful judges will all be Catholic or Jewish, leaving the court without a Protestant member for the first time.

Of the 111 Supreme Court Justices who have served, 35 have been Episcopalians, making them the largest religious group on the court, according to court historians. The court's first non-Protestant was Catholic Justice Roger Taney, appointed by President Andrew Jackson in 1836.


Whether the court's religious makeup even matters in today's legal world has become a subject of hot debate. Yet by ushering in a Protestant-free court, Ms. Kagan is helping to sweep away some of the last vestiges of a group that ruled American politics, wealth and culture for much of the nation's history.

"The fact that we're going to zero Protestants in the court may not be as significant as the fact that her appointment perfectly reflects the decline of the Establishment, or the WASP Establishment, in America," said David Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.

Seen from the distance of time, the changes are stunning. In the 1960s, the vast majority of corporate managers were Protestant, according to E. Digby Baltzell's famous 1964 tome, "The Protestant Establishment."

The percentage of Protestants in Congress has dropped to 55% from 74% in 1961, according to Pew Forum. The corner offices of the top banks, once ruled by Rockefellers and Bakers, now include an Indian-American and the grandson of a Greek immigrant.

In old-money enclaves like Palm Beach, Fla., Nantucket, Mass., and Greenwich, Conn., WASPs are being priced out of their waterfront estates and displaced on their nonprofit boards by Jewish, Catholic and other non-Protestant entrepreneurs.

A survey by Pew Research found only 21% of mainline U.S. Protestants had income of $100,000 or more, compared with 46% of Jews and 42% of Hindus.

Until the early 1980s, when a flood of new wealth began to democratize the American elite, the path to power and status in America was straight and narrow. It usually began with old-line families in the lush estates of Greenwich, Boston, New York or Philadelphia and wound its way through New England boarding schools, on to Harvard or Yale and finally to the white-shoe law firms or banks of the Northeast or the corridors of power in Washington.

John J. McCloy—the Philadelphia-born, Harvard-educated lawyer and banker who served as assistant secretary of War during World War II and on several corporate boards, including Chase Manhattan Bank's—became known as "the Chairman of the Establishment."

His son, John J. McCloy II, a Connecticut-based venture capitalist, says Ms. Kagan's nomination is a sign of the nation's commendable meritocracy, but also a "dangerous departure" from Establishment mores, since Ms. Kagan, while a brilliant scholar, has no experience as a judge.

"I think we're losing something fundamental with the Establishment," he said. "The Establishment was really about people who became leaders because they were confident and highly competent in their areas."

The Protestant downfall can be attributed many things: the deregulation of markets, globalization, the rise of technology, the primacy of education and skills over family connections.

Yet many also point to the shifting dynamics of the faith itself, with mainline Protestantism giving way to the more fire-and-brimstone brands of Evangelicals in recent decades. The Episcopal Church, usually seen as the church of the Establishment, has seen some of the most pronounced declines in recent years.

Rev. Mark S. Sisk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, said the polarized landscape of religion today hasn't favored more moderate faiths like Episcopals.

"When it comes to elective office, I can't think of anyplace in the country where being a middle-of-the-road Episcopalian would be a great plus," he said.

He added, however, that tracking the ups and downs of socioreligious groups like WASPs was no longer relevant.

"That kind of calibration of 'what members of my team are on the front lines' seems to me to be an antique kind of thing to do," he said.

Meantime, WASP culture has been left to live out its days as a fashion statement, on the shelves of Ralph Lauren stores, or as a social badge at defiantly old-world clubs like the Knickerbocker Club in New York or the Bath and Tennis Club in Palm Beach.

In "The Protestant Establishment," Mr. Baltzell pointed to the prejudice and insularity of the elite as the eventual causes of its decline. "A crisis has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment's unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks."

Jamie Johnson, the documentary filmmaker and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, said he believed the destructive effects of wealth over multiple generations were also a factor.

"The generations of affluence bred a certain kind of casual, passive approach to life and wealth building," he said. "Lots of people just got lazy."

