Archives: Articles

War’s Dilemmas: The Century 1938-1945



One could draw a figurative line through the topics covered in most weekly issues of The Christian Century from the year before World War II through the end of that war. On one side would be all evidences of the war: conscientious chronicling of its main events -- especially where religion had a bearing -- coupled with articles and editorials on issues of war and peace. On the other side of this line would be hundreds of reports on Christian church life and American culture. While the latter have no “business as usual” stamp, since the war colored almost everything those years, one senses that the editors were saying: life must go on; faith needs nurture; the subtleties of life matter; there are trenches in America as well as on the front lines.

Between the wars a broad pacifist sentiment had developed. Protestant clergy, often coached or rallied by this most influential mainline and liberal magazine, leaned toward the peacemaking side. By the end of the 1930s, however, it was a set of troubled peace people who commented here each week.

The magazine’s most noted off-premises editor, Reinhold Niebuhr, was restless and, in the end, emphatic. For him pacifism did not answer Hitler’s demonic threat and the totalitarian evils. Few incidents in the magazine’s history attracted as much attention as the break between Editor Charles Clayton Morrison and Niebuhr. For several years Niebuhr’s disaffection was evident, as he transferred loyalties to secular liberal magazines like the Nation. Then in 1941 he helped found and became editor of Christianity and Crisis.

The Century editors had the harder time of it, because they fully shared the Niebuhrians’ horror of Nazism fascism and Japanese militarism. And, throughout the 1930s, something in their editorial bones kept telling them that the issues would not be settled nor Hitler’s aggression stopped without resistance. Many an editorial therefore warned, mourned or rued, but never offered useful alternatives to the war party’s policies. If there was a consistent line, it was a progressive acquiescence to the inevitable, as Austria, Czechoslovakia, then Poland and so much of the rest of Europe fell. Let there be restraint, and a minimum of righteous fervor and self-idolatry as this “tragic necessity” unfolds, was the plea.

Part of the long-range philosophical outlook of Morrison and company was revealed when, once war came, they almost immediately began talking about its aftermath. While they could do little except to call for repentant participation and conscientious attention to the military prosecution of the war, the editors believed the Christian community had a great responsibility for subsequent peacemaking. Articles on how to wage peace, promote relief and structure international dialogue were frequent.



It is revealing to see how alert the magazine was to events in the Pacific theater. Forty-five years later, with so many mainstream Protestants apathetic or uncertain about the meaning of “foreign missions,” it is hard to re-create a climate in which missionary thought played such a vivid role. Protestantism had a heavy investment in Japan, a commanding and literate nation that would be crucial for any Christian future in that hemisphere.

The editors long feared the Japanese military growth, and criticized American arms policies that curiously contributed to that buildup, even as President Franklin D. Roosevelt was scored for undue belligerence against Japan. There were notices that explained Shinto, the religious ethos and structure that supported Japanese nationalism and militarism. The fate of the Japanese churches, which were increasingly less autonomous, was a regular topic. Meanwhile, editors watched the situation of the church in China, long a favored missionary field. Reports indicated anti-Christian action by the Chinese communists, and many writers speculated whether much of the faith would survive the war, no matter its outcomes.

At the same time, specific aspects of the European -- especially the German -- war machines led editors to focus on them. Germany, Italy and, in its own way, Russia were totalitarianisms born in millennium-old Christian cultures. The editors considered it imperative to discern what went wrong after 1914 to bring into power Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin with all their instruments of terror.

The November 30, 1938, issue clearly spelled out in great detail the editors’ thoughts on “Demonic Germany and the Predicament of Humanity”:

That such a phenomenon as the anti-Semitic pogrom could appear in Western society seemed at first incredible -- in a society that has been for centuries impregnated with the principles of the Christian faith.

 

It was the announced intention to do away with Judaism and Jews that elicited the adjective “demonic” and charges of “hellishness.” The editors strained their vocabularies to find language that -- while none could capture the atrocity of Nazism -- at least could serve as barometers and thermometers.



Like most other thoughtful Americans -- Christian, Jewish, secular, public or private -- the editors talked themselves into bemusement about how to respond. The “fiendish and shameless relapse from the most elemental instincts which actuate civilized humanity,’’ when voiced by Josef Goebbels, left the West without a policy. Goebbels would export the Jews en masse to any takers. What to do? A few called for a pre-emptive attack on Germany. The editors were too pacific to encourage that and too practical to anticipate success at whatever price. The Western powers had “everything to lose in defeat and nothing to gain in victory.”

The editors looked at proposals for a Jewish homeland in Madagascar, some spot in South Africa, Tanganyika or Australia, but saw few prospects. ‘‘Palestine is out of the question, in view of the failure of the British mandate to attain some modus vivendi as between Jews and Arabs.” The United States, they thought, should take more exiles, but with 10 million already unemployed, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jewish exiles would only exacerbate that problem and stimulate anti-Semitism. So they offered little direction: “We make no attempt to disguise our bafflement.”

This early editorial stance on a Jewish homeland confronts one of the touchiest issues left over from those years. The editors could say “Palestine is out of the question,” then spend many issues debating whether it really was, and ways in which it was in the question. They have been much attacked for their attitudes during this period; my shelf has several books criticizing Americans, Christians, liberals and The Christian Century for being blind, or for having knowledge but no policy concerning the Jews.

One hesitates to minimize the burden of moral failure in the Christian and Protestant past. At the same time, encountering freshly the thousands of pages from, as it were, the other direction temporally, sets the issue in context.

The Century editors were agents of interfaith amity and victims of an obsolete model. They thought they were tolerant, and were, on any reading of the Jewish-Christian temperatures of the 1930s. They tirelessly supported interfaith organizations, unwearyingly opposed domestic anti-Semitism, and were hopeful about concord and respect in the country’s future. On the other hand, they were captive of turn-of-the-century WASP models that called for assimilation, accommodation, homogeneity in American life.

From the beginning, such Protestants were very friendly to Jews, but only Jews of a particular sort. Theirs was the Reform Jewish world, which, it must be remembered, was dominated by passionate anti-Zionists right into the beginning of this period. For them, Judaism was a universal faith, not given to ethnic particularism and thickness. In a way, Judaism could draw on its heritage to be as much like liberal Protestantism as possible, while liberal Protestantism drew on its heritage to be more like Reform Judaism than one imagines could have been possible in that intolerant age.

Such an outlook meant that the editors thought they were being friendly to all Jews but Zionists. The magazine regularly published articles like Morris S. Lazaron’s contribution to the famed “How My Mind Has Changed in This Decade” series on August 30, 1939. Judaism, wrote the rabbi, was a universal religion. Jewish nationalism was a reaction to despair, but it could not preserve Judaism. “Judaism cannot accept as the instrument of its salvation the very philosophy of nationalism which is leading the world to destruction. Shall we condemn it as Italian or German but accept it as Jewish?’’ With the editors he praised the Zionists’ marvels in Palestine but warned World Zionist Organization extremists of perils that lay ahead. Judaism was “not an exclusive, nationalist . . . tribal faith,’’ and the Zionist solution threatened to change this.

