The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (14 page)

The paradox of having so many religious people participating in a culture so detached from religious concerns is best described in terms of the “privatization” of religion. In diverse modern societies, privatization is the most common way of dealing with traditional religious faiths. In the religiously diverse United States, it has typically been considered fine to practice a specific religious faith as a private option, but one's faith is not supposed to intrude in any substantive way into the spheres of one's public activities. Some degree of privatization seems almost necessary in a highly diverse society in which many activities are technologically defined. Privatization helps people to cooperate in public activities. Since the late twentieth century, privatization has been conspicuously the dominant (though far from unchallenged) way of dealing with religious diversity. What is less recognized, at least in popular perceptions, is the degree to which privatization was already far advanced in the very religious 1950s.

The extent of privatization during that decade was obscured by its incompleteness. There was still enough regard for religious expression in public for it to seem as if faith were integral to national life. World War II, the Cold War, and the religious revival had temporarily slowed the longer-term trends toward privatization. Even some very traditional religious viewpoints were getting good press in a way they had not in the 1920s or 1930s. Billy Graham is the outstanding instance. He had the ear of presidents and, despite his essen
tially fundamentalist gospel, had made his peace with the mainline Protestant establishment. He was a major voice to be heard on public issues. That popularity overshadowed the fact that most of the preachers who proclaimed such a born-again message—even some with very large followings, such as Pentecostal Oral Roberts—were clearly cultural outsiders with no such voice. Catholics had also gained in mainstream recognition and respectability since World War II. Despite some renewal of anti-Catholicism marked by Paul Blanshard's 1949 best-seller,
American Freedom and Catholic Power
, by the end of the 1950s relations between mainline Protestants and Catholics had thawed. At the popular level, Bishop Fulton Sheen's TV show,
Life Is Worth Living
, in which he explained Catholic
doctrine with a dramatic flair, became one of the most popular shows of the era. And the progressive Catholic priest Father
John Courtney Murray received much favorable attention for his essays in
We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition
, published in 1960 when Senator John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was running for president. In addition, major mainline Protestant theologians, of whom
Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were the best known, consistently commanded significant attention in the national
conversation. All of these made the cover of
Time
magazine.
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These conspicuous public expressions could make it seem that some sort of shared religious faith was alive and well and might have a bright future even as it became more inclusive. The mainline Protestant establishment seemed in many ways to be thriving. All the biggest and oldest denominations were growing. The National Council of Churches provided a
prominent public voice for mainline Protestants. Nonetheless, that degree of cooperation also obscured the extent to which American Protestantism was in fact deeply and often sharply divided between North and South, white and black, Anglo old-stock versus newer ethnic, and inclusive mainline versus exclusive and often separatist fundamentalist, conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals. Many of these had no public voice, except perhaps locally.

Such divisions, and the degree of privatization they fostered, were also obscured by a compensating increase in generalized public religious affirmations, especially of an undefined common theism. The Cold War was widely perceived as a battle against “godless communism.” For many Americans, including American leaders, that was not simply a rhetorical issue. President Harry S. Truman and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as many leading diplomats, regarded the conflict with the atheistic Soviet Union as involving a spiritual conflict.
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President Eisenhower, moreover, was especially effective in promoting what later became known as American “civil religion” as a way of strengthening a consensus of domestic resolve in the struggle against communism. Civil religion is a popular piety that treats the nation itself as an object of worship. It involves engaging in symbolic rituals, such as honoring the flag and observing national holidays, as well as hallowing the memories of great leaders. In the 1950s, such shared national piety played a significant role in building a sense of consensus. In 1954, Congress reinforced the popularity of such trends by adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and two years later it adopted “In God we trust” as the national motto.

Such acts of national piety strengthened a sense that the nation's religious heritage was doing just fine, despite a lot of evidence that could have been interpreted to the contrary. American disestablishment of religion had allowed room for formal religious expression even within the government and public schools. The US Congress as well as state legislatures and many public events were opened with predominantly Protestant invocations. In public schools, Bible reading and Christian prayers were common. Public school Christmas programs were likely to be largely Christian, and schools sponsored Christian baccalaureate services for graduating seniors. Many localities maintained Sunday “blue laws,” such as prohibiting the sale of alcohol on that day, as a continuing expression of Protestant privilege. Most of these religious expressions were leftovers of the era of Christendom, but the fact that they were still in place signaled a formal respect for that heritage.

In popular culture, even though entertainment was overwhelmingly secular, there was enough public celebration of religion and room for religious options to make it seem at least religion-friendly. Celebrities spoke sentimentally of “the man upstairs.” Film star and sex symbol Jane Russell famously characterized God as a “livin' doll.” Movies typically cast Catholic priests as manly and caring.
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Religion also sold well, so film spectacles, such as
Ben Hur
,
The Ten Commandments
, and
The Robe
, became blockbuster hits. “He's Got the Whole World in His Hands,” performed by the English singer Laurie London, reached number one on the hits charts in 1958. Elvis Presley's Christmas album, which included one side of religious numbers, became an all-time best-seller. The combination of
widespread religious practice and public religious expression created a sense that religion was fundamental to American life, or at least should be.