Write to Robert Frank at robert.frank@wsj.com

Origines de l'insularité britannique

L'insularité britannique ne naît pas de la géographie, elle trouve son origine dans les choix personnels d'Henri VIII qui pour satisfaire un égo démesuré a choisi de rompre avec Rome. Contrairement à ce que l'histoire officielle anglaise répète depuis le XVIe siècle, le protestantisme n'étaient en rien un mouvement populaire, il a été imposé du haut en bas de la société britannique avec les tristes conséquences que l'on sait.

Ce matin, dans les colonnes de The Independent, Paul Valley répond à la question : « Que se serait-il passé si Henry VIII avait puy obtenir de Rome son divorce ? »

The Big Question: What would have happened if Henry VIII had obtained his divorce?

Why are we asking this now?

Because the Vatican has just announced that it will market 200 facsimile copies of the elaborately decorated parchment from 1530, which bore an appeal by English peers to Pope Clement VII asking for the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon.

The document is key, historians said, to understanding the formation of the English national character. It marks, said Professor David Starkey in Rome yesterday, the most important event in English history. "This is the moment at which England ceases to be a normal European Catholic country and goes off on this strange path," he said, "that leads it to the Atlantic, to the New World, to Protestantism, to Euro-scepticism."

Why did Henry want a divorce in the first place?

It wasn't a divorce, it was an annulment. To cement an alliance with Europe's most powerful country, Spain, Henry's father, Henry VII, had arranged a marriage between Henry's elder brother Arthur and the daughter of the Spanish monarchs, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon. When Arthur died she was married off to Henry.

But by the end of the 1520s, Henry's wife, Catherine of Aragon, was in her forties and he was desperate for a son to secure the Tudor dynasty.

Henry applied to the Pope for an annulment of the marriage, on the grounds that it was not lawful in those days for someone to marry his brother's widow. Technically that was correct. And royal annulments had happened before: Louis XII of France had been granted one in 1499. But, by then, Catherine's nephew had become the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and he did not want to see his aunt humiliated. So the Pope dilly-dallied.

What happened?

Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn and by 1533 she was pregnant. He married her in secret. Meanwhile he had pushed through Parliament a series of Acts cutting back papal power and influence in England. Several months after the wedding he got the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer to unilaterally declare his first marriage invalid. Anne Boleyn was crowned queen a week later. A year later the Pope declared that Henry's second marriage was invalid.

Henry declared that the Pope no longer had authority in England and in 1534, Parliament passed an act that stated that Henry VIII was now the Head of "The Church of England". The Pope responded by excommunicating Henry. The king passed the Act of Supremacy. Those who would not swear allegiance to him as head of the Church were executed for treason. Then followed the Dissolution of the Monasteries, under which all the lands and possessions of Britain's religious orders were purloined by the king and his apparatchiks.

Wouldn't the reformation have happened anyway?

That was the myth peddled by the English establishment for centuries. The propaganda was that a corrupt and decaying Catholicism was replaced by a more morally pure and progressive Protestantism. But historians now challenge that view. They are led by Cambridge University's Eamon Duffy whose scholarly masterpiece, The Stripping of the Altars, was a meticulous study of the accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books and graffiti of the period.

What did this book show?

It showed beyond doubt that medieval Catholicism was in fact flourishing and much loved by the ordinary English people for whom it offered social and spiritual sustenance. Luther's Protestant reformation had taken no root.

"Very few people were remotely interested in ideas from Germany," said David Starkey. But "because Protestantism won and because history is written by the winners, the Protestant account of the Reformation triumphed". The Reformation in England was imposed from the top.

How was the Reformation imposed?

By a fierce centralist onslaught by the King and a small group of brutal, greedy, self-serving henchmen out for loot. Protestantism was imposed – through coercion, spying and disenfranchisement – by a cadre of political opportunists during just three decades of Henry's and then his daughter Elizabeth's reign.

Public resistance to Elizabeth's dismantling of the Catholic parish system persisted until the 1570s. And some Catholic customs and loyalties lingered until the beginning of the 17th century. However, by then, as Professor Duffy put it, England's Catholic inheritance became for the English people "a distant world, impossible for them to look back on as their own".