Given this background, it could have been bizarre and intellectually fickle for the editors to reverse their position instantly on the homeland question. “For Judaism to insist rigorously on aloofness, on segregation, on maintaining itself as a self-enclosed community, is to withhold its witness from the general community, proclaimed an editorial of December 20, 1939.



In a celebrated incident, the editors had difficulty believing Holocaust statistics presented by a rare Reform Zionist, Stephen Wise. The editors checked with the State Department and accepted the department’s verdict that Wise was probably exaggerating. That aside, there was little minimizing. In 1938 the editors began constant reports on the little evidence available about pogroms and eventual threats of extermination of Jews. They simply could see no “just and moral solution” of the Jewish homeland issue. The problem, they said, resulted from deceitful policies that made Jews the tragic pawns of empire (May 31, 1939).

In “Gazing into the Pit” (May 9, 1945), the editor found visual corroboration of what he had feared about and reported on concentration camps.

What can be said that will not seem like tossing little words up against a giant mountain of ineradicable evil? . . . We have found it hard to believe that the reports . . . could be true. Almost desperately we have tried to think that they must be wildly exaggerated.

The editors had feared atrocity-mongering of the World War I sort. “But such puny barricades cannot stand up against the terrible facts.” They called for every kind of Christian ecumenical response. The magazine’s approach through the Holocaust years was limited, blinded, and the editors were benumbed. So was the U.S. government; more so were other Christian periodicals that almost or entirely ignored the subject. Even Jewish organizations knew little to do, and most did little. Liberal Protestants had their limits and villainies, but singling them out, out of context, for condemnation does not do justice to the larger story.

On the domestic scene -- and on an infinitely smaller and less ominous scale -- the magazine kept up its non-shooting war with the other large group of Americans who created problems for assimilators and seekers of homogeneity: Catholics, Liberal Protestantism and The Christian Century have a partly earned reputation for unreasoned anti-Catholicism, and the war years show that there was not a total cease-fire on this front.

Certainly one myth characterized their approach and limited their ecumenical and civil outreach. Like most non-Catholics, they thought that the Roman Catholic Church, and especially its American branch, was a monolith, a juggernaut, a subservient mass. Culturally and socially, the editors thought, Catholics should be nondescript, blended and tolerant -- like liberal Protestants. The reality of Catholic life, in other words, was very different from the image it bore.

That said, except for one incident and its frantic response, the magazine was far more genial and friendly to Catholicism than its reputation indicates. While it would not have occurred to the editors to include Catholics in church unity schemes and pictures, they showed respect for Popes Pius XI and XII, wished Catholic citizens well, and often praised the church’s achievements. What ruined everything for a year was the proposal by Franklin Roosevelt to appoint Myron C. Taylor as a Vatican ambassador. In 1940 the entire possibility looked like breaking the game rules of national life. The magazine returned to this theme so frequently that on this one subject alone this reader of 15 year’s worth of issues announces: it was a bore. No harm done, one might say, except to imagination and variety.

The editors were not solely interested in confirmation that the monolithic juggernaut, under signals from Rome, always acted against the American Protestant Republic. Just the opposite. The Morrison era found the staff eager to report on ferment and change. It is impressive to see how early they began watching the late Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. On January 5, 1944, the magazine reported on a pamphlet in which Murray and a colleague showed how Catholics would collaborate with all who believe in God in order to “renovate secular society.” Protestants ought to go along with this program, the magazine advised, even if they should remain cautious.

On August 1, 1945, a long editorial gave thoughtful praise to Murray’s pamphlet “Freedom of Religion.” Murray’s essay was “so keen in analysis, so fine in spirit and so clear in expression that it not only exhibits the issues without evasion or distortion but also helps to create an atmosphere in which these issues can be discussed dispassionately.” This did not mean that Murray converted the editors to the half-way house he portrayed; he himself was not pushing as hard as he did successfully 20 years later when Vatican II essentially approved his approach. Differences remained. Yet there was a fine discrimination growing in the editors’ minds.



This reference to Catholicism is the first turn to the other half of the magazine’s concerns. While monitoring the war and its devastations, the Century stayed faithful to the day-to-day doings of Americans in culture and church. While the domestic issues that concerned the editors had continuity with those of prewar years, they were necessarily de-emphasized during the crisis. The magazine cajoled believers into feeding more of the hungry, drying up the wet (liquor interests regularly were scored), and there were editorials about lynchings and labor, gambling and injustice. To their credit, the writers kept alert on the fronts where demagogues like Charles Coughlin still found followings, and blasted his anti-Semitism and divisive social policies. The shadow of late depression days remained, though by 1938 there seemed to be little new to say.

One of my favorite and one of the most revealing stories in the Century’s lore occurred when Charles Clayton Morrison looked back on 30 years of editing (October 5, 1938):

I recall with many an inward chuckle, one morning some ten or a dozen years ago when the business manager came into the office to tell of a dream he had had that night. It seems that I was drowning in Lake Michigan. He and my editorial colleagues were standing on the shore, having exhausted all their efforts to rescue me. I was just going down for the third and last time, but before the water covered my mouth I thrust up my hand and cried, “Keep it religious! Keep it religious!”

They knew that “it” meant The Christian Century, and that my exhortation was in keeping with the determination, shared by us all, against the temptation to break away from religious journalism and make the paper an organ of secular idealism. I speak of it as a “temptation,” for that it truly was. Our public could easily have been expanded far beyond the church, our income greatly increased, and our secular prestige enhanced, had the collective abilities represented in our editorial staff been devoted to a freelance type of journalism.

Maybe. In any case, the good doctor added, “We have been able to resist this temptation because our hearts are in the Christian church,” whose problems and hopes the magazine chose to share and stick with.

Sometimes this emphasis meant celebrating the occasional moments of victory on the front the magazine held most dear: the ecumenical. Very little ecumenical news missed mention. In 1939 this could mean something as in-house as the reunion of northern and southern Methodists. Yet never did the editors feel compelled to give Federal Council of Churches officials or planners for the World Council of Churches a free ride; criticism was constant. One could reduce the length of reporting on this subject, which took hundreds of pages, by saying that if unity in Christ was being approached or offered, this magazine was for it. The mark of “one” sometimes obscured “holy,” “catholic,” or “apostolic” in the editors’ concerns.

No surprises there. There were surprises, though, in the way these chastened liberals talked about the mission of the church. Far from being the naturalist theists their teachers may have been, Morrison, Winfred Ernest Garrison, Paul Hutchinson and new young writers, like Harold E. Fey, were devoted more to what Henry Pitney Van Dusen elsewhere described as Christocentric liberalism. They were particularists who seemed to think that this could be the core of a universal message, and they stuck to it.



Whoever has laughed at a philosophy of history betrayed in the name Christian Century or at the simple-mindedness of modernism would do well to read the editors struggling with theological change around and in them. The critical realism of the Niebuhr brothers, the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and the Europeans, the recovery of Sören Kierkegaard -- each of whom was closely watched by Century book reviewers -- must have been difficult for these midwestern Disciples and Methodists to grasp. Comfortable with immanental views of God, they struggled with ‘Wholly Other” kinds of transcendence. Nurtured toward sunny faith in human disposition, under God, they confronted the revived emphasis on original sin, total depravity and the human condition as diminishing the grandeur of the human as God’s creation.

