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American Religion: From Pluralism to Consensus
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13558 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1988 |
3,356 Words |
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Kenneth A. Myers
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SPIRITUAL POLITICS
Religion and America Since World War II
Mark Silk
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988
288 pp., $19.95
"The religion of America," Paul Johnson has observed, "is religion." There is nothing new about the observation that America is an incurably religious nation. But in his brief and lively study of the American penchant for religion, Mark Silk goes beyond this commonplace observation to document the extent to which this endemic religiosity has combined with a number of theological, historical, and cultural factors to produce what is functionally a new religion: the anomalous and novel hybrid faith called "Judeo-Christianity."
At the outset, Silk tells his readers that he is not going to delve into the questions of how modern American religious commitment measures up qualitatively to that of, for example, Puritan New England. Nor is his intension to offer yet another sermon on church and state questions. Rather, his attention is dedicated to "spiritual politics." By this Silk does not mean what some have labeled "political theology," which is essentially political and ideological dogma disingenuously donning the gowns of the divine. Spiritual politics describes "one of the principal means by which Americans conduct their cultural business." Whether one understands it as the product of a sincere conviction that all of life is essentially religious, an idolatrous urge to sanctify the profane, or sheer habit, Americans seems to prefer a spiritual flavor to their public life. As Silk puts it, American society has a powerful "desire for a common religious cause [despite the absence of a common religion] as well as for quasi-spiritual allegiance to the religiously impartial state." Borrowing a term from the late historian of ancient religion Arthur Darby Nock, Silk argues throughout his book that American spiritual politics is marked by a style of "adhesion," whereby the social and political order are sanctioned and sanctified by virtue of their adhesion to the religious traditions within the society.
This principle of adhesion, which was so evident in religions within the Roman Empire, is fundamentally at odds with Christianity and Judaism, religions that demanded "exclusive commitments from their devotees, insisting that there be no dabbling in other religious activity …. An outsider who wanted to join these anomalous faiths had to convert; ... toleration of other beliefs was simply toleration of error."
Silk's analysis of American spiritual politics displays the tension that results from the uniquely American mix of the exclusive tendencies of Christianity and Judaism (with their historic demarcation between insiders and outsiders), the commitment to religious pluralism as embodied in the First Amendment (a commitment with often radically different significance to the religious and the irreligious), and the historic sense of an American national purpose (a tradition that not incidentally predates Jefferson and Madison by more than a century). Silk makes a case that the convolutions in the understanding of the relationship between religion and politics since 1945 are best understood by reference to these conflicting habits of the American heart.
During much of American history, when the commitment to religious
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