The superficialities of much of this common public faith did not go unnoticed at the time, especially by those who held out for the more specific faith of a particular religion. The most influential work calling attention to the tensions between these two kinds of faith was Will Herberg's sociologically based study
Protestant-Catholic-Jew
, published in 1955. Herberg had gone through the requisite radical phase of intellectuals of his generation, but had been influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr and had become conservative regarding both religion and culture. Being Jewish himself, he celebrated that Catholics and Jews were becoming part of the American mainstream,
but he believed it was at the price of effectively subordinating
their traditional religious beliefs and practices to the
operative
religion of most Americans, “the American Way of Life.”
That operative shared religion included faith in the dignity of the individual, the superiority of American democracy, and the pragmatic doctrine of “deeds not creeds.” It thus turned
religion from being the highest value into an instrument for promoting other values that in practice proved to be a person's higher concerns. Many Americans who professed faith neither knew nor cared much about the particulars of their religious tradition.
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Martin Marty, a young Lutheran scholar, offered further insights into the situation in
The New Shape of American Religion
, which appeared in 1959. The so-called revival of religion, Marty explained, was largely a revival of “interest in religion.”
Unlike earlier American awakenings, this one was not primarily a renewal of Protestantism but “
a maturing national religion
.” And this national religion, which was shared even by many of the unchurched, was strikingly vague. Most Americans seemed to be in favor of a God of “religion-in-general.” Marty quoted Eugene Carson Blake, president of the National Council of Churches, who had characterized this religion as “America's humanistic nationalism.” “This ideology is what an American is if nobody tampers with his attitudes,” said Blake. “His articles of faith are science (in its engineering applications), common sense (his own ideas), the Golden Rule (in its negative form), sportsmanship, and individual independence.” Blake called this faith “humanism” not because such Americans did not believe in God, but because God for them served as a sort of useful ally in support of these beliefs.
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The problem, as Marty himself framed it, was a variation on the theme of the decade: conformity. Even Americans who were active in churches, said Marty, were likely to subordinate
their professed traditional theological beliefs to the pervasive national creed. Americans had built a consensus around a
“religion of democracy.” They often blended their traditional religious beliefs with faith in America. President Eisenhower's typical utterances, such as “A democracy cannot exist without a religious base,” reinforced this blending. The underlying beliefs of most Americans, even though they might be expressed
in Christian terms, were essentially “secular and humanistic
.” Their humanism could be found not only in their
faith in democratic government, but also in the self-help faith of
a Norman Vincent Peale and in general affirmations that re
ligious
faith was a step toward wholeness and self-fulfillment. Belief in nonconformity had become the new conformity. So church people, ironically, often conformed to the prevailing secular American ideals of autonomy and individuality. These ubiquitous ideals of an “independent, individualistic or autonomous man” were essentially secular, as they owed more to America's enlightenment heritage than they did to its Christian background.
“
‘Enlightenment' man,” declared Marty, was “behind much of the Protestant compulsion to create a new individualism.”
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If, as Herberg, Marty
, and many others were pointing out, characteristic American religious belief often intersected with the mainstream culture in ways that only reinforced essentially secular trends, what was the alternative? In answering that question, no one was more often cited as a prophetic counterexample than Reinhold Niebuhr. Will Herberg and Martin Marty were both admirers of Niebuhr. Martin Luther King Jr. was also significantly shaped by Niebuhr, and in turn helped to show how African American Christianity could be the most conspicuous exception to any claims of insubstantial religious influence in public life. So wide was Niebuhr's influence, not only in mainline Protestant churches but even among liberal intellectuals, that Harvard philosopher Morton White tagged a significant contingent of his followers as “atheists for Niebuhr.”
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Niebuhr's reputation was well deserved. He was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and he is well worth studying today. He taught at Union Theological
Seminary in New York, just across the street from Columbia University, and thus was near the epicenter of American cultural life. As a prophetic voice he was most effective in challenging the assumptions underlying both of the great ideals of the day, faith in science and faith in self-determination. The underlying assumption in both cases was optimism about the ability of humans to control their own destinies. Niebuhr countered that optimism by rehabilitating the Christian doctrine of “original sin.” At the core of the human condition was an egotism marked by a tendency to think too highly of oneself. Freedom, or the ability to transcend the determination of mere natural forces, was what distinguished humans from
the beasts. But humans also had an inbuilt tendency to mistake
that transcendence for an autonomy in which they viewed themselves as captains of their own destinies. Especially striking in Niebuhr's analysis of original sin was the idea that humans were corrupted not only by their open vices, but just as much by their virtues and accomplishments, which became sources of their pride. Niebuhr was a master of the telling paradox. “A too confident sense of justice,” he characteristically observed, “always leads to injustice.” Everyone, individuals as well as nations, needed to be humbled, and to be humbled they had to see themselves from a larger perspective, ultimately from the divine perspective.
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One implication of the doctrine of original sin, or of ineradicable human egotism, was Niebuhr's “realism” in human affairs, which included his insistence that force might be necessary to counter evil. The twentieth century had proven that political problems could not be solved simply by goodwill and
scientifically based social engineering. So for many, Niebuhr's realism was a welcome antidote to the superficial optimism of utopian, romantic, and scientifically based promises to move the race toward perfection.

Niebuhr's popularity among so many thoughtful observers reveals a side of the 1950s that is sometimes overlooked. Despite the upbeat character of much of the culture of postwar America, despite the popularity of Norman Vincent Peale and “trust yourself” psychology, despite all the recommendations for autonomy, there was another strong undertow pulling in the opposite direction, suggesting there might be a fundamental flaw in the human condition. The twentieth century illustrated unprecedented dimensions of human brutality and “inhumanity” and great propensities toward self-deception in turning ideologies into blinding absolutes. The prevailing American optimism and self-confidence were undercut by uncertainties and anxieties born of historical realities as well as by the ever-present possibility of atomic holocaust. Niebuhr's
works resonated with many literary works, too, such as those of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Flannery O'Connor
, who depicted deep-seated and seemingly irremediable human failings. Niebuhr often invoked the Jewish and Christian heritage of recognizing that humans were inherently sinful and therefore needed to depend on God. Nonetheless, as Morton White observed, many of his readers could accept his insights on the paradoxes of human nature while ignoring the theological ground of his arguments.
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