The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (13 page)

FIVE

The Latter Days of the Protestant Establishment

At the same time that faith in individual autonomy
and the authority of science was standard fare in so much of midcentury American culture, the United States was experiencing one of the most widespread religious revivals in its history. Record numbers were attending religious services of almost every type and level, from those who went to tent revivalists for healing to prosperous old-line Protestants, from fans of Billy Graham to devotees of Reinhold Niebuhr, from hyper-biblicist sects to broad spiritualists, from the white and the black rural South to the urban ethnic neighborhoods of Roman Catholics or Jews, and including varieties of other Christian and non-Christian beliefs and practices. Millions read Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman's 1946 number-one best-seller
Peace of
Mind
and the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 counterpart,
The Power of Positive Thinking
, both of which promised religiously based self-fulfillment. In 1952, a record 75 percent of Americans responding to pollsters said
that religion was “very important” in their lives. And in 1957, more than four out of five affirmed that religion was not “old fashioned and out of date,” but rather, “can answer today's problems.” Between 1950 and 1960, church affiliation jumped an amazing 14 percent, going from 55 percent of the total population to 69 percent. By the end of the 1950s, attendance at religious services similarly reached an all-time peak.
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The intriguing question that emerges, then, is this: How did these two simultaneously huge cultural trends—the consensus outlooks celebrating both scientific authority and autonomy, and the religious revival—fit with each other? More broadly, how could a culture that was so modern, secular, and antitraditional in so many of its practices and ways of thinking be at the same time so religious? How did so much religion fit with the rest of the cultural mainstream? How such questions typically were addressed in the 1950s has important implications for the subsequent rise of the religious right by the late 1970s. They also lead into the culminating theme of this book: how best to accommodate a variety of religious viewpoints in pluralistic America.

The story of religion
in the 1950s has many dimensions, but at its center is the continuing heritage of cultural leadership of the mainline Protestant churches. These were the predominantly northern, white, Protestant denominations, such as Episcopal, Congregational (United Church of Christ), Presbyterian, American Baptist, United Methodist, Disciples of Christ, various sorts of Lutheran churches, and others, that were regarded as constituting an informal religious “establish
ment.” That is, even though America had not had “established” state churches supported by taxes since its early days, Protestant Christianity still held a privileged place in the culture as the predominant religion. Mainline Protestant leaders were part of the liberal-moderate cultural mainstream, and their leading spokespersons were respected participants in the national conversation.

Protestantism had played a complementary role to more secular outlooks in public life throughout US history, and many Protestants were, of course, eager for this role to continue. It was a role that was embodied, for example, in the US Constitution. Written with remarkably little religious language for the time, the Constitution defined the federal government in a practically secular way. At the same time, the framers took care in the religion clauses of the First Amendment (“congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) to guarantee that religion might flourish in many supplemental capacities—even in tax-supported established churches in some New England states. Although the early republic was not a “Christian nation” in the sense that some conservative Christians today claim, neither was it wholly secular. Protestant Christianity retained many public privileges. Some of these were ceremonial and others were substantial. Education, which in Christendom had always had a conspicuous religious component, continued to include Protestant teachings. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, even state universities had required chapel attendance and were likely to have clergymen as presidents. Protestants could also form voting blocs large enough to
shape religiously based legislation, as in Sabbath laws, or in promoting various social and moral reforms. The last great manifestation of that public influence was in the movement for prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages, culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.

By the 1950s, although Protestants retained disproportional influence, the question loomed as to how such influence might continue. Prohibition itself had brought strong reactions against allowing one religious group to impose its restrictive teachings on everyone else. Moreover, as it was increasingly recognized that the nation included various religious, secular, and simply profane outlooks, the prospects for specific religious teachings to continue to play a role in shaping a public national consensus were looking increasingly problematic.

A prominently proposed solution
to this problem was the one offered by Protestant “modernism.” A modernist was one who saw God's work continuing to be revealed through the best developments of modern times. During the 1920s, American Protestantism became sharply divided between fundamentalists, who militantly insisted on holding onto strictly biblical teachings, and modernists, who believed
that the best way to preserve Christianity was to allow it to grow with the best thought and moral ideals of the modern world
.

