The Protestant Party: Why Democratic Dysfunction Is Actually a Feature

If you've spent any time around people who study American Protestantism, you've probably heard some version of the following statistic delivered with a kind of weary pride: there are somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 distinct Protestant denominations worldwide, depending on how you count. Some researchers put the number higher. The range itself is telling – nobody can quite agree on what counts as a distinct denomination, which is, if you think about it, a very Protestant problem to have.

I thought about that number a lot while watching the post-2016 Democratic Party try to figure out what the hell it was.

The parallel is not accidental. It's structural.

The Foundational Problem

Protestantism, at its core, is built on a premise that is both its greatest strength and its permanent liability: that individuals can read the sacred texts and arrive, through their own reason and conscience, at valid conclusions about what those texts mean. There is no pope. There is no single magisterium with the authority to say "this interpretation is correct and that one is heresy." The tradition is held together by shared foundational commitments -- the authority of scripture, the centrality of grace -- but beyond those commitments, you're largely on your own, and so is everyone else.

The predictable result of this is what you see when you look at American Protestantism: a landscape of extraordinary diversity, persistent fragmentation, and occasional spectacular implosions when two factions decide the other has drifted too far from the true reading. Southern Baptists and Episcopalians both call themselves Protestant Christians. They do not agree on much. They have both, at various points in their histories, split from earlier bodies over doctrinal disputes that outsiders found either incomprehensible or depressing. This is what happens when you build a tradition on the principle of individual interpretation and then act surprised when everyone interprets differently.

The Democratic Party operates on exactly this logic, and the people who find this most confusing are the ones who keep expecting it to behave like something it isn't.

The foundational Democratic commitments are real: equality, pluralism, the idea that government is a legitimate tool for collective welfare. But those commitments are stated at a level of generality that permits – almost requires – wildly divergent readings of what they mean in practice. A DSA member and a moderate suburban Democrat who would have been a Rockefeller Republican thirty years ago both genuinely believe they are honoring the tradition. They are not pretending. They are reading the same texts and arriving at different conclusions, exactly as the tradition's underlying logic permits them to do.

This is not dysfunction. This is the system working as designed. The dysfunction framing comes from comparing the Democratic coalition to a different organizational model and finding it wanting. That's like complaining that a town meeting isn't efficient enough compared to a military command structure. True, but beside the point.

The Only Thing That Works: Revival

Here's the catch, and it's a significant one.

Decentralized traditions don't just spontaneously cohere. The Protestant world has never solved the fragmentation problem at the organizational level -- the denominations remain stubbornly distinct, and new ones keep forming. But American Protestantism has periodically achieved a kind of temporary, electric unity through a different mechanism entirely: revival.

Historians of American religion identify at least three and arguably four Great Awakenings in American history -- periods of intense religious fervor, driven by charismatic preachers and urgent moral causes, that temporarily unified the fractious Protestant landscape around a shared sense of purpose. These revivals didn't resolve the underlying doctrinal disputes. They didn't merge the denominations or establish a central authority. What they did was generate enough heat to lift everyone above the fault lines for a period -- long enough to do something significant, win something, or lose something together.

And then the revival subsides. The factions reassert themselves. The disputes come roaring back, often angrier for having been suppressed. And the cycle begins again.

The Democratic Party has run on this exact mechanism for most of its modern history. FDR was a revival. The Civil Rights Movement was a revival – one of the most morally urgent and politically consequential in the party's history, and one that predictably fractured the coalition along the fault lines the fervor had temporarily papered over. RFK's 1968 campaign was the beginning of one that got killed before it could fully form, which may be why that particular ghost haunts Democratic politics so persistently.

And make no mistake about it, Obama was a revival. This is worth digging into, because it explains a lot of what came after.

The Obama Awakening, and What It Cost

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign was, structurally, a classic revival event. It was not ideologically unifying – his actual policy positions were center-left, which meant the left wing of the coalition was always somewhat suspicious of him, and rightly so on several counts. But it was rhetorically unifying in a way that cut across the coalition's fault lines without resolving them. His 2004 DNC keynote was essentially a revival sermon delivered to a secular audience that didn't quite recognize what it was hearing. His 2008 campaign was the full Awakening.