The famous, and almost eternal, “How My Mind Has Changed” series patented in the late 1930s could have made the editors look like mere tenders of a theological cafeteria line. But Morrison and his co-workers did more than print articles; they argued with the authors, plundering, ransacking, resisting -- and sometimes being changed themselves.

In other areas, too, the Century was open to change. For example, it maintained a respectable record of placing women on the editorial staff; when Margaret Frakes was hired in 1949 she was the publication’s fourth female editor. This was during a time when there were practically no female professors at U.S. seminaries. Not until August 23, 1939, had the editors been able to cheer Georgia Harkness’s appointment at Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston as that of the first woman on an American seminary staff. And then they readily printed a letter saying that no, Professor Harkness was not the first. What about Margaret Tappan, who had been at San Francisco Theological Seminary since 1937? Editorials like “Women in the Church” (December 11, 1940) furthered the cause; it carried the following indictment: “The American church is still one of the most backward of all institutions in the place it accords to women and the attitude which it exhibits toward them.”



One unanticipated shift in these years brought public attention to evangelicalsm, fundamentalism and Pentecostalism at the expense of the Protestant mainstream. The editors saw fundamentalism as a backwoods, over the hill, jerkwater phenomenon that had already outlived its time. There were several articles on “Holy Rollers” in the remote distance, and some of their churches were congratulated for serving overlooked people. However, C. P. Raycito urged that “we must not compromise with our convictions just because these primitive notions of the minor sects seem to be gaining in popularity or because they do attract some we cannot reach” (August 15, 1939). To surrender to the fundamentalists’ otherworldly outlook would be as bad, the author thought, as succumbing to the fashionable defeatism of European theology. There was a mention that Carl McIntire was organizing a fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches, but it seemed a curiosity. Harold E. Fey reported at length on “Youth for Christ” in the June 20, 1945, issue and he managed to say some good things about revivalism, but worried about the slickness and crowd manipulation; it was “milky abstraction” compared to the solid meat of Jonathan Edwards, Francis Asbury or even Dwight L. Moody. Fey made one bad guess: “One is entitled to doubt that the current resurgence will endure very long.”

What impresses is the intactness of the mainstream Protestant world. With passion rarely amassed today, the editors and those people important to them held huge rallies in downtown auditoriums. They evangelized and witnessed and programmed and cheered; they were the custodians of the culture’s spiritual values, and that task required unity. They worried about keeping the Protestant colleges alive, finding postwar ministers and representing religion on campuses, where minds were being shaped. They watched every move in the seminaries and divinity schools, because leadership training mattered greatly.

The Christian Century, through its good-natured Quintus Quiz columns, thousands of book reviews and hundreds of editorials, saw itself as a fine-tuner of these impulses. That required the editors to be more self-critical than I, for one, had been led to picture them as being. There was some orneriness, cantankerousness and sometimes willful self-blinding in Morrison, whom a few of those who contribute to the magazine, I among them, remember at least dimly. In his 90s and almost blind, he could storm off the elevator, attacking us “young fellows” who, he thought, were complicating his world by advocating relations with Orthodox, evangelicals and Catholics. He loved an argument, spoiled for a fight and took disagreements over values as seriously as he would have taken training for the Olympics. All that was true, and yet he had his supple side.

In that spirit the editors distanced them on February 2, 1938, from facile old modernisms that only wanted to be tied to science and progress. “There is no more pathetic spectacle than is afforded by those liberals of the old school who still defend’’ this wan theism, they wrote. The editorial admired Martin Niemöller’s Berlin congregation whose power to oppose Hitler came from the very act of worship with use of the creed, “ ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.’ (Its pastor is in jail for affirming this same creed.) No listless verbalism here! The ancient creed has become new!”

On those terms the magazine attacked John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for a New York speech in which he suggested that the church drop creeds, liturgies and devotion for the sake of “unselfish good works”(April 25, 1945). The editorial gave Rockefeller, after a few pats, a strong crash course on the role of belief and worship: “Christianity is not morality, not even the morality of Jesus -- though it inspires morality.” Nor is it philanthropy or social action. Rockefeller should have attacked sectarian misuse of creeds, not creeds per se. This is not faith in the teacher, but faith “which his death and his resurrection” created and evoked, and still does.

This is the Christian gospel, and it is the primary and supreme mission of the church to bring all men into the orbit of its saving power, to declare it to the world until mankind accepts Jesus Christ as the cornerstone, not of the church alone, but of civilization itself.

Accuse the writers of imperialism in faith one might, but not of timidity.

A February 9 follow-up on “Evangelizing the Church” shows as well as anything that when Morrison said “keep it religious” he had a very distinct translation of “religious.” He could be friendly to other faiths, but he could not picture a redeemed world apart from a faithful church. It was time to call the church back “from its wanderings in the wilderness of secular ideologies to its historic and essential character.” Progressivism was out.

Almost never did the magazine refer to “religious revival,” a constant theme after 1952. But once, during the war, the editors pondered foxhole religion and the fact that “every analyst of religious trends in wartime notes a quickening of interest in religion in the minds of many persons who have hitherto been indifferent to it. “In this August 25, 1943, editorial they did not feel called upon to challenge the sincerity of such religion. One could meet God in dire circumstances. A religion that was no good in time of trouble was no good at any time. “But the trouble with such belated discoveries of God in desperate emergencies is that [the converts] discover so little.”

The dramas of war and peace were the plot of these years of The Christian Century. The quieter dramas of the normal circumstances of life made their exactions and offerings week after week. The fidelity of the editors to that somewhat more mundane world strikes me as having been as much a fulfillment of their vocation as chronicling the events of the war. Yes, Dr. Morrison, the legacy you handed over sounds strong and clear to successors: ‘‘Keep it religious!’’ So it was, and so it would be.

Abortion and Theology

In the autumn of 1984, Kristin Luker’s study of the abortion controversy, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (University of California Press, 324 pp., $14.95), is especially relevant. By all but extremists on both sides of the issue, this book has come to be regarded as one of the most scrupulously fair and searching of the analyses of the debates positions and prospects. It would not surprise the author if, despite her best efforts, the book did not win the favor of those who are obsessive about the rightness of their causes. It is devoted to understanding their mentalities.

Luker, a San Diego sociologist, begins her last chapter by discussing the “Paradox of Success.” Since 1973 the movement that she agrees to call “pro-life” has made dramatic political gains, as the 1984 presidential campaign underscores. These successes occur against a background of paradox: “Not only is the American public generally sympathetic to abortion: it is apparently becoming more sympathetic all the time.” The pro-life hecklers and speech disrupters evidently are breeding backlash by satisfying their own need to lash. They are driving more people into the camp that finds abortion to be a reasonable choice, at least under certain conditions.

Luker cites polls, which she advises us to use, albeit warily. In 1962 only 10 per cent of the population supported what is now called “abortion on demand.” In 1980 the Gallup survey found that figure to have risen to 25 per cent, while an additional 53 per cent favored abortion in a very broad range of circumstances. By 1977 the National Opinion Research Center found that 90 per cent approved of abortion when the health of the mother was at risk; 83 per cent when pregnancy resulted from rape; and 83 per cent when there was likely to be fetal deformity. In contrast, true believers in the pro-life movement oppose abortion under any circumstances. (A CBS-New York Times poll in mid-September of this year found that only 28 per cent of those polled back a constitutional amendment banning all abortions; only 46 per cent of churchgoing and 21 per cent of non-churchgoing Catholics want such a ban.)