Wouldn't Protestantism have flourished anyway?

Probably not. Henry had persecuted English Protestants until the row over the annulment. But once his estrangement from Rome was clear, Protestants flooded into England. There was a big influx from France after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 when a large group of wealthy and prominent Huguenots were slaughtered in Catholic Paris. There was also a steady wave of Protestant from the Low Countries after Spain began to assert its rule there. So Protestantism was a foreign import.

How did the move towards Protestantism manifest itself?

In 1536 Henry gave permission for an English translation of the Bible to be published in England, which was a very non-Catholic act for Rome was still hiding behind its Latin. Henry continued to regard himself to be a Catholic but by doing this he began to move the Church in the direction of Protestantism. From that point onward, the Church of England claimed itself to be both Catholic and Reformed (as distinct from just Protestant) a character which many proclaim to be its continuing compromising genius to this day. It was to be 100 years before the Protestants really showed their strength – by cutting off the head of the king in the Civil War.

Were it not for the annulment, as John Stuart Mill put it in his essay On Liberty, this country would almost certainly have followed the example of the majority of the Continent. "In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire," Mill wrote, "Protestantism was rooted out; and mostly likely would have been so in England, had Queen Mary [Henry VIII's first daughter] lived, or Queen Elizabeth died."

How would things have been different if England had remained Catholic?

"My offices might be in Rome and I might be writing in Latin," quipped Paul Handley, the editor of the Church Times, the leading Anglican newspaper, yesterday. "And what would have happened to the bolshy individualistic Englishman on which we base all our historical mythology?"

It would have been a unique Catholicism though, not fervent like the Mediterranean kind, but not separatist like the Catholism of France which is the product of a guillotine-crazed Revolution and a secularising Enlightenment. We might just be irreligious Catholics instead of irreligious Protestants. But the world may have lost something rather special.

Un regard féminin sur la France

Mary Alsop King, future épouse du premier ministre de la France.

Une jeune Américaine à la découverte de la France

Quand on évoque le sort des expatriés venus travailler en France, on s'intéresse à l'intégration du mari dans son milieu professionnel ou à celle des enfants à l'école. En revanche, on s 'intéresse moins au sort de l'épouse. Mais il arrive que celle-ci ait une vengeance… posthume !

Mary Alsop King est une jeune américaine qui débarque en Europe en 1866, au lendemain de la sanglante guerre civile qui a déchiré son pays. Après un long séjour à Rome, elle s’installe à Paris où elle rencontre William Henry Waddington, un jeune veuf, anglais naturalisé français, qui a abandonné l'Université pour se consacrer à la vie publique. Après de brèves fiançailles, ils se marient en 1874 pour devenir un des couples les plus en vue de la haute société française.

Et pourtant, par un savoureux paradoxe, si William H. Waddington n’est plus aujourd'hui qu’une note de bas de page dans les livres d’histoire, en revanche son épouse Mary reste connue grâce aux lettres qu’elle a écrites durant sa vie et qui ont servi de base à un grand nombre de livres traitant de sa vie en France.

Grande bourgeoise parisienne, Mary appartient à un petit monde que l'on a dû mal à imaginer, celui d’une classe sociale privilégiée vivant en vase clos où les femmes ne parlent que le français et ne connaissent que la capitale et leur château familial à la campagne. Un jour, en parlant de Rome à un visiteur étranger, Mary prend à témoin une de ses amies : « Je crois qu’on est très bien à l’hôtel d’Angleterre à Rome », s’attirant aussitôt la réponse courroucée : « Mais je n’en sais rien, Madame, je n’ai jamais quitté Paris et je n’en vante ! »

Dans ses lettres, la jeune Américaine rend compte des bizarreries de la vie française. Par exemple, elle s’étonne de l’intérêt que ses amies portent à l’éducation de leurs enfants. Elle rapporte, stupéfaite, que plusieurs de ses connaissances s’impliquent dans les études de leur progéniture au point d’étudier les matières du baccalauréat et de rédiger même certaines compositions. Elle ajoute « la nurse qui élève seule les enfants, qui ne tolère aucune interférence, présentant les enfants à leurs parents à heure fixe, est inconnue en France. ».