Black voters, college-educated whites, young people, Latinos – factions that rarely speak the same political language – were in the same tent, moved by the same moment. The coalition held through 2012, partly on the emotional residue of the revival and partly because Mitt Romney was, whatever his virtues, not exactly an inspiring opponent.

By 2016, the revival was over. This matters enormously, and it's where the Protestant analogy gets genuinely uncomfortable.

What happens after a Great Awakening abates is not a gentle return to the status quo. The theological disputes come back with additional grievances attached – grievances about who got centered during the revival, whose concerns got sidelined in the urgency of the moment, and who got credit for the wins. The post-Obama Democratic coalition did not fragment quietly. It fragmented loudly, in public, in ways that were deeply unedifying and that the right – with some justification – used as evidence that the whole enterprise was rotten. A label they beat the shit out of Democrats with today (listen to any episone of the Focus Group podcast if you have any doubts about this)

The argument about whether the 2016 primary was conducted fairly is, in this frame, a classic post-revival doctrinal dispute: two factions, both of whom felt the original fire, arguing furiously about who was the true heir to the tradition and who had corrupted it. Bernie Sanders voters and Hillary Clinton voters were not, at base, disagreeing about policy. They were disagreeing about the soul of the movement. That's a theological argument dressed up in the language of healthcare policy and trade agreements, and it was every bit as vicious as theological arguments tend to be.

You ended up, by November 2016, with a Democratic coalition that had just finished an exhausting internal schism facing a Republican coalition that had hardened into something approaching a unified doctrinal identity – albeit it around a spray-tanned proto-tyrant. That is a structurally terrible matchup, and the results were what the results were.

The Diminishing Returns Problem

Revival movements, historically, don't get easier with repetition. The Second Great Awakening was more intense but less politically durable than the First. Each successive one has to work harder to generate the same heat, partly because the audience has seen it before and is more skeptical, and partly because the factions between revivals have developed more entrenched identities and more specific grievances that any new revival will have to somehow absorb.

The Democrats have not had a revival since Obama. Biden was explicitly an anti-revival -- a stabilizing caretaker figure, which was exactly what his coalition needed him to be in 2020 and exactly what became a liability the moment the crisis that elected him began to recede. The 2020 unity was fear-driven rather than inspired. Fear coalitions work once. They don't build lasting organizational identity, and they don't survive the transition from "we must stop this specific thing" to "now we have to actually govern."

This is the current situation. The coalition is between revivals, in the middle of its normal fragmented state, facing a political environment that is genuinely urgent and that the fragmentation is making harder to respond to coherently. The progressive wing thinks the moderate wing is a bunch of cowardly sellouts. The moderate wing thinks the progressive wing is an electoral death wish with good intentions. Both of them are correct about each other's failure modes, and neither of them is wrong about the other's weaknesses, which makes the argument both intractable and exhausting to watch.

Worth noting: one of the more specific and unresolved fractures in this coalition right now is the progressive left's complicated relationship with antisemitism – a fault line that the post-October 7 period widened considerably and that the party has handled with a kind of institutional cowardice that serves nobody well. This is not a minor doctrinal dispute. It's the kind of thing that costs you constituencies you cannot afford to lose, and it has.

The question the Democratic Party cannot currently answer is whether the next revival is coming, what form it will take, and whether any of the figures currently being floated as potential standard-bearers can actually generate one. That's the subject of a later post in this series.

For now, the structural point is this: the fragmentation you're watching is not the Democratic Party failing to be something it should be. It's the Democratic Party being exactly what it has always been, in the trough between awakenings, running on the logic of a decentralized tradition that has never figured out how to cohere without a charismatic moment to cohere around.

That is genuinely a problem. It's just not the problem most of the coverage suggests it is.

Coda:

I will admit that this was fascinating to research. I had read about the revival movements of the 19th century and had some awareness of the Billy Graham phenomenon in the middle of the 20th century, but this was an interesting thread to pull on.

Makes me glad that I wasn't raised with a "faith tradition".

This is part 2 of a three part series, read part one if you missed it.

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