Harold Bloom,The American Religion
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)

Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America
(San Francisco: Harper, 2002)

David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great
Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2007)

Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984)

Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003)

The wall of separation between church and state in America, so described by Jefferson, has always been porous. The separation doctrine is constitutionally established and has been successful in guaranteeing freedom of religious worship in America and not establishing a particular denomination as America’s official religion. Nonetheless, there has been a fervent devotion to religious belief in American culture from the beginning, and while the connection between church and state has been informal, it has been real in its influence on public, as well as private, morality. Now, however, this informal but real bond between church and state in America is undergoing dissolution. There has been an undeniable change over the past fifty years in the religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices of the American people. In general, this seems to be due to the decline of the influence of Protestantism in its various forms, which has largely dominated the American ethos. The decline probably began in the 1950s rather than the 1960s, at a time when American self-confidence was at its highest, when social mobility became available to all classes, when self-definition seemed the prerogative of every American citizen and of the nation itself, and when sexual mores were loosening.

The picture of religion’s influence in America was never less than complex, as Catholic influences came to North America even earlier than Protestant influences in the upper Midwest, Southwest and Southeast, where different Protestant denominations such as the Anglicans, Quakers, Lutherans, and Congregationalists dominated different regions, and where Jewish congregations were early arrivals as well. But the benign attitude of Americans toward religion may be best revealed by the number of religions which are, so to speak, native to it. A partial list of native-born religious denominations is enough to make the point, as it includes Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Southern Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and, most recently, Scientologists. All of these religious denominations originated in the United States and now have adherents worldwide numbering in the hundreds of thousands and in some cases the millions.

What the five books discussed in this essay have in common is their attempt to describe the contemporary setting of religion in American life in the context of the dissolution of the informal bonds between Protestant Christianity and the civic order. The authors of these books describe, each in their own way, the contemporary characteristics of religious life in America, but proceed from there to propose an interpretation of the intimate connection between American religious belief and American culture as it exists “after the fall.”” As Sam Tanenhaus has written, “”only in America do religious and political ideals become interchangeable, even indistinguishable.””[1] Thus, even as the dissolution of the informal bonds between church and state is taking place, new descriptions of the relationship are being formulated.

The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith is the second of Alan Wolfe’s books about the contemporary situation of religion in American life; the first was One Nation After All,[2] which was based on surveys of the attitudes on various issues of religious believers in the United States. Wolfe’s thesis in that book was that despite religious differences, Americans have more or less the same general attitudes on such issues as patriotism, racism, welfare, homosexuality, and politics. Wolfe is an avowed liberal, and he cheers the apparent fact that their beliefs did not so sharply differentiate religious believers from the rest of the general populace and that believers showed much more tolerance about these issues than secular-minded citizens might expect. In The Transformation of American Religion he explores this theme further, making the general assertion that in America religion itself has been transformed. As he says, “”In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture, and American culture has triumphed.””[3]

Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, and as a personal note I will mention that in 2005 I attended a summer seminar run by Wolfe entitled “”Religious Diversity and the Common Good.”” The seminar was attended by college professors with an interest in religion and underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities. As a teacher Wolfe was eminently fair-minded, not at all resembling the cliché of the liberal professor who will not accept any deviation from his political convictions. At the beginning of the book he criticizes the antireligious sentiments of academics “”especially in the humanities and social sciences.””[4]Wolfe is exceptionally well-informed and articulate, characteristics on view in Transformation. He is a well-known public intellectual who writes frequently for the liberal New Republic.

The general method of Transformation relies on the techniques of social science, which have certain characteristic advantages as well as disadvantages. (One of the influential pioneers of using social science techniques to analyze religion in America is Peter Berger, who influenced both Wolfe and Neuhaus.) The great advantage of relying on social science to examine religion is that it allows for a dispassionate comparison of the entire range of religious expression and experience that occurs throughout the contemporary United States. Social science attempts to be value-free, and so dogmatic assertions peculiar to individual religions are not allowed to dominate the overall analysis. Wolfe often relies on his own observations of worship services, plus interviews with believers and leaders of churches, temples, and mosques throughout his book. He mainly relies on the reports of other social scientists who have studied the field of religion in America, and while there is a very large number of such studies, Wolfe seems well-acquainted with the material. Relying on social science to study religion has certain built-in disadvantages as well, for a dispassionate approach may leave the researcher unable to understand the power of religious belief to motivate believers and a value-neutral approach tends to ignore or underestimate the place of doctrine as a means of informing worship and unifying religious bodies.[5]

Transformation is well-organized with a constant theme throughout, namely that despite the recent rise in religious belief, the content of American religious practice is conformable with the beliefs and attitudes of the nonreligious part of American culture; this theme is brought forth forcefully and clearly in the Introduction, “”The Passing of Old-Time Religion,”” which explains and in effect celebrates what Wolfe sees as the decline of intense religious belief. The Conclusion is titled “”Is Democracy Safe From Religion?”” Despite the ominous nature of the question, Wolfe concludes that democracy is safe from religion, for the subtext in this chapter and throughout the book is what Wolfe fears is the danger posed to American democracy by the rise of the Religious Right, personified by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The central eight chapters contain the meat of the book as each chapter examines a particular aspect of religion; the chapter titles are each one word and readily designate their subjects: worship, fellowship, doctrine, tradition, morality, sin, witness, and identity. Wolfe’s procedure in discussing each topic is to first define it and then to show its transformation from a prescriptive mode to a more tolerant one in the context of various religious denominations. The fourth chapter, “”Tradition,”” provides an example of Wolfe’s method. After a brief introductory section, he tracks the subject from Orthodox Judaism to Conservative and Reform Judaism, and then to Protestantism and Catholicism. He concludes the chapter with a brief section, “”An Innovative God.”” Wolfe says regarding the Orthodox, “”If Jews emphasize the value of tradition among Americans, the Orthodox emphasize the importance of tradition among Jews.””[6] He starts the chapter with a consideration of the Jewish faith because it places such a high value on tradition. Wolfe starts with the Orthodox segment of contemporary American Judaism because it is the segment most concerned with strictly preserving the ways in which the ancient faith has been practiced and understood for millennia. Yet, Wolfe points out, contemporary Orthodox believers are constantly having to interpret their specific traditions in light of American culture regarding dress, segregation of the sexes at worship, kosher food practices, and observing the Sabbath. The degree to which the ancient practices are preserved and which specific practices are retained distinguishes Orthodox believers not only from the culture at large but from other Jewish groups as well. Wolfe points out that the recent interest in Orthodox Judaism among younger Jews, starting in the 1960s, came about because of its existence as a form of countercultural expression.[7]

