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Religion and the American Experiment: Issues for the Third Century
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13426 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1987 |
3,476 Words |
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George Weigel
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Twenty-five years ago - when secularization theory was at flood tide among social scientists, when theologian Harvey Cox was celebrating the rise of the "secular city" and John. F. Kennedy was telling the graduates of Yale University that the real problems of the age were not moral and philosophical, but technical and managerial - one would have been rash indeed to have predicted that the bicentennial of the Constitution would come at a moment when the perennial American argument over religion and public life was being vigorously engaged, yet again. It just wasn't supposed to happen.
And yet it has. It has happened because of the return of the evangelical Protestants from the cultural wilderness to which they had been consigned by Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken during the Scopes "monkey trial." It has happened through the socioeconomic transformation and new public assertiveness of Roman Catholics. It has happened amid the decline of the great churches of the old Protestant mainline. It has happened due to the rapidly changing demographics of the American religious scene (there are now more Muslims than Episcopalians in the United States). The argument over religion and public life has entangled the Supreme Court, shaped presidential campaigns, sent shock waves through the public schools, created a new cottage industry of mass-mail-based organizations (from the Moral Majority to People for the American Way), and kept the scholarly pot boiling.
Why?
The simplest explanation seems to be that Americans are incorrigibly religious people and, according to the research of Theodore Caplow (All Faithful People, University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and others, are becoming more, rather than less, religious. The classic social science hypothesis that modernization inevitably leads to secularization has been falsified - at least in the United States. The argument over religion in American public life is going to continue, and the odds are that it will wax rather than wane in the American third century. Can the contours of the future debate be discerned amid the smoke of intellectual and political battle?
Martin Marty, a distinguished church historian at the University of Chicago, ventures an answer in Religion and Republic, a reedited collection of essays originally published over a period of seventeen years. The collection suffers the usual defects of such efforts, but Marty is an important barometer of opinion in contemporary mainline Protestantism.
All is flux
Marty thinks of the contemporary American cultural scene not so much in terms of pluralism as of plurality. America, according to Marty, is "a cluster of subcultures in search of but not necessarily finding a post-pluralist integrative culture." There may once have been a common cultural foundation for the American experiment in democracy (Marty seems unsure on this point), but like it or not, that's not the condition in which we find ourselves today. Marty is thus a kind of Heracleitus of the present moment: all is flux, but the flux is (or ought to be) of great interest to both religious and secular folk. Thus the raison d'etre for Religion and Republic.
The basic fact in the flux is what Marty terms a "transposition of forces," a dramatic changing of the
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