A democratic & republican religion

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Interesting, any thoughts?

A democratic &

republican religion

by Marc M. Arkin

The United States is without question one of the most religious countries in the industrialized world. Current surveys indicate that over 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, compared with 62 percent of the French and 52 percent of Swedes. About two-thirds of Americans claim church membership, 40 percent say they go to church once a week, 60 percent go monthly, and 43 percent describe themselves as born-again Christians. Three times as many people in the United States believe in the virgin birth as in evolution. Although twenty-nine million Americans say they have no religion, fewer than 5 percent of the population will admit to atheism or even agnosticism. Whether these figures reflect reality is irrelevant; the point is that the vast majority of Americans want to be seen as religious and think it unacceptable to be viewed otherwise, even by an anonymous polltaker. This is hardly surprising since 58 percent of Americans—as opposed to only 13 percent of the French and 25 percent of the British, but along with 89 percent of Pakistanis—think it necessary to believe in God in order to be moral.

Yet, at the very same time, thoughtful Americans of all denominations complain that religion is excluded from American public life. They point to the dominant secular culture and to the separationist constitutional regime that assertedly favors it. In fact, there are two separationist cases on the Supreme Court docket this term—whether a state must provide scholarship funds to support a student’s training for the Christian ministry and whether the phrase “under God” can remain in the Pledge of Allegiance. The irony is that the Court sessions that heard both cases—like every other Supreme Court session—began with the invocation, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”

This American inconsistency has a long pedigree; the same week that Congress passed the final draft of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, both houses also passed a measure providing funds for congressional chaplains. Indeed, the Non- Separating Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—they who limited the franchise to adult male church members who had experienced a saving work of God in their own souls, and who were still hanging Quakers on Boston Common well after it was illegal in England—believed themselves to have established the most secular state in the world because they had no ecclesiastical courts and ministers did not hold public office. What is more, they were probably right. American religious history admits of no easy generalizations.

In actuality, religion is ubiquitous in American life; the airwaves, for example, are saturated with what religion people call “God talk.” The tension between secularism and religion is a fundamental and enduring part of American culture, a tradition as longstanding as the Puritan jeremiad itself. Instead, I would argue that the present-day issue is not the absence of religion from the public arena, but that religion has become a commodity like any other product of mass culture, leaving it all but bereft of its power to support independent moral norms.

To understand this situation, it seems to me, one must look to the historical development of American religion over the last century and a half. For that, there is no better starting point than the account of religion in American life written by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831. De Tocqueville observed,

Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.

Everyone to whom de Tocqueville spoke offered the same explanation for this novel state of affairs: “they all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country to the separation of church and state.” From this he concluded,

Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions… . Despotism may govern without faith but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic … than in the monarchy … ; it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened as the political tie is relaxed?

In providing the foundation for a free social order and government, American religion was indubitably “republican.” Yet de Tocqueville was too astute an observer not to perceive that democratic mores themselves exerted an effect on religion. Even in the 1830s, de Tocqueville recognized a certain homogenization of religious doctrine—even between Catholics and Protestants—and the pervasiveness of a “passion for well-being” in religious exchange. Of American preachers, he remarked that “it is often difficult to ascertain from their discourses whether the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the other world or prosperity in this.” And, of democratic religiosity, he presciently noted a tendency to pantheism, an egalitarian desire to identify the Creator and His creation. Recent writers have seen in these tendencies a single, peculiarly democratic constellation of beliefs, a modern instantiation of the gnostic impulse, which plays itself out in the restless American hope for hermetic knowledge—preferably of a fabulistic variety—that will yield individual salvation in the form of personal well-being. However conceived, from the arrival of the first white settlers, American religious life has been characterized by a tension between the authority of organized denominations and the individual search for religious fulfillment, with its myriad spiritual experiments, a tension that the Puritans characterized as that between community and calling.

But to return to our theme, how do de Tocqueville’s observations regarding the dual nature of American religion unfold in the century and a half after he made them? In nineteenth-century America, the great dividing point in religious life, as in everything else, was the Civil War. Before the War, America was predominantly Protestant, and that Protestantism was self-confidently evangelical in orientation, barely creedal—save the stray Presbyterian. It was directed at seizing the cultural initiative through the social reform activities of the so-called Benevolent Empire—activities ranging from temperance and missionary societies to abolitionism. These evangelically dominated voluntary associations provided the “meditating institutions”—to use Montesquieu’s term—that the fledgling republic lacked, supporting the social fabric both morally and institutionally. Preoccupation with the approaching sectional conflict postponed the encounter with the “modern” that was already taking place in Europe and that eventually fueled the growth of liberal theology. Pre-war theological liberalism, as the old joke goes, was confined to the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston. Instead, American Protestantism was driven by an immediate belief in the apocalyptic realization of God’s kingdom.