Wolfe next treats Conservative and Reform Judaism, but not in detail, using a few anecdotes and quotes to make his point that even as these segments of modern American Judaism retreat from strict observance of ritual traditions, they also attempt to revise the traditions to fit modern life-styles. Thus, Reform Jews must choose which traditions to ignore, such as sex segregation in worship services, and may argue about the wearing of the yarmulke. Wolfe argues, somewhat against the grain, that even if they reject tradition in general as in Reform Judaism, Jews are still dealing with tradition—how much of it to retain in order to stay attached to their identity and heritage, and how much to revise or discard in order to accommodate life in today’s America. Wolfe’s comparative analysis indicates that Conservative Judaism seeks to retain the connection with Jewish religious tradition as expressed in the Torah and in traditional ritual practices but that Reform Judaism has discarded the explicitly religious dimension of Jewish identity and replaced it with a zealous concern for activism and social change.[8]

Wolfe proceeds in his analysis of tradition to examine evangelical Protestantism. Here he finds a contradiction at the heart of the recent movement to revive evangelicalism and Pentecostalism within contemporary Protestantism. This movement seems to be a return to “”old-time”” religion, separating itself from mainline churches by emphasizing the personal experience of salvation; nonetheless, the movement is strongly antitraditional. Wolfe asserts this based on the fact that evangelical churches spring up and are designed to appeal to various currents in contemporary society, e.g., appealing to discontented minority youths in the inner city or to well-established white middle-class suburban families. Individual evangelical churches are designed to appeal directly to specific social subsets by means of altering worship services and modifying the gospel message itself to fit the needs of that particular set of potential worshippers. “”The fact that evangelicals approach their faith in such innovative ways, however, simply underscores how dynamic conservative religion in the United States has become.””[9] Wolfe concludes the section on evangelicals in this chapter by pointing out that the recent upsurge in evangelical involvement in (right-wing) politics represents a break from tradition, for had “”conservative Protestants adhered to the traditional preference for personal salvation over political activism”” we would not have had the mass movement against abortion or possibly the presidency of George W. Bush.

Catholics are the last group that Wolfe deals with in the chapter on tradition and here he shows how the church that is taken to be the paradigmatic example of a religious institution that reveres tradition and rejects the appeals of modernity has in fact not done so. But Wolfe’s case is easy to make since the Catholic Church in America has undergone two major shifts in the last two generations. First, the immigrant church of Irish, Italian, and Polish parishes, which continued the old traditions and sometimes the native language of the immigrant populations they served, has over two or three generations become integrated into the general American middle-class culture.[10] Second, the major effect of the Second Vatican Council was to substantially change the way in which the Catholic Mass was celebrated, as well as provoke other changes in Catholic practices. Wolfe cites particularly the change in the practice of confession, from “”the scariest sacrament”” that formerly took place in a dark box to something done more openly and less in the manner of reciting a checklist of the believer’s sins than an informal discussion of the believer’s spiritual life.[11] Wolfe also cites the less authoritarian nature of the relation between lay Catholics and the Church’s priests and hierarchy, the accommodation of Catholic teaching on marriage and sex to the “”realities of modern life,”” and the recent influx of Latino immigration with its emphasis on traditional practices and beliefs that Wolfe nonetheless confidently assumes will be converted into an Americanized and implicitly less threatening style of Christian worship.[12]

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In the chapter’s last section, “”An Innovative God,”” Wolfe rejects the notion expressed in the analysis of political journalist Michael Barone that “”religious believers are in the forefront of a determined effort to restore traditional morality to the country.””[13] Rather, he maintains that since to conserve is to innovate (reflecting Burke), while the “”United States has conservatives aplenty . . . it lacks traditionalists.””[14] Wolfe asserts that the turn of American politics to the right since the time of the Reagan Administration does not portend a cultural shift toward traditional morality, but this conclusion may be rooted in liberal hope. It is said that at bottom, all serious disagreements are theological disagreements about the nature of man and God. Wolfe, however, does not think that insight applies to religious believers in America; differences in ideas about God and man do not engage Wolfe as he diligently does his sociological research on religion in America, nor does he think, or hope, that they engage anyone else.

Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion is the work of David Gelernter, a well-known essayist on American culture (he writes for Commentary and the Weekly Standard) and a professor of computer science at Yale University. (Gelernter was the victim of a letter bomb sent by the Unabomber; he escaped death, but his right hand was permanently maimed.) Gelernter is an engaging writer with a wide range of interests and abilities whose religious background is Jewish. His thesis is that “”Americanism”” is not merely a civil religion, but a religion unto itself, comparable to Judaism, Protestantism, or Catholicism—hence the subtitle, The Fourth Great Western Religion. Americanism is a relatively short book and an easy read in which the author has made his case by means of historical evidence and a succession of sometimes brilliant aperçus and insights.