Despite the gap between those who want to outlaw abortion and the opinion of the majority, the abortion debate will neither go away nor, concludes Luker, become noted for “civility, calm, or reasoned discourse.” Yet, she cautiously predicts, the debate itself will gradually become less important to the public. Lest anyone think that this will result from the reasoned argument of the people she agrees to call “pro-choice,” she tells us that they actually don’t discourse much at all. Instead, they will gain because support for many kinds of abortion comes not so much through either passion or reason as through a change in lifestyles. More and more women are entering the work force, and those who find fulfillment outside the home have little sympathy for the needs and values of the home-centered, who make up the core and the mass of the women-dominated right-to-life movement.

Kristin Luker’s contribution has been to isolate and interview the activist leadership of both camps, and to limn their world views. Finding the pro-life activists is not hard. Because they see their way of life assaulted and feel on the defensive, they have organized with almost fanatic zeal. Luker measures their commitment, choosing to use a ten-hour-a-week involvement as a floor. “Most worked between thirty and forty hours a week on this issue.’’ On the other hand, the busy and preoccupied women who made up the more blurred core but larger mass of the pro-choice movement produced few such activists; Luker had to lower her floor to five hours per week In order to find enough who stood on it. Pro-life people, who are motivated to organize, work and vote can take advantage of this situation, for the genially apathetic pro-choice people are doing other things -- not including, unfortunately, spending time reasoning and thinking theologically about the issues pro-lifers will not let drop. The case for “discretionary” abortions keeps growing. “The future of the debate will belong to the side that most effectively captures the middle ground of opinion.’’

Pro-lifers have some assets in the struggle to capture public opinion. “Many Americans feel a deep uneasiness about abortion.” Yet the antiabortion camp makes few gains among this larger population because the activists ground their movement in “the deeply held belief that every embryo is a baby.” (Luker knows that the term “embryo” is not technically accurate, but she seeks depoliticized words; to call it either a fetus or a baby prejudices the case.) To win support for antiabortion laws, pro-life activists would have to compromise on this issue. They are not now convincing the huge majority that to take the life of an embryo in order to save the life of a mother is simple “murder,” as the bumper-stickers (but not most people in the reasoned, religious, Christian and even Catholic traditions before 1973) would have it. Few agree with one leader’s flip’ sounding dictum that two deaths are better than one murder.

Compromise would be delicate for pro-life supporters, even on this extreme, mother-saving issue; more than delicate, it would be devastating, for it would mean accepting one of two premises: “that embryos belong to a different moral order from people who have already been born or (more perniciously, from the pro-life point of view) that embryos are persons, but some persons (women) have more rights than others (embryos).” Some Catholics, using the doctrine of ‘‘indirect effect” or the “unjust aggressor,” are now seeking ways to compromise while still preserving the integrity of the cause and movement, as Luker explains in her final chapter.



While the author tries never to be shrill or doom-sounding, she does follow out a scenario that the politics of 1984 hint might be plausible. Pressure from the pro-life movement could bring about the passage of laws that the vast majority would not accept. The result would be something like the aftermath of prohibition. “The best the pro-life movement can hope for, should one of the current anti-abortion bills pass, is a modern form of the Prohibition experience.’’ Why? Because public opinion supporting certain kinds of abortion is close to unanimous; it was formed before the 1973 Supreme Court decision; and the majority that have come of sexual age since that year now take for granted that fertility decisions are to be made only by the individuals involved. Antiabortion laws would therefore result in legal chaos, in flouting the laws, possibly in a rise in organized crime, but hardly in the saving of maternal or embryonic life. Although pro-choice people can take little comfort from this scenario, they are not doing much to prevent it. They may, however, still win out despite pro-life activism, pressure and disruption, simply because more and more women’s lifestyles are changing. Although the abortion debate may gradually become more muted, “none of us should be too surprised if, by the turn of the century, technological changes were once again to make abortion a battleground for competing social, ethical, and symbolic values.”

That sentence ends the last chapter of a book whose previous eight sections are just as jarring and rich. To come to her final point, revealing a plague in both “pro” houses, Luker ranges widely. A historical chapter reviews the basic literature on the subject, finding that ever since the disagreements between the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, and all down through Christian history -- a history that has almost consistently disapproved of abortion – “the moral status of the embryo has always been ambiguous.” The pro-life movement would break with much of history, as Luker reads it, to end ambiguity and “fine tuning.” Although both sides appeal to facts, it is hard to deny Luker’s fair-minded assertion that “the abortion debate is not about facts, but how to weigh, measure, and assess facts.”

A second chapter gives her reading of how abortion got on the American agenda a century before Roe v. Wade made it urgent in 1973. Not women, not churches and clergy, but physicians put it there. Here was one realm where they could flaunt expertise as they defined their professional elites. Having forced the subject, once they had received the status and prestige of experts, physicians let the issue drop during a “century of silence” -- the title of Luker’s third chapter -- a silence interrupted by Roman Catholicism, which, in speaking out, was breaking with a part of its own past. Ever since the 12th century Decretals of Gratian, and certainly since Pope Gregory IX in 1234, Catholics had distinguished between animate and inanimate embryos, and between early and late abortions. After the work of Pius IX in 1869 the distinction disappeared. The result was “uniform and unconditional opposition to abortion, even to therapeutic abortion,” against the background of a theory of marriage and sexuality that the church did not succeed in selling to enough non-Catholics. Some would contend that it has been similarly unsuccessful in selling it to enough faithful Catholics. Still, Catholicism did witness during the century of silence.

Luker’s fourth chapter deals with reform attempts, her fifth with the invention of “right to abortion” efforts. In 1967 then-governor Ronald Reagan of California made history by signing into law the Beilenson Bill, which protected physicians who must make choices that might involve abortions. The result was unforeseen; few had thought that the bill would “challenge either the fact of [physician] management or the social status of abortion itself.” But it did. In 1968, following the new law, 5,018 abortions were performed; by 1971, 116,749 had occurred -- a gain of 2,000 per cent in four years. The search for “a middle way” had become “abortion on demand.” Medical control had become a legal fiction in a world where 99 per cent of those seeking abortions got them. The right-to-life movement had to be organized to make the countercase.



