Yeah, it was a crisis—though few who, like the author, were sentient during the 50’s understood completely what was going on around us; viz., the erosion of the liberal intellectual order we had come, with notable encouragement, to take for granted.

When I say “take for granted,” I mean just that.  We had prayers before high-school football games?  Sure; why not?  There were prayers inside public schools?  Sure.  Societal acknowledgement of religion as a Very Good Thing?  Check.  It was the 50’s.  We followed the American Way of Life, of which religion, in a generic way, was a decided part.  It kept things sane and civil.  Even the eggheads—the Adlai Stevenson intellectuals—agreed in the main with that proposition.

George Marsden’s account of our turbulent descent from the mountaintop of consensus religion to the maelstrom of continuous contention over God’s place in our affairs merits careful study and reflection.  This is not least on account of the book’s tightness and brevity.  More to the point, it is because of Marsden’s stature as one of the country’s most respected historians of religion.  Pretty much everything Marsden writes about—fundamentalism, Christian scholarship, Jonathan Edwards—is worth noting, come to think of it.

I can think, in truth, of few topics more in need of reasoned exploration than that concerning the rapid collapse of civilization, 50’s style—so high-flying, so full of gas, when ripped unexpectedly by the passions of the 60’s.  Down, down, down went the balloon, carrying all of us with it, to . . . wherever it is we are now.  Marsden, an expert explainer, explains with clarity and erudition—and conspicuous lack of tedium—what happened as the balloon descended to the earth from the height to which it had risen at the end of World War II.  My one reservation about this excellent book I shall get to in due course.

A point worth emphasis is that Marsden has no notion—and neither should any of us—of the 50’s as an era when God and America were indistinguishable.  True, religious expression and attendance were on an upswing; religion of a generous, Enlightenment-based, science-tinged nature was part of a much-desired cultural consensus seen as essential to recovery from the strains of the previous two decades and the postwar assumption of world leadership amid extraordinary prosperity.  Various things were nonetheless worrisome.  How would we build and live a common faith if freedom, as many seemed to think, meant personal autonomy?  Who had the right to rein in the autonomous spirit?  What were the means?  John Dewey touted self-evident “goods of human association, of arts, and of knowledge”—a pretty airy-fairy concept, subject to varied interpretations.  Mainstream liberals thought their pragmatically based democratic convictions adequate to the task of maintaining cultural consensus.  They sought shared principles based on our national experience.

Walter Lippmann, deeper than these men on the whole, saw the need for recovery of natural law—built-in assumptions with real authority based on the Way We Were.  However, the nonreligious Lippmann wanted to do the job on a secular basis.  There was some merit to that approach.  America was pluralistic in religious matters and secular in her general approach to everything; the more ethereal things got—general acknowledgments and all that—the better we got along.  Once we got down to creeds, we were in trouble.  “With no objective point of moral reference,” says Marsden, paraphrasing Lippmann,

with no philosophy to teach people that there was any order or meaning beyond the subjective self, there was nothing with which to counter the madness of the masses or to preempt their madness by educating them in the traditions of civility.

Martin Luther King, Jr., demonstrated the value of natural-law anchorages in the implementation of public policy.  King’s “bedrock conviction,” Marsden reminds us, was “that moral law was built into the universe.”  What’s built-in cannot readily be evaded.  And so segregation went into the dustbin.

Various thinkers attempted various accommodations between religion as reality and religion as social mainstay.  Reinhold Niebuhr “was careful to grant scientific outlooks sovereignty in their own territories, even as he resisted imperialistic efforts to reduce human experience to naturalistic terms.”  Alas, this approach “made the faith wholly optional and dispensable.”

It all fell apart in the 60’s—not just prayer for the players and fans before football games but the assumption that the quest for personal autonomy could be kept within rational bounds.  “Flexible, inclusive pluralism” was hailed, not least by the liberal leaders of liberal denominations, “as one of the great virtues of American life.”  Except, of course, when questions arose as to the meaning of life itself, and the duties and responsibilities of those who led it.  The whole gay-marriage furor, which may end by wiping out of existence the historic, religiously based understanding of marriage, shows what happens when secularization rules the roost.  What matters is what people decide they want: no theological understandings to work around or subvert, just plain old desire as the kick start.  When God is dead, or effectively hors de combat, everything is permitted.

Nor is political action, as practiced by the Religious Right, going to turn things around.

To the contrary.  Beating secular people over the head with religious doctrines has proved inutile and divisive.  Marsden has a good chapter backing up that assertion.

Nearly every book these days delineating a crisis of some sort or another has a subtitle with the pragmatic teaser “And What to Do About It.”  Marsden’s doesn’t, and it’s a good thing, as we shall see.  The reason for these literary calls to action is that we are Americans.  We aren’t constituted to stand still while the tide of affairs rushes over and past us.  We want to do something.  Well, with respect to the situation Marsden describes so deftly, what do we do?

Marsden’s own answer, modeled on the prescription of the Dutch neo-Calvinist politician-theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), is that we should work toward “a more inclusive pluralism.”  Kuyper believed in a shared rationality, a “common grace,” as the Reformed Calvinist concept is known.  He favored respecting, as Marsden puts it, “a multiplicity of authorities in the structure of society,” reflecting, in turn, “a God-ordained ordering of social reality that people of all sorts of faith could recognize as beneficial.”  This would certainly take us beyond culture and the either/or-ness of common discourse—if, perhaps, we could figure out how to do it and who is going to lead.  The insights, however valid, of a little-known Dutchman seem to me unlikely to captivate the secularized society now in the making.  Marsden thinks “mainstream academia” could fruitfully address such matters and that journalism might undertake “the task of providing leadership in cultivating a public domain as fully inclusive of religiously shaped viewpoints as is feasible.”

What is that noise I hear?  The clearing of throats?  The media, the higher-education establishment as leaders in the cause of reattaching our attachment to true pluralism, as opposed to the spurious ethnic- or sex-based kind?  You never know, to be sure.  I would respectfully—on account of my respect for him—have to rate Marsden’s “what to do” chapter as a sort of analytical boxcar which, decoupled from the train, would not quickly be missed or sought.

And yet . . . and yet . . . I admire this book a great deal for its courage and clarity, and for Marsden’s sense of things we need to know and talk about lest we miss the point that things are different from what they were until recently; that the difference, in terms of our hopes for America, is productive of extraordinary danger; that we can’t afford to say of the modern turn of events, “It is what it is.”  What a characteristic modern American locution, that.  Not “It’s what it should be.”  No—“It’s how things are, and, excuse me, I have to check my Twitter feed.”

Maybe the old days, whatever they led to, weren’t half bad at that.

 

[The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, by George M. Marsden (New York: Basic Books) 219 pp., $26.99]