It is important to understand the implications of Gelernter’s thesis at the outset. While it is a commonplace observation that the United States is a “”religious”” nation, Gelenter’s thesis that Americanism is itself a true religion comparable to the biblical religions extends well beyond this point. There is something of the intentionally provocative in Gelernter’s thesis, of the sort that scholars would not make in an academic context, for Americanism is aimed at an informed but popular audience. Nonetheless, there are original interpretations of historical facts that may be known, yet are not often emphasized in scholarly treatments of American religion—e.g., the influence of the First World War—and his thesis, however provocative, has gained some traction. Gelernter makes his case by means of a historical account of the religious bases of the American experience, arguing from the usual examples of American religiosity such as the Puritan settlers, Lincoln’s biblical references, and Franklin Roosevelt’s prayer on the eve of the Normandy invasion. He also presents certain usually ignored examples such as the influence of the King James Bible and the cultural shock of the First World War. From this historical account he attempts to prove that “”America is not only a nation; America is a religious idea.””[15]

Gelernter pursues this theme in a broad historical manner, starting before the founding of America, with chapters on the influence of the King James Bible, the Puritan Fathers, religious causes of the Revolutionary War, Lincoln and the Civil War, World War I and Wilson’s presidency, and the modern era encompassing World War II, the Cold War, and beyond. These historically-focused chapters are framed with a beginning chapter, “”I Believe in America,”” and a concluding one, “”The New Covenant.”” Gelernter calls his book “”an essay in ‘folk philosophy,'”” as he makes the case that the United States is a “”Biblical republic”” and asserts that those who demote Americanism to a merely civil religion are “”deluded.””[16]

In the chapter on the King James Bible, Gelernter refers to it as “”world-creating””[17] and attempts to go beyond the usual association of the vernacular Bible with the rise of Protestantism, and its political effects in England. Rather, Gelernter emphasizes the immense cultural influence of the 1611 King James Version, claiming that its literary influence is greater than the writings of Shakespeare or Homer. Indeed, Gelernter almost raises the King James Bible to the level asserted by some American Protestant fundamentalists, giving it a providential significance in the formation of early English and American culture.

In his next chapter, “”American Zionism,”” Gelernter deals with the Puritan period in American history, emphasizing the vivid connection that the Puritans saw between themselves and ancient Israel, such that their settlement in the New World would be as a “”City on a Hill,”” the phrase used in the Bible to describe Jerusalem. He says of the Puritans that they “”fathered the nation that we are today.””[18] The importance that Gelernter places on America’s Puritan origins can be seen from the fact that this chapter is the second longest of this short book, thirty-six pages (the chapter on Lincoln is the longest). Gelernter traces the story of American Puritanism in separate headings devoted to its rise in England, its importation to America in the seventeenth century, its impact on America’s character, and the “”biblical roots of Americanism.””[19] Gelernter brings out the Puritans’ devotion to the Old Testament, pointing out how the travails of ancient Israel’s history culminating in the establishment of an independent Israel became the foremost model for American exceptionalism. He points out that the Exodus and the stories of ancient Israel’s heroes, including Joshua, David, and Solomon, were the persistent subject of Puritan sermons. However, it is likely that Gelernter is overemphasizing the influence of the Puritans on the American character. Puritanism was confined largely to New England, and within several generations revolts against its practices and doctrines arose, including Unitarianism, which denied the divinity of Christ, and “”universalism,”” which declared that all men would finally be saved, thus denying the existence of an eternal hell. Dissident figures who opposed the Puritan domination of greater Boston included Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams who were both exiled, and John Murray, a prominent Unitarian.

In the third chapter, “”Revolution and the American Creed,”” Gelernter recounts the biblical origins of the American republic and of the core American belief system. Since recent scholarship has a largely secular bent, he utilizes other sources such as collections of speeches, contemporaneous accounts, and older scholarship (from before the 1970s). He is at pains to contradict the impression that the intellectual impulsion of the American Revolution was primarily from secular sources including the Enlightenment and the philosophy of John Locke. He cites Jefferson, pointing out that while Jefferson’s Christianity was not orthodox, he did have a deep reverence for Jesus.[20] However, Gelernter downplays the fact that Jefferson’s religious beliefs were rationalistic; Jefferson rewrote his Bible crossing out all the descriptions of miraculous events, and for him Jesus was an ethical philosopher rather than a savior or prophet. The Puritan founding of America is transformed, and in a manner fulfilled, at the time of the American Revolution in Gelernter’s account, for as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the explicitly biblical origins of Puritan ideals become distilled into the permanent American Creed. In Gelernter’s view, citing Gunnar Myrdal, Locke, Daniel Bell and others, the American creed consists of liberty, democracy and equality. Limited government and a preference for local rather than centralized political control is mentioned but not included in his view of the American Creed.

The fourth chapter deals with Abraham Lincoln, and consists mainly of a historical rather than an analytical or interpretive account as is the case with other parts of the work. Although Lincoln is the primary figure of the book, Gelernter’s treatment of Lincoln and the Civil War is not original, for the religiosity of Lincoln’s character and the biblical sources of his great speeches are well known; there is no obscured religious motive to be uncovered as with Washington, Wilson or Truman. What Gelernter does offer that is somewhat new is the idea of Lincoln as not only the last and greatest of the founders,[21] but as a martyr and prophet who “”completed the transformation of Puritanism into Americanism.””[22] Gelernter’s thesis is not difficult to appreciate since Lincoln’s character and career seem to most Americans providentially placed in American history, although it may be enough for most observers to see Lincoln as a great statesman or the greatest of American presidents without granting him status as a religious prophet.