The chapter in which Luker’s patent best shows is her seventh, “World Views of the Activists.” I recommend to anyone who wants to make sense of the current scene a reading of her detailing of those competing, mutually exclusive, world views. According to Luker’s summary,

Women come to be pro-life and pro-choice activists as the end result of lives that center around different definitions of motherhood. They grow up with a belief about the nature of the embryo, so events in their lives lead them 10 believe that the embryo is a unique person, or a fetus; that people are intimately tied to their biological roles, or that these roles are but a minor part of life: that motherhood is the most important and satisfying role open to a woman, or that motherhood is only one of several roles, a burden when defined as the only role. These beliefs and values are rooted in the concrete circumstances of women’s lives -- their educations, incomes, occupations, and the different marital and family choices they have made along the way -- and they work simultaneously to shape these circumstances in turn. Values about the relative place of reason and faith, about the role of actively planning for lire versus learning to accept gracefully life’s unknowns, of the relative satisfactions inherent in work and family -- all of these factors place activists in a specific relationship to the larger world and give them a specific set of resources with which to confront that world. Pro-choice and pro-life activists live in different worlds, and the scope of their lives, as both adults and children, fortifies them in their belief that their own views on abortion are the more correct, more moral, and more reasonable. When added to this is the fact that should “the other side” win, one group of women will see the very real devaluation of their lives and life resources, it is not surprising that the abortion debate has generated so much heat and so little light [pp. 214-15].

Evidence supports her analysis. Those who seek civil peace while remaining both uneasy about “abortion on demand” and unable to be completely against abortion find a plague in the pro-life house. Its people are absolutist, self-righteous and disruptive in ways that drive more and more into opposing camps. They often seem unconcerned about other political consequences of their obsessive choice of one cause.

Without stressing it, however. Luker points out a plague in the pro-choice house that religiously and theologically concerned people ought to pay attention to. Whatever the religion of those in the “middle ground” the place where we find most Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews and even many evangelicals -- they cannot get by forever by arguing the theology of “choice” and “rights,” while refusing to sharpen their understandings of “values” about “life.” According to Luker, the religion of pro-choice activists, who presumably represent most mainline church-people on the abortion issue, is unrepresentative, thinned out, hardly visible or usable as a resource at all.

She finds that almost 80 per cent of the pro-life activists are Catholics, 9 per cent are Protestants, 5 per cent claim no religion and 1 per cent are Jewish. On the other hand, 63 per cent of the pro-choice activist women -- in sharp contrast to the national average -- say they have no religion, 22 per cent think of themselves as vaguely Protestant, 3 per cent are Jewish and 9 per cent have what they name a “personal’’ religion. Twenty per cent of the pro-choice activists were raised Catholic, 42 per cent Protestant, and 15 per cent Jewish, while only 58 per cent of the pro-life activists were raised Catholic, conversions having produced the 80 per cent affiliation figure. “Almost three-quarters of the pro-choice people interviewed said that formal religion was either unimportant or completely irrelevant to them;’’ only 25 per cent of them ever attend church, and then only occasionally. Pro-life figures are quite different.

Luker is content to leave things there, using church affiliation and religious interest as but two of the elements making up world views. But the pro-choice religious community cannot leave it there. Fully able to accept secular arguments and allies, on theological and tactical grounds, they will do their cause a disservice if they do not find better articulators of Christian and Jewish theological views -- and find some of them, at least, in the pews. On the evidence of books like this, it would seem that people like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who connect such other “pro-life” causes as opposition to nuclear weapons to their antiabortion stand, are consistent and compelling even to those who will not finally be compelled. But those who refuse to connect pro-choice with “life” in the case of what Luker calls embryos will continue to look inconsistent, apathetic and unwilling to produce theologians who will state their case. A thoughtful public may eventually decide that they are not merely unwilling but unable to make a theological case for their position, Since there are so many more people who support reproductive choice, they may succeed in foot-dragging the nation away from a prohibition-era scenario, and may thus win respect for law. They have a long way to go, however, to progress from mere foot-dragging to taking steps in support of law, and of life

No Radicalism Here: Faculty Survey

Appearing three times a year, the scholarly journal This World is funded by the Institute for Educational Affairs and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Therefore it has plenty of money, and it used some of it wisely to commission an independent survey of theological seminary professors in the United States (Summer 1982, $4.00). The researchers from the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut chose 2,000 such professors at random and received an impressive 57-per-cent return as 1,112 took time to answer 200 questions.

The survey’s denominational spread seems fair. There were 221 Catholics, 166 Baptists, 122 Methodists -- a breakdown which follows church-body rankings in America, although Lutherans instead of being in fourth place were sixth, with 95. The Roper people and their proofreaders get things a bit mixed up as they deal with two “Morvarians,” one “Evengelical Mennonite,” five “Advent Christians” -- want to bet the latter were Seventh-day Adventists, who have eight times as many clergy as Advent Christians? The researchers fatally confuse Church of Christ with United Church of Christ. More important, they lump both with Methodists and Pentecostals as “nonliturgicals” in their findings. Meanwhile, “liturgicals” such as Missouri Synod Lutherans and Episcopalians are clumped, despite their differences, only because their ritual is more structured. There are better ways to classify church bodies.

Still, why gripe, since the Roper and This Worldly people have left us with many important responses? For most of our comments, we shall deal with the “total sample” in any case, seeing professors as a unit rather than severing them into Catholic, non-liturgical, liturgical and “other” clusters.

The survey is devastating to the preconceptions of those who carry radical images of the theological professoriate. Doctrinally these faculty members are conventional. Ecclesiastically they are faithful. In general we get the image that, across the spectrum, they are bourgeois Hauspapas (although 7.7 per cent are female). Politically they seem a bit lethargic, still trapped in ordinary New Dealish liberalisms. They did not begin with or turn from radicalism with the new conservatives who publish This World.

Were they ever radical? What ever happened to that irresponsible crowd of mavericks who a dozen years ago and more were announcing the death of God, defending the New Morality, or writing books on The Secular City, Theology for Radical Politics or The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, and trying to bring down the establishment? Here in Roperdom are no signs of such past attachments -- and few can remember any, if they once held them, say the statistics. Maybe there was a brain drain from seminaries to university religion departments, which house a greater number of radicals. Maybe the media misrepresented the many while focusing on the few. In any case, call off the heresy hunters and witch seekers. We’re safe nowadays.



The poll asked: Are you highly observant in religious practice? Here 84 per cent of the seminary professors answered yes, and only 1 per cent were “largely” or “totally nonobservant.” So much for Sunday-morning slugabedism. In the total sample, 12 per cent are fundamentalist, 55 per cent self-described evangelical, 69 per cent mainline and 45 per cent liberal -- which means that many are more than one thing. Eighty-five per cent are ordained ministers; 75 per cent have been parish ministers and 13 per cent still are. School prayer in public institutions? Sixty-eight per cent of the professors oppose it, just as 63 per cent oppose “the biblical view of Creation being taught in the public schools along with the theory of evolution.” Interestingly, most of the opposition came from the South (where the Southern Baptist Convention, going against its professors and violating its dearest traditions, recently voted in favor of a school-prayer amendment!). Curiously, although the Supreme Court encourages teaching about the major religions in public schools, only 58 per cent of those surveyed favor it. Few seminary graduates teach in public institutions, so the professors have little personal involvement in this question professionally.

Wherever they stand on economics today, 70 per cent of the respondents believe that the Bible favors a society based on cooperation; only 2 per cent, one based on competition. They keep a foot firmly in all camps when 92 per cent say that a person could be a member in good standing of their church and adhere to “democratic socialism,” 81 per cent to “laissez-faire capitalism” and 36 per cent to “Marxism.” Very few object to denominations speaking out on public issues, and most (80 per cent) agree with most of their own church body’s positions in this field. The majority perceive great gaps between these positions and local clergy and laity. Almost none thinks that the pulpit is an appropriate place to boost particular political candidates, and almost none thinks that his or her church is too involved in social-justice causes.