The continuing influence of Protestant modernism in the 1950s might be illustrated by looking at various clergymen, theologians, and popular religious writers, but the best example is found in someone who was none of these, but far more influential: Henry Luce, head of the Time, Inc., publish
ing empire. The key to understanding Luce is that he was the child of Presbyterian missionaries, and he always remained a missionary to and for America. Born in China in 1898, he attended Yale in the World War I era. As a student he was active in Yale's famously evangelical Dwight Hall, where he sometimes preached. Although he remained religious after college, his views concerning the essence of Christianity had radically changed. In response to the challenges of modern science and modern thought, he abandoned more traditional forms of Christianity and emerged as a quintessential Protestant modernist. During the next decades, Luce continued to be an active lay Presbyterian, occasionally preaching to church and college groups. He used
Time
and
Life
to keep religion in the news, and he probably did as much as anyone in the era to sustain the idea that religion was still part of the American cultural mainstream. Although Luce's views were explicitly theistic, his application of them involved no consistent distinction between the church (and similar religious groups) and American society. America was, in effect, his church, and America's mission to the world was Henry Luce's Christian mission.
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In 1955, Luce's influential business magazine,
Fortune
, marked its twenty-fifth anniversary by publishing a series of articles by leaders in various fields speculating on what America would be like twenty-five years hence, in 1980. The projections concerning America's economic future were, as one might expect in 1955, exceedingly upbeat. Experts anticipated continuing economic growth that would lead to doubling in family incomes and a shortening of the workweek. As an aside,
the most fascinating predictions concerned the American
energy situation in 1980. A number of the authors were confident about harnessing the atom for peaceful purposes. David Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America, wrote, for instance, “I do not hesitate to forecast that atomic batteries will be commonplace long before 1980,” and that small atomic generators would be installed in homes. In another of the articles, John von Neumann of the Atomic Energy Commission went so far as to suggest that “a few decades hence energy may be free—just like unmetered air.”
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Luce himself contributed the culminating article, which was on religion. Luce reflected on how religious and material progress might continue to go hand in hand. He recognized that the nation in 1955 was in some ways undergoing a cultural crisis that conceivably could have demoralizing consequences. “Science,” he wrote, “discloses no ‘meaning' or ‘purpose.'” Moreover, “our artists and our novelists have disintegrated the human personality into the miserable shreds of degradation.” Americans overwhelmingly continued to have an immense regard for “human dignity” and still believed that life had purpose. Yet a haunting question remained: “Is our talk a last collective shout in a cosmic graveyard?” he asked. “Twenty-five years from now, will men believe still that there is in life a ‘dignity' infinitely precious—that liberty wagered against death will win and is forever worth winning?” Luce believed that the strength of America was that most of her citizens still accepted the Christian idea that life's purpose was God-given. “Our acceptance of the Christian answer,” he conceded, “is apt to be careless, shallow and ignorant, both in theory and in practice; but it is the one we are used to; it is the one which, despite our
quarrels and uproars, has given to American life and politics a remarkable
consensus
.” He also believed that the consensus was based on a widely shared sense of divinely instituted principles. At almost the same time as he penned his
Fortune
article, he used a university address to respond to Walter Lippmann's call for a basis for a public philosophy. “Mr. Lippmann,” said Luce, “writes as a pessimist, I speak as an optimist.” His answer to the dour Lippmann was simply that America already had a public philosophy, one that only recently had been reiterated by President Eisenhower himself, who had proclaimed that the nation's laws were “rooted in moral law, respecting a religious faith that man is created in the image of God.”
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The central question facing Americans, Luce emphasized in his
Fortune
speculations, was whether they would preserve their publicly shared faith in the face of the intellectual and social challenges of the coming era. Continuing growth and
change in response to new challenges was the essence of the Protestant modernist agenda. Christianity, Luce assured his readers, would endure to the end of time, yet it would have to adjust to changing civilization in order to do so. Luce cited the missionary slogan that “the gospel must be preached in every tongue,” but interpreted it to mean that “
it must be preached in the different language of every different age
.” The great intellectual challenge to the faith in the early twentieth century had been modern science. But America, Luce assured,
had moved beyond the Scopes trial and its false choice of science
or
religion. The consensus now, he believed, was that
science and religion were not in conflict but simply “two distinct worlds” with correspondingly distinct standards. That
recognition had brought peace between science and religion. The next step was to bring cooperation. That was what Luce foresaw, or at least that is what he hoped for: that by 1980, there would be a new view of man in “collaboration with God in the whole of evolution.”
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Henry Luce's hopes that by 1980 most Americans would share a common faith proved almost as far off the mark as the
Fabulous Future
predictions that energy would become virtually free. In Luce's case, he was projecting the theological modernist hope into the future. That hope was that the essence of true theism, derived largely but not exclusively from the Christian heritage, would serve as a higher point of reference in guiding the United States as the country led Western civilization and the world in “the American century.” That shared faith would be pluralistic in the sense characteristic of the 1950s, in that it would be inclusive of peoples of many sub-
faiths. For Luce and for many of his generation, such a growing inclusive pluralism fit their experience. Religion had not declined, as many during the cultural crisis of the 1920s had predicted it would. Public expressions of a common faith were growing. Yet the sort of shared, generically Christian/American religion that Luce was projecting into the future was already too problematic to long endure as a substantial part of American public life
.

The fact was that
despite the religious revival taking place at almost every level, American culture of the 1950s was simultaneously strikingly secular. “Secular” here means only that most activities were conducted without direct rel
igious reference, not that they were necessarily antireligious. For instance, religious faith had only tangential influences throughout the economic system or in typical workplaces, huge areas of the culture. Furthermore, growing dependence on technology created other vast areas of technical activity that by their nature had little to do with faith. As the French sociologist-philosopher Jacques Ellul would soon be pointing out, “technique” had to do not only with literal technology but also with the technological principle that determined so much of modern activity in culture, business, and even sports. That driving principle was the search for the most rational and efficient means of getting a job done. So a modern corporation, for instance, might as a matter of course uproot “personnel,” with no regard for family, religious, or community considerations, and move them to a distant city, because that was the most efficient way to maximize profits. Moreover, if what is considered important to pass on to the next generation is an index of the priorities of a civilization, it is revealing that religious considerations had almost nothing to do with the subject matter taught in public schools. Even most religious people were content to supplement secular public-school teachings merely with a twenty-minute Sunday-school lesson. In higher education, religion could be studied as an area of special interest, but it was rarely considered as a possible norm or even as a point of reference regarding the vast majority of what was taught. Indeed, the dominant public discourse of the era that we have been considering was conducted mostly without religious reference. Faith was sometimes a matter of controversy that entered into politics and the news, but most often it was
treated as a special interest, so that even in Henry Luce's
Time
, where it sometimes rated a cover story, it was otherwise confined to its own section, beside leisure, sports, and the arts.
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