Chapter six concerns the religious impact of World War I and is the most original chapter in Gelernter’s book. He argues that World War I and not World War II was the defining event in the history of Europe, a thesis which reflects some recent thinking. He blames that war for originating European pacifism and anti-Americanism. In a striking section, Gelernter points out the resemblance between the Vietnam War memorial in Washington on which the names of the war dead are incised, and several such monuments in Europe erected after World War I on which the names of the dead of such battles as Gallipoli and the Somme are engraved. Both the Vietnam War and the First World War had the same effect on the American and European elites respectively, that for them war was afterwards seen as a wasteful horror that could never be justified, and the outbreak of war a condemnation of the systems that perpetrated such horrors.[23] These wars, Gelernter argues, are the sources of the deep strain of anti-Americanism within the American elites who tend to think that America deserved defeat in the Vietnam War, while for European elites, there remains considerable resentment that the American nation successfully engaged in both World Wars and the Cold War, while not tasting defeat or suffering the eventual collapse of its civilizational underpinnings.[24]

The main effect of World War I and its aftermath for Gelernter is that it expanded what he terms “”American Zionism”” from the United States throughout the world. As he did for Lincoln and Washington, Gelernter points to Wilson’s religious beliefs, being the son of a Presbyterian minister who himself had a ministerial bearing and attitude. In Gelernter’s vision, President Wilson’s post-war diplomacy and the Wilsonian trend in American foreign policy represents the world-wide missionary expansion of Americanism as a religious movement. This Wilsonian expansionist trend is most recently apparent in the foreign policy of George W. Bush after 9/11, in which it was announced that America was engaged in wars not to destroy the nation’s enemies but to spread democracy to the Middle East[25] (a point Gelernter takes up in the following chapter). As a result, the American Creed of democratic republicanism, individual rights, and equality under the law has become a world-wide religious movement, comparable one assumes to the early Christian or Mormon religions.

In the seventh chapter, Gelernter brings the story of American Zionism up to date with a condensed overview of America’s history and its influence in world affairs from World War II to the present. Gelernter presents World War II as a conflict between ultimate good and evil involving three explicitly pagan empires—Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Imperial Japan—opposed by two informally Christian nations, Britain and the United States. After World War II, the conflict become bipolar, between America and the West versus Soviet Communism and its allies. Gelernter points out that Truman was an inveterate Bible reader who had a strongly religious sense of his duties as president, particularly with regard to supporting the establishment of Israel. In the following section on the Cold War, Gelernter cites four “”falsehoods”” that arose concerning the Vietnam War, e.g., that it was unwinnable. Gelernter explains Reagan’s presidency as a period in which the Wilsonian trend in American foreign policy became active rather than passive, as Reagan actively sought to win the Cold War which resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, Gelernter points to George W. Bush’s born-again evangelical Christian beliefs to explain the invasion of Iraq, which he presents as an expression of the American religion with Bush expanding the “”American creed”” into Middle Eastern culture and politics.[26] Gelernter does not deal with the nature of the conflict between American religiosity which is inherently Christian and Hebraic, and the current expansionist stance of Islamic religiosity.

The final chapter of Americanism is entitled “”The New Covenant,”” in which Gelernter writes in opposition to the recent dominance of secularism in American culture, claiming that American religiosity will reappear and that the secular trend in American culture is temporary. Secularist ethics, Gelernter points out, is not inspiring or heroic.

In Americanism Gelernter promotes what he calls “”American Zionism,””[27] a vision of American religiosity which emphasizes its Old Testament roots to a degree not seen before. The references to the “”City on a Hill”” by the Puritans, explaining the depth of religious belief of Wilson and Truman, plus all the other evidences presented about the American religion have the effect of making Judaism more than a secondary religion, second to Christianity in its influence, but in effect elevates Judaism as the primary source of American religiosity. Overall, Gelernter’s thesis is provocative and the book’s overview of American history enables him to make many interesting and well supported points. However, Americanism is far more likely to provoke than convince, and may serve unintentionally to muddy the waters that lie between religion and politics rather than clarify them.

A New Religious America by Diana L. Eck has the subtitle, How a “”Christian Country”” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. As it indicates, Eck thinks that religious diversity is a bona fide good thing, and her book centers on treatments of three non-Judeo-Christian religions which have recently become prominent in America, i.e., Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Her treatment of the topic of religious diversity is descriptive and often personal—””I was in Detroit for Rama Navami, the Hindu holiday celebrating Lord Rama. My Hindu host, Dr. T.K. Venkateswaran, gave me careful directions to the Bharatiya Temple in Troy, a leafy northern suburb of the city.”” (This introduces an account of a wedding at the temple.)[28] Eck’s book reflects her personal interests and position as Professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard and Director of the Pluralism Project which supports scholarly research into religious organizations and groups of religious believers in America, typically those that are overlooked or neglected in the media and of which Americans largely remain unaware. Eck has received notice and awards for her previous work as an author, while her work with the Pluralism Project netted her the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton. The Pluralism Project has been successful in promoting research into American religious life, and has been supported by, among other funders, the Lilly Endowment.

In effect, A New Religious America is a celebration of the recently emerging diversity of religious life in these United States. Its descriptions of religious life often focus on the picturesque, expressed in smooth, palliative prose which resembles that of Reader’s Digest stories. Eck exhibits no interest in theology as such; the book draws no systematic comparisons, even neutral ones, between various religions, and the only negative aspect of the various religious groups she discusses are the offenses which they have suffered from bigoted Americans.[29] The book has a multicultural tone in which the regnant beliefs and mores which have characterized life in the United States are constantly viewed with suspicion while new entries into the American cultural mix are treated with respect and looked upon favorably. It is expected in the multicultural mind-set which characterizes the book that the reaction of Americans to new kinds of people is one of fear and incomprehension and that they have to be educated to become their better selves as they encounter the new reality of an America far more religiously diverse than ever before.

The book is divided into seven chapters, in the center of which are three chapters that deal with the new religious arrivals to America: Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. The first two chapters introduce Eck’s topic and explain her idea of toleration, while the last two are a review of the causes of religious bigotry and a prescription for national action. Since the book is intended for a general audience it relies far more on description than analysis, so that the four “”theoretical”” chapters which frame the three central chapters engage the readers’ interest by using multiple examples which do not however approach the level of serious analysis.