Whatever happened to the radicals on the “far left”? Only 2 per cent of the seminary faculty members locate themselves there, and only 14 per cent are “very liberal” in their own mirrors. Not one was “far right.” Most of the professors tilt toward the Democratic Party. In their eyes, America is becoming less compassionate toward the poor, and, say two-thirds of them, the nation is “somewhat,” not “a lot” (28 per cent), more conservative than ten years ago. Most of them think they are about where they were ten years ago, though 1 per cent are “a lot more conservative” -- along with the This World people (in our image of their self-image) -- and 20 per cent are “somewhat more conservative.”

Seventy-four per cent of those polled feel that the U.S. spends too much on arms, and very few think it spends too much on welfare. See how tiredly late New-Dealish they are? Only 5 per bent “strongly agree” and 33 per cent “agree” that the U.S. would be better off if it moved toward socialism. Only 11 per cent see any reason for Americans to justify using violence to achieve political goals. Eighty-one per cent would like to see a step-up in arms-control negotiations with the Soviets, though only 46 per cent regard the use of nuclear weapons as “always morally wrong.” Roman Catholics, at 60 per cent, are most opposed to nuclear weapons in any circumstance.



Creationists will have a hard time convincing legislators and courts that those who teach tomorrow’s clergy are in their camp, since 69 per cent of the Protestants accept the theory of evolution; 98 per cent of the Catholics do, while 100 per cent of the Catholics think that evolution does not deny but instead “explains” creation. Only 2 per cent see science as a threat to religion. The professors like nature and would like for it to be around and cared for a bit longer.

These educators are not too happy about the foreign-policy images and activities of the U.S., since only 57 per cent say that the nation is “in general a force for good in the world.” Eighty per cent see the U.S.-Soviet clash as “power politics,” and only 20 per cent see it as “moral struggle.” In this zone not all readers will agree with my picture of the seminary professors as safe and settled. Seventy per cent are wary of multinational corporations. As to whether repressive regimes on “our” side or communism constitutes the greater problem, they split 50-50. Still, not safe.

Let’s run for cover. Eighty per cent of the respondents call Jesus “Son of God”; 11 per cent more, “promised Messiah.” Only 1 per cent view him as a “political revolutionary,” and the turn-of-the-century liberalism that saw him as moral teacher, prophet or itinerant preacher hardly shows up on the screen. Of course, 99 per cent are “pro” existence of God, and think their students are with them; 88 per cent affirm immortal life (though we’ll bet many had to translate that term with “resurrection,” not “immortality,” in mind). Eighty-three per cent anticipate a final judgment, but only half think of “a place of Eternal Torment.”

Will the biblical inerrantists win? Only 11 per cent of Catholics have use for the movement, while 27 per cent of the whole sample does. The seminary professors estimate that 30 per cent of their students favor the concept of biblical inerrancy. About two-thirds of the professors do see the Bible as infallible in faith and morals matters. Most of them pray and worship regularly, but not too many regularly have mystical experiences. Well, who does -- and holds tenure? The professors don’t like abortion, 70 per cent deeming it immoral when a married woman resorts to it to stop having children; but only 44 per cent want laws against it. Sixty-four per cent regard homosexual relations in private between consenting adults as immoral, but 75 per cent do not want a law against such practices. Though the professors really stand with the public samples on these “social issues,” they would rely on persuasion, not coercion, to make the “moral” point.

Is premarital sex immoral? Seventy per cent of those polled think so. Extramarital? Ninety per cent. Good-bye, new morality -- but here again the professors are not eager for laws. Fifty-three per cent find divorce “morally neutral,” but only 23 per cent find remarriage of the divorced who have living spouses to be immoral.

Few of the respondents view their church bodies as liberal (from 2 per cent Catholic to 22 per cent in two other clusters), and they split about half and half as to whether they consider themselves more liberal than or as moderate as other members of their church body. Only 15 per cent think they are more conservative than their co-religionists; clearly, the professors are not custodians of the denominational antique shops and doctrinal museums. Eighty-one per cent think their denominations are “about right” in maintaining orthodoxy among their members and in the seminaries (83 per cent).



As for ordination of women, no less than 74 per cent of the Roman Catholic respondents (and 75 per cent of everybody) are in favor. Only 22 per cent of the professors favor ordination of known practicing homosexuals. The South, with 30 per cent, has the highest proportion in favor of ordination of homosexuals -- still another southern surprise. The professors endorse religious pluralism, though their personal attention to ecumenical matters wavers; yet they find few good rationales for denominational separatism. Is there still a “superchurch” out there? Only 11 per cent (24 per cent of the Catholics) look forward to or expect one. Seventy-eight per cent think religion is too uninfluential in America. Although the professors think politicians pay much more attention to religious values than do business leaders, they wish both groups would heed religion more. Almost all favor tax exemption for religiously used church property and oppose it for property owned by churches but not used for religious purposes. Seventy-seven per cent “in general” are unsympathetic toward Moral Majority efforts; 70 per cent feel the organization is harmful in politics; 72 per cent think it does damage to the cause of religion in the country. However, 63 per cent believe it will lose influence soon, and 69 per cent believe the same concerning the Moral Majority’s leader, Jerry Falwell.

These are only a few tantalizations from the Roper researchers’ statistical tables, interspersed with some of the ahas and hmmmms such polls inspire. After a quiet summer off from classroom duties, at a safe distance from multinational corporations, secularized businessmen, and the as-yet-unredeemed American economic system, maybe -- if this survey is accurate -- the seminary professors will come back a little closer to This World and this world than they’ve been in the past.

Spirit at the Solstice

A wintry heart: a “being toward death.” Winter, the season when a pole of the earth slants farthest from the sun, finds the shadows longest at noon. Somewhere around December 21 in the northern hemisphere, or June 21 in the southern the tilt is the greatest. The long chill begins. Before that time, in the moderate climates, some snow will have fallen to follow the dropping of leaves, but the illusions of postponement can be extended. The slant, the tilt, the time of solstice means the end of illusion: winter has arrived.

Winter is more than dormancy; it is a dying. Poets who have springtime in view make much of the way the earth needs annual sleep. Animals hibernate. Trees rest to draw strength for a new bursting of buds. Nature is quiet, but will become vital again. Poets are also beings who are aware of standing on a horizon that opens toward death. The leaves that have dropped from the living trees will never return. Though at first the smell of their decay was sweet, it turned acrid. In the dryness of late autumn, they disintegrated. The twigs are gone. No poetry or wishing will return them. Though some animals will revive from winter’s sleep, others have gone to their caves as to their graves. They disappear, and when spring comes the wanderer ponders: What happened to all the carcasses? Where are the dry bones?

A wintry sort of spirituality does not literally trace the cycles of the seasons and is not a weather report or an observation on the climate. This spirituality treats winter as a metaphor or an image of the heart and soul. The wintry image, because it represents more than dormancy -- death -- forces an urgent theme on the spiritual seeker. The search for a piety does not permit evasion of the central issue of life: its “being toward death.” Every Yes hereafter has to be made in the face of “ceasing to be,” as the world ordinarily knows being.