Comment recevoir un prince ?

Venant de la société new-yorkaise, où les seuls rois sont ceux de la bourse, elle ne sait comment faire pour accueillir dans ses réceptions des rois, des princes ou des grands aristocrates. Apprenant que le duc d’Orléans (le prétendant au trône de France) viendra à une de ses réceptions, Mary se précipite chez le duc Decazes, un des amis de son mari et ministre des Affaires étrangères, pour lui avouer son ignorance et lui demander conseil.
Le duc est décontenancé par sa demande :

—Une réception au ministère, c’est tout comme chez vous. Faites comme vous avez toujours fait.
—C’est là le problème, je n’ai jamais rencontré une altesse royale de ma vie !
—Ces Américaines, elles sont incroyables s’exclame le duc. Puis, reprenant son sérieux, il lui explique par le menu comment s’adresser au prince :
—Vous n’avez pas besoin de s’adresser à lui en l’appelant « Altesse royale » à chaque fois que vous lui adressez la parole. Utilisez la troisième personne : « Monseigneur veut-il me permettre ? »

Grâce à ces conseils et à l’aide précieuse de son personnel, elle accueillera ses hôtes de marque comme si elle n’avait fait que cela toute sa vie et ses réceptions compteront parmi les plus prisées de Paris.
La place éminente qu’occupe son mari permet à Mary de faire des rencontres passionnantes. Elle est ainsi présentée avec son mari à la reine Victoria de passage à Paris. La jeune femme assiste amusée à l’émerveillement de la souveraine découvrant que ce ministre français est aussi anglais qu’un de ses propres sujets : « She was much interested in his beginnings in England at Rugby and Cambridge – and was evidently astonished, though she had too much tact to show it, that he had chosen to make his life and career in France, instead of accepting the proposition made to him by his cousin Waddington, then Dean of Durham, to remain in England and continue his classic and literary studies under his guidance ».

Des protestants français… très différents !

Si l'épiscopalienne Mary Waddington est frappée par l’ignorance de ses amies à l’égard du protestantisme qu’elle professe ainsi que son mari, la mentalité des protestants français est tout autant une inépuisable source d’étonnement : 

« They are almost a separate class in France--are very earnest, religious, honourable, narrow-minded people. They give a great deal in charity and good works of all kinds. In Paris the Protestant coterie is very rich. They associate with all the Catholics, as many of them entertain a great deal, but they live among themselves and never intermarry. I hardly know a case where a French Protestant has married a Catholic. I suppose it is a remnant of their old Huguenot blood, and the memories of all their forefathers suffered for their religion, which makes them so intolerant. » 

Leur comportement plonge parfois notre jeune Américaine dans des abîmes de perplexité. A Paris, une de ses amies protestantes venue en visite se régale de petits croissants et, voulant connaître le nom du fournisseur, lui dit : « votre boulanger est bien sûr protestant ».

Découvrant avec horreur que Mme Waddington ne se soucie pas de la religion de son fournisseur : 

she gave me the address of an excellent Swiss protestant baker and begged me to sever all connection with the catholic at once. I asked her if she really thought dangerous papist ideas were kneaded in with the bread, but she would not listen to my mild persiflage and went away rather anxious about my spiritual life.

Un siècle et demi après l’arrivée de Mary Waddington en France, le pays a tellement changé qu’il serait méconnaissable à ses yeux. Pourtant, les expériences qu’elle a vécues au contact des Français peuvent être partagées par tous les Anglophones qui liront dans ses livres que, bien souvent en France, plus ça change, et plus c’est la même chose !.

Les ouvrages de Mary King Waddington sont facilement accessibles ici. Signalons notamment My first years as a Frenchwoman 1876-1879, Chateau and Country Life, Letters of a diplomat's wife.