The second chapter, “”From Many, One,”” would seem to be the chief theoretical chapter, since it deals with the most fundamental issues at stake, i.e., how much religious diversity American culture can undertake before it loses its self-identity. Eck self-assuredly argues that toleration rather than the doctrinal content of religious belief systems is the primary source of American identity, forgoing the well-known former expression of American religiosity of “”Catholic, Protestant, Jew,”” formulated in the 1950s by Rabbi Will Herberg.[30] In her treatment of this central topic, Eck mentions the arguments of Arthur Schlesinger and Peter Brimelow, that there is in Schlesinger’s phraseology, “”too much pluribus and not enough unum.””[31] However, she does not engage the issue beyond pointing out previous examples of religious intolerance in American history and how such intolerance has been overcome. Eck also deals with the arguments of John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit theologian whose book published in the early 1960s, We Hold These Truths,[32] argued for a natural law basis for American identity. Eck, however, reduces Murray’s concept that natural law is the basis for American political identity to a reliance on debate and discussion, thus gutting it of any reference to the actuality of universal values. Eck does defend religious “”pluralism”” against the charge that it implies a “”kind of valueless relativism . . . [which] undermines commitment to one’s own particular faith.””[33]

Of the three internal chapters, the chapter on Muslims, “”American Muslims: Cousins and Strangers,”” is likely to be of the most interest given the present conflicted relations between America and Islam. Eck writes well and fluidly of Islam, interspersing historical accounts of the early presence of small Islamic communities in America with personal anecdotes of conversations with various Muslim believers and leaders, along with an exposition of Muslim beliefs and practices. But her tone while expository and detailed, is written from the stance that “”misinformation about Islam and, even more, sheer ignorance of Islam, are common.”” Eck presents Islam as an inherently democratic and peaceful faith, blaming newspapers for bringing to “”American homes the images of Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations.””[34] Throughout the chapter which takes up approximately seventy pages, Eck is at pains to palliate perceived prejudice against Islam as she glides by issues such as the treatment of women or the recent upsurge of violent Islam on the international front.[35] Her purpose throughout is to refute what she perceives as gross insults to this world-wide religion which, as she points out, is monotheistic and closely related, both historically and doctrinally, to Judaism and Christianity. She states regarding the presence of Islamic believers in the United States that “”history cannot be turned back, and America’s vibrant new Muslim communities are here to stay.””[36]

There are two unresolved issues in Eck’s treatment of Islam in America. Perhaps because her treatment was written before the attacks on 9/11, she virtually ignores the question of whether reliance on the use of violence and warfare is inherent in Islam, and considers the question as if it only arises as the consequence of a stereotype. Jihad as “”holy war,”” according to a Muslim authority Eck quotes, is not mentioned in the Koran and refers not to war but to the internal struggle of the believer to live according to God’s will.[37] Eck does not mention another Islamic scholar with an American connection, Sayyid Qtub who studied in the United States in the late 1940s and whose work Milestones promotes jihad as a legitimate means of preventive war. Qtub’s writings have become a chief inspiration for the current wave of Islamic terrorist warfare and of the radical Islamist group, the Egyptian Brotherhood (Qtub was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966).[38] The current international conflict between expansionist Islam and western nations, including the United States, is not dealt with at all.

With regard to the content of Islamic doctrine, Eck notes that like Christianity and Judaism, it is monotheistic, and that Jews, Christians and Muslims pray to the same God.[39] However, she does not elaborate on a consequence of that fact, which in the context of American religiosity raises a significant point; given that Islam is monotheistic, does this allow Islam a place in American religiosity alongside Christianity and Judaism so that “”Christian-Jew-Muslim”” replaces “”Protestant-Catholic-Jew”” as the iconic expression of American religiosity? If so, then monotheism becomes the signal point of resemblance that connects the primary religious beliefs of Americans, which then excludes Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern or nonmonotheistic religions from the American religion.

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The last two chapters of A New Religious America make the case for religious tolerance; the sixth chapter does so by recounting examples of religious bigotry, the seventh and final chapter by recommending interfaith activities and organizations as a means to “”bridge building.””[40] The sixth chapter, entitled “”America, Afraid of Ourselves,”” largely consists of recent examples of religious bigotry in the United States that are organized to present a good explanation of how and why religious bigotry occurs. It is probably the most analytical chapter in the book, pursuing issues of how visible differences in race and dress excite prejudice, how assimilation weakens religious identity among second generation immigrants, and how ignorance of different religious traditions exacerbates religious hatreds. A section on “”dot busters”” is about an anti-Hindu group in Jersey City that is cited as a major example of religious prejudice, but Eck, while presenting the truly obnoxious activities of this group, fails to mention that the “”dot”” (more precisely “”bindi””) on the forehead of some Indians is not only an adornment for Indian women, but has also functioned as a caste mark.[41] This is not an excuse for the physical abuse of Hindu believers obviously, but the existence of a rigid caste structure historically supported by the Hindu religion in India presents a complexity in an avowedly egalitarian society such as America. Eck does not mention this problematic aspect of the Hindu religion at all.

Eck’s thesis that as America has become more religiously diverse, so the nation at large must come to respect those forms of religion, reflects an increasingly influential attitude. At my own institution, Rivier College, which is a medium-size Catholic college in New Hampshire, the Catholic priest who is the college chaplain publicizes all manner of religious holy days in his e-mails sent to everyone at the college. Thus, Diwali, a Hindu holy day, receives prominent mention along with Ramadan, Yom Kipper, Christmas, and Easter; the Chaplain not only mentions but explains the significance of each of these non-Christian holy days. Eck nonetheless has overestimated the effect of the new patterns of immigration on religious diversity in America. Approximately 80 percent of Americans still identify themselves as Christian; many of the new immigrants in fact are Christian, e.g., those from Haiti, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Central America. A large portion of the Vietnamese immigrants who arrived after the Vietnam War is Roman Catholic even though the majority may be Buddhist.

What is left unresolved in Eck’s book, and what is left unconsidered as a result of the otherwise commendable attitude of toleration, is the likely loss of a sense of the unity of American religious beliefs that affects ultimately the unity of American culture, precisely the issue raised by Brimelow and Schlesinger. Eck puts the essential question on the last page of her book but does not answer it: “”Whether the vibrant new religious diversity that is now part and parcel of the United States will, in the years ahead, bring us together or tear us apart depends greatly on whether we are able to imagine our national community anew.””[42] But reimagining religious America will require a consideration not only of the picturesque aspects of the newly arrived religions on the American scene, but a serious consideration of their content and practices as well.