The wintry sort of spirituality, says Karl Rahner, promotes solidarity with those whose horizon excludes God. For those who are serious about this excluding, the mystery of death is the great determiner of their distance. Awareness of a probable “ceasing to be” and inability to say Yes in the face of it combine to lead them away from any desire to reckon with God. Whoever says God has chosen to imply goodness and power. If there is goodness and power, why is there death or the pain and suffering usually associated with it? Did God cause the death? If so, where is goodness and love? Did God have the power to abolish death and not use the power? That version advances nothing, for where, even then, are goodness and love? The third option seems hardly more attractive. It holds that God may be powerless to work life in the face of natural death. Why bother with a God too weak to create and sustain what matters most to every person? The questions will not be suppressed.

Committed Christians who fuse horizons with those of the godless know they cannot evade the questions. Attempts to smuggle the reverent unbeliever into the kingdom by calling her an “anonymous Christian,” as Karl Rahner would, meet with opposition. The resisters say, in effect, “Don’t baptize me with terminology where you cannot reach me with water.”

A classic illustration of this was when some French Dominicans came to admire the writings and character of the novelist Albert Camus. They wanted to find ways to include him anonymously in their camp but found him drawing back. Finally he addressed them, inviting dialogue. They should remain Catholic and he agnostic, he said, staying in their separate camps. If Camus could make sense of a God who permitted babies to die, he could find the Christian scheme attractive. Since he could not, their faith remained fundamentally unattractive, whatever lesser benefits it might bring.

Not often do believers have the opportunity to engage those beyond their own horizon that includes God, the way those Dominicans encountered Camus. In recent generations the nonbelieving community has tended serenely to ignore the claims of faith. When they see evidence in the media of a commercialized and trivial entertainment business in the name of faith, the creatively godless shrug their shoulders. They have better things to do than to pay heed to such voices and options. These mean no more to them than would popular astrology to most Christians. Entertaining Christianity, though it employs a language that includes death, is in a hurry to pass over the Good Friday story in order to reach Easter. Such a diversion does not allow the reality of death to loom.

Summery-spirited Christians know that they will have to die along with everyone else. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, since it took the sting out of death, in their eyes. removes some of the seriousness of death. Mentions of rewards for the graced life after death are frequent, but seldom is there a walking through the stages that lead to death. Since much summery Christianity concentrates on healing, it must bring up the fact of disease. Here again, however, the theme can be trivialized, because in the popular books or on the television programs, one comes to meet only with the success stories. People throw their crutches away; the cancer cells miraculously disperse; life is prolonged. Well and good, think those of the wintry sort, but prolonging does not do away with it. Death remains. The leaves fall, decay and disappear. The heart knows, and demands a listening to its confusion.

Believers who find themselves at home with the wintry sort have been so voiceless that those who exclude God from their horizon are hardly aware of those who hold to faith. When the believing community begins to produce realists on the subject of death, people who take it seriously on their own terms, their act occasions surprise.



The theme of death reaches people differently in various phases of their lives. Young people given to wintry sorts of spirituality will not and should not find themselves focusing on it. Father John Dunne of the University of Notre Dame found this question to be a human constant: “Since I must die, how shall I satisfy my desire to live?” He noticed that the question comes in a new way to people around the fourth decade of their life. Young people have probably been close to someone who died. We are told that they will have seen  18,000 violent deaths on television before they reach college age. Such ritualizing of violence, however, screens real death from view and makes it easier to evade.

Death up close is not a present reality for most of the young in a modern society. The architecture of housing cooperates: there is no upstairs room for grandma in the ranch home, no corner for grandfather in the apartment or condominium. If a member of the senior generation dies, the grandchild is at a distance. After death, the body of the elder is usually disguised by the cosmetic aspects of the funeral parlor art. Only professionals are physically near the dying: the cleric, the medical staff, the funeral parlor director. Even they find safeguards against having to make death personal: they can pull screens and use sanitation and monitoring devices to keep the dirtiness of death distant. Busy calendars and schedules remove the opportunities for reflection, and there is even new terminology to shroud the realistic language about death. Once upon a time people died in the community, but now they die alone. All this has a bearing on death for the dying one, but it also changes the nature of the surviving community.

An author writes lines like these as if with a kind of automatic impulse. He fears that they will seem lifeless because they have been repeated so often. Yet he must move one step further and risk more repetition by entering into the present record the observation that death is supposed to have become a taboo subject. A yawn comes easily when one hears one more time that in the 19th century sex was taboo and death was a popular subject, whereas in the 20th everyone can talk about sex, and almost no one brings up death. Recently there has been some change in this context, and books on death have sometimes even become best-sellers. Seminars on the subject attract wide notice. Still, Christian parish leaders report that however voguish the topic may be, it does not attract audiences or readerships that have any staying power.

Even where the talk about death and dying comes with ease, a certain taming of the subject occurs. Many a therapist can rattle off the “stages of death and dying” as outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross or her competitors or successors. To put a name on stages, however, does something to make them more domestic and safe. Such naming is a part of therapy; why criticize the healing impulse? What a culture gains in therapy it may lose in its grasp of soul. Death has its own power. It also resists being graded, located between strata of life or seen following neat stages. Death comes with the brutal crash of steel as autos meet on freeways, through the quiet slit of steel with a razor at the wrist, with the thieving suddenness of a coronary occlusion, with the silent stealth of infant crib death, with the adding-machine efficiency of genocide, or with the plotlessness of invisible mass killings in Kampuchea. The naming of stages does little to prepare a person for the many ways that the last enemy uses to attack.

John Dunne found from reading spiritual biographies that somewhere around age 29 or 30, profound people pass to a new stage of awareness. They appropriate the horizon that death creates. People who have watched television death for entertainment or who have read objectively about dying begin seeing subtle changes in their own bearing. They have begun their new move toward autumn. Doors close, options narrow. By now they have been fated to follow one vocation instead of another. They have vowed to spend life with this mate and not that one. As they mature, they hear the commentators describe athletes or mathematicians of their age as being over the hill.” Through the centuries, cultures and the dictates of the body have worked similar effects on diverse people. They move from observing death at a distance to reckoning with its possibility close at hand. Some of the deep religious experiences of conversion occur at about that time. The journals of spirituality, especially those of a wintry sort, start to be written at that age.

If Dunne is reckoning correctly, the age when people take death seriously as a personal reality, a point that today occurs before midlife, was near the end of the average life span for people in the ancient world. If the Psalms are to serve as a text that discloses a creative way of being in the face of death, it is important for a reader to remember how close death was to everyone in the original context of the book. No actuaries kept statistics on the people of the era. Through complex means of calculation there can now be educated guesses. The young person of today can expect to reach Psalm 90’s minimum of “threescore years and ten.” When the Psalms were written, few could look ahead so far. In ancient Greece and Rome the average span was believed to be just over 20 years, in medieval England about 33. Two centuries ago it had risen only to 36.

In the Psalms; all views of death had to reflect its closeness. The earthy naturalness of Old Testament stories reveals the nearness of death through battles, floods, accidents, miraculous disasters, or any number of other causes. Death was both a part of nature taken for granted and a punishment for evil, the result of God’s activity. To make sense of the psalmic attitudes toward death, it is important to set a larger Old Testament context.