After the Civil War, faced with the intellectual challenge posed by Darwin’s evolutionary theories and the social challenge posed by urbanization, as well as a drastic shift in immigration patterns, the intellectual synthesis of the mainline Protestant denominations splintered. While still wedded to the hope of bringing about God’s kingdom, liberal Protestants, to use Richard Niebuhr’s phrase, “turned from the expectation of heavenly bliss to the hope of a radical transformation of life on earth,” whether in the form of health, as in Christian Science and the prophecies of Ellen White, founder of Adventism, or prosperity, as in the preaching of Henry Ward Beecher (Congregationalist), or social amelioration, as in the writings of Washington Gladden (Congregationalist) and William Rauschenbusch (German Baptist), key thinkers in the movement known as the Social Gospel.

Despite obvious differences, each of these groups is properly within the line of theological liberalism since, in the language of historical theology, they were all Arminian or Pelagian. They believed in man’s freedom and his capacity for altruism or at least melioration. To them, sin was either a form of error, which education and the example of Jesus could mitigate, or the product of poverty, which social reform could correct. For them, God was no longer the inscrutible sovereign, but the embodiment of parental love. Despite their genetic ties to the older Evangelical reform movements, for these liberals, the embrace of Christ in culture was complete.

Conversely, the evangelical side of American religion—that part of American religious life that claimed a direct line of descent from John Wesley’s apostle George Whitefield through Charles Finney—remained wedded to the belief in an imminent parousia based on grace and divine sovereignty that we might call Christ against culture. Even within the anti-modernist camp, however, there was a divide between those who emphasized biblical inerrancy—spearheaded by the Princeton theology—and those who sought the direct experience of the Holy Spirit. The former tended to have roots in the more creedally oriented traditions such as Presbyterianism, while the latter tended to come out of Methodism, with its perfectionist elements, and the black churches, which had followed a largely independent line of development since hiving off from the mainline churches about seventy-five years earlier.

As the turn of the century approached, millennial expectations intensified across the religious spectrum. For liberals, hopes focused on the World Parliament of Religion at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, an event that seized the public imagination in ways now difficult to recapture. As representatives of many of the world’s faiths—from Hinduism and Baha’i to Judaism—gathered for scholarly discussions, liberal Protestant leaders enthusiastically likened the day to a new Pentecost. Disconcerting many of the non-Christian delegates, they proclaimed the Parliament as a harbinger of the triumphant spread of the gospel message, completing the apostolic mission to the gentiles, rather than taking it as an opportunity for ecumenical relations among equals.

At the same time, other groups interpreted the metaphor of a new Pentecost quite literally and prayed for a return of the wonders of the Apostolic Church. At first, scattered congregations experienced the “latter rain” (Joel 2:21-32) in a new Holiness Revival, but the movement did not truly catch fire until 1906, when a mixed-race congregation in Azusa, California experienced an outpouring of charismatic phenomena. Pentecostalism quickly spread across a number of denominations, subdividing as it went, appealing in particular to the poor and marginal. To this day, the movement remains characterized by an emphasis on the egalitarian gifts of the spirit, particularly speaking in tongues and faith healing, and a deep skepticism regarding creedal orthodoxy. Pentecostalism initially met with a deeply critical response from Fundamentalist conservatives, although the two groups have moved closer together over the issue of biblical inerrancy in recent years.

In addition to their shared hope for the kingdom—however conceived—both modernist and antimodernist Protestants were deeply infused with other elements of the broader democratic culture, with roots in the antebellum period: sentimentalism and militancy. Post-war sentimentalism flowered in the popular consolation literature of the period—most notoriously, Elizabeth Stuart Phelp’s The Gates Ajar (1868), with its portrayal of a heaven in which every house has a piano—and the florid effusions of that self-described cordial Christian evolutionist (and philanderer) Henry Ward Beecher. So-called “muscular Christians,” for their part, stressed the manly virtues of physical fitness and the realization of America’s mission in world history. If Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” provided their overture, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” gave them an abiding theme. I should add that the Anglican High Churchman Sabine Baring-Gould wrote this most rousing of Victorian hymns in 1865; Arthur Sullivan wrote the music.

In fact, despite its apparent oppositional stance, during this time evangelical revivalism jettisoned most of its serious theological content and itself became a powerful engine of mass culture. The pathbreakers in this regard were the sentimentalist Dwight L. Moody and his musical assistant Ira Sankey. When Moody retired in 1892, his mantle was taken up by Billy Sunday, a former outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings, who embodied the fighting Christianity of America’s emergence as a world power. In 1917, the peak year of Sunday’s ministry, he drew 1,443,000 to his ten-week New York campaign; converts numbered 98,264. In Sunday’s hands, the “altar call”—that moment when Christians publicly professed an experience of God’s saving grace—was thoroughly democratized: “How many of you men and women will jump to your feet and come down and say, ‘Bill, here’s my hand for God, for home, for my native land, to live and conquer for Christ’?”