The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation by Harold Bloom asserts that the underlying unifying aspect of American religiosity is not some form of Christianity but what he refers to as “”Gnosticism.”” Bloom is a professor and literary critic known for his capacity to read and write a very large number of books, among which are one about God as portrayed in Genesis and another in which Bloom offered his well-informed list of those literary works necessary for cultural literacy.[43] Bloom’s approach in defining “”the American religion”” is to give doctrinal and historical accounts of those religious denominations which have originated in the United States and which he claims most clearly reveal the inner spirit of American religiosity. He assumes the role of a “”religious critic,””[44] corresponding to the role of literary critic, in order to explain “”the inner spirit of our national faith.””[45] Bloom includes in his account Mormons, Southern Baptists, and Seventh-day Adventists along with several others, but does not include denominations which did not originate in the United States, including the Episcopalian, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Methodist and Unitarian churches, or the Jewish faith in either its traditional or modern forms. More remarkable perhaps is that Bloom leaves out Liberal Judaism, Universalism and Unitarianism, which are religious denominations that have originated in the United States.

The American Religion consists of five main sections of several chapters each, starting with an introductory section which describes the Gnostic origins of a variety of the American religions. In the first section, Bloom pays special attention to an early nineteenth-century episode which took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, where over ten thousand worshippers underwent what appears to have been a mass experience of religious ecstasy.[46] Bloom describes the “”orphic”” and “”Gnostic”” elements of the American religion in this first section, concepts which he then applies in subsequent sections of the book in his discussions of various examples of American religiosity. Bloom claims that Gnosticism is his own personal religious belief even though it lacks an organized structure and seems to be more a literary construction than a church. Gnosticism is descended historically from a third-century Christian heresy or movement associated with one Valentinus, which denied the human aspect of Christ, denied the authority of the Christian Church, and asserted that the divine presence could be found by individual worshippers within their own souls. Interest in Gnosticism has increased lately, with the discovery of several Gnostic gospels which biblical historians have unearthed from the second and third centuries. These alternate gospels are used by some current scholars to give a revisionist account of the origins of Christianity;[47] however, Gnosticism is difficult to define, and yet its broad outlines and discernible elements make it a useful subject for reconstructions of intellectual history, an approach used by the political historian Eric Voegelin.[48]

While a broad interpretation of Gnosticism is not new with Bloom, he also includes “”Orphism”” along with Gnosticism as one of the two essential characteristics of the emerging American religion. Orphism is also a descendent of ancient religious thought, but is older than Gnosticism and derives from pre-Christian Greek culture. Orphism was a cult dedicated to Bacchus and Dionysius encouraging participation in group drunkenness and sex as a form of religious worship. As Bloom interprets Orphism, it is a religious tendency which emphasizes orgiastic and communal aspects of American religious experience. Bloom’s background as a literary critic enables him to stitch together the elements of Gnosticism and Orphism into an interpretative structure that consists of two seemingly contrary tendencies. However, Bloom needs them both in order to explain the individualistic and idealistic side of American religion along with its emphasis on inner ecstatic experience and community. Whether Bloom accomplishes this is questionable since his intellectual construction may not easily fit the reality of the American religiosity.

The second section deals with Mormons, whom Bloom calls the “”American original,”” i.e., that denomination most typical of the Gnostic current in American religiosity, which he sees as the future of the American religion. Bloom finds in Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, a rich subject for the kind of analysis he practices, for although Bloom calls himself a “”religious critic”” his approach to analyzing religion is literary. Smith was native to the famous “”burned over”” district of western New York State, so called because in the middle of the nineteenth century it produced an intense level of religious feeling and activity encouraged by prophets who felt called by the Spirit. In the burned over district much of the religious activity was not initiated by missionaries from existing religions, e.g., Anglican, Presbyterian, or Roman Catholic, rather, there was in place a devotion to the King James Bible which was read and understood by believers without instruction and in an often unusual way.

Joseph Smith exhibited his religious genius by writing an alternative Bible, the Book of Mormon, in which the early history of ancient Israel was repeated on the North American continent; the religious worshippers he would organize around his prophesies were the redeemed people, the church of “”latter day saints.”” The traits of Americanism which Bloom delineates in Smith’s career (Smith was killed by an angry mob thus completing his prophetic career by martyrdom) are the trend toward reinvention and new beginnings, for Mormonism not only propounds an alternate to the Bible, it also contradicts traditional Jewish and Christian belief by asserting that men can become as God.[49] Despite the appeal of this aspect of Mormon teaching, Bloom does concede that lately Mormonism has devolved more into the lines of a traditional Protestant sect (and in fact its current television advertisements offer inquirers not the Book of Mormon but the King James Bible). Bloom looks benignly on the prospect of the Mormon faith becoming increasingly dominant in America and worldwide, although he is less comfortable with the influence of Mormons on Republican presidential administrations.[50]

The third section gives Bloom’s shorter account of “”rival”” examples of the American religion, all of which originated in the United States: Christian Science, Seventh-day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostalism and “”The New Age: California Orphism.”” One of the virtues of Bloom’s book is that by concentrating only on those religions “”native”” to the United States, it highlights the religious inventiveness of the American character. American culture is often noted for its technological inventiveness, but much less often is the American inventiveness of new forms of religion noted, and in this chapter Bloom gives it full recognition and credit.

The fourth section devotes three chapters to the Southern Baptists, whose faith Bloom characterizes less as a form of Protestantism than as a religious belief in its own right;[51] he is especially concerned about the political consequences of the Southern Baptists’ involvement in right-wing politics. Although Bloom is a literary critic with a capacity for distinguishing intellectual trends and nuances, he struggles with defining the essence of Baptist beliefs. In the first chapter on the Baptists, he attempts a historical survey based on the doctrine of Roger Williams, whom Bloom acknowledged is not recognized as a founding figure by Southern Baptists.[52] Later on, he focuses on the Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins and his so-called “”Roman Road,”” a reductive account of the theology of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Bloom describes Mullins’ doctrine of “”soul competency”” which in effect guarantees that the Christian religious worshipper needs nothing more than herself and perhaps her Bible to find the full expression of the Christian faith, a sort of ultimacy of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.[53] In this, Bloom is confronted with the fact that the Baptist tradition is “”experiential”” in its practice, so that Christian salvation is felt from within through an experience in which the individual believer accepts Jesus, an aspect of the Baptist religion which exactly fits Bloom’s idea of “”Gnosticism,”” i.e., that it puts religious validation within the individual and the felt experience of the believer. Despite the innate individualism of its doctrine however, in practice the Southern Baptist religion has a flowering social manifestation.[54]

It is the practical historical presence of the Southern Baptist religion that concerns Bloom, even as he remains admittedly confused about its theology, for the ethos of the Southern Baptist faith dominates the South of the old Confederacy to this day. Bloom maintains that the first convention of Southern Baptists in 1845 was formed primarily in order to defend slavery, while in its present form—in 1980 when Bloom writes—it evokes his concern as a right-wing political force.[55] Bloom is also concerned with another aspect of historical Southern Baptism, which was just beginning at the time when he wrote this book and has since come to fulfillment, namely the split between conservative and moderate believers which has split the Southern Baptist church in America.[56] Bloom is fearful of the rise of fundamentalism, which he does not distinguish from defense of traditional Christian doctrines, which itself is a reflection of the fact that for Bloom religious doctrines are to be explained as literary creations and not in terms of their explicit content, i.e., as if relating to spiritual realities. For Bloom, the turmoil of the Southern Baptists resolves simply into the political controversy between conservatives and liberals.

The fifth and final section gives Bloom’s “”prophecy”” about the future as well as his opinion about the general character of the American religion, using African-American expressions of religion as his “”paradigm.”” The origins of African-American religious expression remain elusive however; as exemplified in the “”Negro spirituals,”” the issue is whether they consist primarily of tribal chanting transplanted from Africa or of the melodic elements of Western music.[57] Bloom refers to the African-American religion as a paradigm, but appears merely anxious to tie together his thesis with a climactic reference to the African-American religious experience.

The last two chapters of the book are short and in them Bloom deals summarily with a number of topics, including dualism, anti-intellectualism, self-realization, and the missionary impulse, that characterize the American religion. However, Bloom does not provide a coherent account of these and other allied topics, although he provides a number of memorable sayings, e.g., “”Death, in literature, is the mother of beauty; death, in life, is the father of religion.”” Characterizing his own religious belief, he calls himself a “”Gnostic without hope.””[58] However, the subject of death is one among many topics interestingly proposed but never developed into an overall approach, as it has become apparent by the end of his book that Bloom’s categories of Orphism, Gnosticism, and Enthusiasm do not explain as much about American religiosity as he had hoped.

The prophecy that Bloom offers, writing in the early 1980s, is that he foresees a millenarian movement inspired around the year 2,000 provoked by the impulses of the Gnostic American religion; in his analysis he explicitly discounts Catholics, Lutherans and Jews. Nonetheless, Bloom uncannily predicts that “”the twenty-first century will mark a full-scale return to the wars of religion.””[59] But if Bloom’s prophecy was correct in predicting the religious wars that would come after 9/11, it was so for the wrong reason. The development of the Gnostic American religion he foresaw is not the powerful stream existing as an independent cultural entity that Bloom describes, and at the very end of the book he disappointingly characterizes the millenarian conflict as a political battle between the left and the right.[60] But the interest of Bloom’s account of American religiosity lies not in its attempt at an intellectual understanding or political categorization, but in its realization of the capacity of Americans to invent not only themselves, a new nation and multiple technologies, but a variety of different religions.

Richard John Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square, although published twenty-five years ago, still retains its importance for having given American culture a phrase and an idea which continue to characterize the American religion—that there is a public square in which secularism is dominant, but that without the influence of religion that area of civic life is “”naked.”” It is worth describing Neuhaus’s career as well as this book since his career throws light on the book’s thesis. Neuhaus, who died in 2009, began his career as a Lutheran pastor who was active in the cause of racial justice; he knew Martin Luther King and ran a pastorate in Harlem where he looked to the physical as well as spiritual needs of his congregants and the people of Harlem. He was intellectually inclined as well as being a socially active priest; his concern with what he discerned as the collapse of American values, the failure of the “”main line”” Protestant churches to effectively confront it, and the rise of “”moral majoritanism”” of which he was permanently suspicious, led him to become a serious critic of American religiosity. Eventually, he converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism and was quickly ordained a Catholic priest by Cardinal O’Connor of New York. In his later years, he became, in effect, a religious “”neoconservative,”” making frequent television appearances on cable networks as diverse as PBS, C-SPAN and EWTN, to present his view of the necessity of religious ideals in the political and cultural life of America. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of the religious journal First Things, which continues to publish articles of high intellectual quality, for which Neuhaus wrote extensively long editorials.

Although it consists of sixteen chapters, The Naked Public Square cannot usefully be summarized by describing its chapters or groups of chapters. Neuhaus’s style is wordy and ruminative, consisting of a constant flow of references to the movements of the 1980s such as civil rights and the moral majority, the writings of then current theologians including John Courtney Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr, and political philosophy from Rousseau to Rawls; as Dr. Johnson said of Burke, the stream of Neuhaus’s mind “”is perpetual.”” Each chapter contains not a part of the thesis of the book but virtually all of it, since Neuhaus does not construct his argument in parts culminating in a final conclusion, but presents it up front so to speak and then examines each of its constituent parts. This makes for a text that is somewhat difficult but nonetheless worth reading given the range and depth of Neuhaus’s knowledge.