This shared culture also enabled liberals and conservatives to put aside their differences in a series of efforts to retain control of the social fabric. Anti-Catholicism—an American perennial—regained its vitality as an expression of nationalism. From James G. Blaine’s proposed constitutional amendment of 1875, prohibiting any state or federal aid to religious charities or schools, to the 1887 foundation of the American Protective Association (through the quasi- religious ceremonies of the Ku Klux Klan in the South and Midwest in the 1920s and 30s), anti-Catholic groups appropriated the rhetoric of separation of Church and State to express the country’s white Protestant identity. Further, during the 1920s, America began its experiment with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages—an experiment that many have seen as a last ditch effort of native Protestants to impose their norms on immigrant groups, including northern European Lutherans.

It was also during the early decades of the twentieth century, in a further embrace of culture, that the driving metaphor of mainline American religion shifted from the coming kingdom to the therapeutic community: religion was supposed to make people integrated and happy. The end of man, pace John Calvin, was no longer to glorify God, but to find inner harmony, proving de Tocqueville’s point. Much as it pains me, space constraints require that I pass quickly over such seminal works of American popular religious culture as Charles M. Sheldon’s best-selling novel In His Steps (1896)—in which members of a middle-class congregation find contentment through a vow not to do anything that Jesus wouldn’t do—or Bruce Barton’s 1925 bestseller The Man Nobody Knows, in which Jesus is a Midwestern Rotarian.

By mid-century, the message was right there in the titles: Fulton J. Sheen’s Peace of Soul (1949) and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). In A Guide to Confident Living, Peale put the worldly message bluntly: “To get anywhere with faith, learn to pray big prayers. God will rate you according to the size of your prayers.” Books, of course, were just the tip of the iceberg. Radio harbored such figures as Father Coughlin and, more marginally, perhaps, Father Divine and Reverend Ike. Sheen had a television show. Even Hollywood cashed in on the Bible. There were The Ten Commandments (1923), famously remade in 1956 with Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Ramses, The Robe (1953), and Samson and Delilah (1950), a big budget movie with Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature in the title roles—forerunners of Mel Gibson’s unimaginably successful and idiosyncratic The Passion of the Christ (2004). The problem of trying to please both God and Mammon comes through clearly in an interview with Jane Russell—she of the full figure—in which Ms. Russell offered her assessment that God was a “livin’ doll”—not quite the God of wrath of the Old Testament.

In fact, religious entertainment grew with the economy from the period 1960 to 1990. Forces of Evangelicalism, learning quickly from their liberal brethren, took to the airwaves with the CBN, the PTL (Praise the Lord) cable network, and such evangels of the gospel as Jimmy Bakker (The 700 Club) and Jimmy Swaggart, not to mention the more respectable Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (Liberty Broadcasting Network). Bakker’s ministry branched out into a Christian theme park, which included a Christian conference center and a shopping mall that sold religious books alongside jewelry and clothing. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the interpenetration of wordly concerns and religiosity is the still flourishing market in Bible-based diet books (More of Jesus, Less of Me), sex manuals, and a magazine-like version of the New Testament that intersperses scripture with Christian beauty tips (“use the time spent applying sun screen to talk to God”).

Although “New Age” religious groups receive press coverage disproportionate to their numbers, they still serve to illustrate the perennial effort of Americans to remake themselves in their own image, no matter how bizarre. But at this juncture, they are also an indication of the poverty of the spiritual fare offered by traditional mainstream faiths. The protean term “New Age” itself covers a multitude of sins; it appears to have first gained currency in 1972 when the Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert re-created himself as Baba Ram Dass. But most New Age phenomena are united in the claim that they bring alternative—and better—paths to mental and physical health. They have, as it were, united the fabulist aspect of the gnostic impulse with the American search for well-being. From Scientology to transcendental meditation, from spirit channelling to crystal therapies, these faiths give the lie to the argument that the Enlightenment has triumphed in America, particularly among the educated and elite classes. Shirley MacLaine and Tom Cruise might not be caught dead in a mainline church, but they are perfectly willing to seek their spiritual counsel from J. Z. Knight (who gets her information direct from a Cro-Magnon-era warrior named Ramtha) or Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and his E-meters. If these groups are genuine embodiments of the prophetic impulse, then it can truly be said that God works in mysterious ways.

This democraticization—and religious proliferation—may be the inevitable accompaniment of the voluntarism that is American religion’s great source of strength and energy. To be at once “republican and democratic” is an inherently unstable state of affairs, as the founding generation well understood. In that vein, today’s last word should go to Matthew Arnold. In Culture and Anarchy, he wrote, “One may say that to be reared a member of a national Church is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help towards culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man … has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as well.” Of course, Arnold was thinking about an English church of a bygone era, but it remains true that having to confront and conform one’s thoughts to a received body of faith and tradition is a steadying influence in life, if only as a matter of self-discipline and its moral consequences. In succumbing to the forces of democraticization and becoming an indistinguishable part of the wider culture, American religion has to a great degree relinquished that role.

Marc M. Arkin is a professor of law at Fordham University.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/sum04/arkin.htm