The book is best described not according to its internal structure but according to its main theses of which six can be clearly discerned:

1. secularism is rampant;
2. liberal social attitudes dominate the mainline Protestant churches;
3. the fundamentalist reaction is an unacceptable approach to Church-state relations;
4. democratic society is threatened by the recent and continuing loss of public virtue;
5. the role of culture should be predominant in American society as opposed to law;
6. a vigorous form of the Judeo-Christian tradition should be imported back into the public square for the public good.

1. Secularism

The dominance of a diffuse but effective secular philosophy in American society Neuhaus takes as a given, and he is deeply concerned that its proponents are forcing religion out of the public square. By this he means that explicit references to religion are being systematically forced out of all areas of life that are public, i.e., available to the citizens at large, including the public schools and the courts. He cites evangelical Protestant critics of “”secular humanism”” such as Tim LeHaye and Francis Schaeffer.[61] The isolation of religion exclusively into the private sphere Neuhaus sees as unacceptable given the culture-forming and meditative role that religion plays in the social context.[62]

2. Liberalism of the mainline

The liberalism of such bodies as the National Council of Churches as well as the governing elements of major Protestant denominations, such as the Presbyterians and Episcopalians, has been well-known for a long time. Neuhaus sees this development in terms of the encroachment of secular philosophy on true Christian doctrine. He is particularly concerned with how the liberalism of the main-line Protestant churches accedes to secularization of the culture, which thus legitimizes the exclusion of religious tradition from the public square.[63] Earlier, the Progressive movement which was concerned with alleviating the condition of the working class, African Americans, and the dispossessed could more readily be allied with Christian and Jewish concern for the poor and the marginalized. However, with the social developments of the 1960s and ’70s, which legitimated the free exercise of libidinal urges, there has been a departure in the Progressive movement from traditional Christian-Judaic principles of social morality, particularly concerning family life. Now rather than religion defining public morality, the moral neutrality of the state with its utilitarian ethics is defining religious morality.[64]

3. The unacceptable moral majority

Neuhaus’s negative reaction to the rise of the religious right, especially as exemplified in the person of Jerry Falwell, is apparent throughout the book. In fact, The Naked Public Square begins in the first chapter with a discussion of the moral majority.[65] Neuhaus’s reaction seems to be more one of aesthetic repugnance against the vulgarity and bluntness of the late Jerry Falwell than a considered response to its theology of evangelical Protestantism. He considers the technique of the moral majority movement, which amounts to politicizing a religious cause, to be inimical to democracy, even as its concern about the lack of moral center to American culture and politics is legitimate.[66] The rise of the religious right forces Neuhaus to deal with the issue of the proper relation between church and state, which he believes is very much out of balance.

4. Democratic society is threatened by the loss of public virtue

In the ninth chapter, “”Private Morality, Public Virtue,”” Neuhaus attacks the secularist attempt to exclude religion from the public sphere directly. He states that the assumption of the constitutional founders was that religion, actually main line Protestantism for many years, would underlie the “”bare-bones constitutional polity”” based on individualism and self-interest.[67] The decline of the influence of the Protestant religion in America was followed by a plethora of negative social consequences which reached a “”frenzied apex”” in the ’60s and ’70s including mass sex murders, an explosion of teenage pregnancies, and abortion.[68] That the manifest evidences of social decay are caused by the decrease of religious influence in American life is plainly evident for Neuhaus.

5. Culture versus the law

Throughout the book, but especially in the last chapter, Neuhaus criticizes the reliance on formal law as promulgated by the federal government and in American legislatures and courts. He sees the law being used as a means of excluding religion and public philosophy from the public square, and approvingly cites the challenges to laws with this secularist intent by Christian lawyers.[69] For Neuhaus it is culture that has the mediate role between the state and the individual, and it is therefore culture on which Americans should rely for the emplacement of religious and civic values in the fabric of American life. Reliance on the law, Neuhaus implies, can too explicitly define matters in a theoretical manner rather than in a manner based on the history and character of the American people.[70]

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6. Importance of the Judeo-Christian tradition

The loss of the Protestant ethic in American life that took place in the middle of the twentieth century is the theme that propels The Naked Public Square, since in Neuhaus’s view that decline has precipitated the current moral and political crisis in America.[71] Reviving the influence of Protestant ethics is however not a plausible approach to revivifying America’s moral life; instead Neuhaus relies on a movement based on a combination of traditional Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious influence, encouraged through conversation and serious discourse among the citizens. (To help accomplish this, Neuhaus started the journal First Things.) He thinks that the need for a public ethic is self-evident and the historical fact that American culture was formed and is still formed in large—though unacknowledged—part by the Christian belief system indicates plainly where this public ethic should come from.[72]

The accuracy of the analyses of The Naked Public Square can be evaluated from the form of events that have taken place since its publication in 1986. In summary, it appears that Neuhaus’s analysis of the dire effects of American culture without a religious basis has become increasingly evident, but that the serious debate about the need for a public ethic that he looked forward to has not taken place. Instead of a movement to restore public virtue have come two trends that have obviated the felt need for an extended and serious debate about the relationship between religion and a public philosophy.

First has been the broad acceptance of the collapse of public moral standards exemplified in the vulgarity of popular entertainment, high divorce and illegitimacy rates, cohabitation among couples, and the legitimizing of alternate lifestyles, e.g., gay marriage. As each of these developments has been the subject of litigation and legislation, they have become protected by law, and thus it appears that Neuhaus’s worry about the dominance of law over culture (and religion) has been plainly justified. More importantly, much of the public no longer thinks of this decline in standards as a crisis to be addressed. Secondly, the explosion of antisocial trends that Neuhaus reflected on has somewhat abated; divorce rates have stabilized, and general attitudes now reflect a pro-life more than a pro-choice sensibility, so that pro-life politicians no longer fear that their antiabortion stance has doomed their candidacy. The crime rate has significantly declined even though it apparently has happened because the rate of incarceration has also increased over the last twenty years and not because of a rise