The writers of the Psalms confronted death but saw through it to life because in death they saw God. This notion seems startling because the Psalms have so little to say in general and nothing concrete to say about a positive mode of being in afterlife. Shed, the abode of the dead, was attractive neither to visit nor to take up residence in. Sheol allowed for no visitors, and none ever returned from it. This shadowy world was, and in retrospect is, a horror without mitigation. The language of winter is too serene for Sheol’s miry, murky landscape. And yet, one must say, despite the language of “ceasing to be” or going to Sheol, there is a Yes in the face of such language in the depth of Hebrew piety.

One angle of vision comes from subsequent styles of Judaism. Two lines from eastern European 18th century Hasidic Judaism reflect the long afterglow of this vision.

Rabbi Zalman, one of the great successors to Hasidism’s founder, Baal Shem Tov, was said to have interrupted his prayers to say of the Lord: “I do not want your paradise. I do not want your coming world. I want you, and you only.” This was in the spirit of his predecessor, who said, “If I love God, what need have I of a coming world?” Such language is not likely to satisfy moderns who wish a more open future. It is an important first word for those who have only utilitarian views of God. In the world of the practical, God is loved for the sake of one’s self, for the self’s purposes, and for the yield of this relation in the reward of eternal life. The ancient Hebrew loved God for the sake of a long life in which to enjoy creation, but she also was to love the Lord for the Lord’s sake.

The Christian tradition in its vital years picked up something of this sense of the love of God and of trust in the divine ways wherever they lead. From the tradition of Bernard of Clairvaux in the Middle Ages there survives the story of a woman seen in a vision. She was carrying a pitcher and a torch. Why these? With the pitcher she would quench the fires of hell, and with the torch she would burn the pleasures of heaven. After these were gone, people would be able to love God for God’s sake. Here, as so often in Hebrew thought, a regard for the intrinsic character of God and of divine trustworthiness shines through. A believer shifts away from a bartering concept in which one loves God for the sake of a transaction. Now there is a relation in which the trusting one is simply reposed in the divine will. The journey through the season after solstice in the heart will take on purpose and become beatable.

The Hebrew Scriptures from page one prepare the seeker for such an embodiment of God. Genesis asserts that God antedates the beginnings. The Scriptures have room for two different creation stories on the first two pages and for others in the Wisdom literature, in Job 38-39, and elsewhere. No one can collate these stories in order to deduce a scientific account of how the world began; the texts have a different purpose. While some religions have no interest in beginnings, faith within the Hebrew Scriptures insists that the Creator is the Lord of all that follows -- including death. Wonder over the universe of nature is a derived wonder. Such awe exists not for its own sake but because God is the agent. The world and the holy as such, the seasons of weather and the heart as such, are not of intrinsic but of derived value. Everything depends on trust in the Creator.



Whereas this understanding was all very comforting to the Hebrew who had such a vivid sense of the Creator’s presence, it seems to do little to help believers and unbelievers comprehend each other’s horizons. It does little good to talk about those horizons until a reader has done more justice to what the psalmists thought were their own. Today the world is described as “desacralized.” For many this means that the universe has lost its innate sacredness. No longer has it a native capability to generate transcendence and inspire awe. Today humans set out to control the rivers and oceans, the resources under the earth, and the seasons themselves. The Hebrew’s world, however, was sacralized not because of its innate and native character but because it belonged to God.

God’s world included human mortality. According to the Eden stories, death came as a punishment for disobedience. More than disobedience was involved, nevertheless. Death was the marking line drawn between the divine and the human, between created people and the Creator God. Adam and Eve chose to strive to be immortal and to have knowledge. These both belonged only to God, who would have given creatures one but not both of them. People became mortal, but they had knowledge. This knowledge is what inspired the Hebrew drama and reflects itself in the Psalms. People now do not live to be immortal, but they have knowledge. Death, therefore, though a punishment, is also a simple fact that defines the creature over against the living God. The human now knows something of “good and evil,” life and death. Eden meant ignorant immortality. After Eden comes informed mortality.

The Psalms frequently remember that death is a punishment for disobedience, but more often they are matter-of-fact, and the punishment idea is lessened. Responsibility for living replaces the consciousness of punishment. Humans are not to be beasts, nor to live like beasts, for they are still in dumbness, in ignorance. The knowledge of death, for all the grimness of realism it introduces to life, is what gives daily and yearly existence meaning. Humans no longer have immortality, but they have history, memory and hope. Remembering is the root of trust, hoping is the center of faith.

Although Sheol is a threat with whose horrendousness we moderns cannot cope, death itself in the Psalms is not mere enemy. God does not act like an Oriental potentate who enjoys humans, like puppies, tumbling before his throne until it suits a divine whim to have them killed. Death, indeed, is not the result of a whim but is to define what is human. Astonishingly, then, in this concept, death is not simply evil any more than winter is evil in the passing of the year. Death is not a reality designed to call humans to refuse the enjoyment of living. Death, the definer, gives meaning to life and history. It is an instrument that helps provide meaning for daily existence.



Each believing Hebrew had to learn what their literature imparts to later readers. The texts teach the intrinsic value of each day. They turn mourning into a regard for the living, not for the dead, who are beyond reach. With this goes a reality that confirms our sense that a wintry sort of spirituality dominates these Scriptures. The living are all also beings who appear on a horizon toward death. No matter how righteous they may be, not everything turns out well for them in life. The Psalms often do focus on a “Why?” that is inspired by whatever it is that limits meaning in the life of the righteous who must die, before they are on the verge of dying. So limited and immediately confining seemed the language of response to the Why that some later rabbis came up with equivalents to the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. They needed “immortality” to compensate for what limited them in this life.

In the rabbinic versions of immortality, God finally evens accounts for the righteous. Among other things, they can resume relations that they had known on earth. The Scriptures are never very clear, however, about such reunions. Jacob does not expect to meet his missing and presumed-dead son, Joseph. Sheol is a zone of darkness and chaos in which such a meeting would be meaningless, indeed impossible. Sheol is thus no match for Greek or later rabbinic immortality or Christian resurrection. The Hebrew Scriptures have no language of bliss after life. They give no voice to a hope for a creation that is reflected back into the old world, thanks to the values of life after death. Sheol follows life but does not serve as an afterlife. It has been said that Sheol is better seen as an afterdeath Sheol never makes its appearance for comfort, to inspire a different mode of living now. Afterdeath is a winter from which no spring emerges, after which no summer invites.

Because the Hebrews of the type who wrote the Psalms concentrated on the trustworthiness of God and not on the gift of afterlife, they did not ask for more living after death. They pleaded with God as the giver of life to endow the meaning of their seasons with value. Seldom do they stand in the divine marketplace and bargain for a life to come, though some do haggle for more years. God as the Lord of life matters more than their ego and their survival.

Even to record such conclusions of biblical scholars may contribute to the wintry chill that reaches many corners of the texts, God simply keeps asking creatures questions that admit of no easy answer. These impel them into full and busy lives in the light of a divine purpose whose extent remains finally unknowable. Unknowability does not in the end mean silence. God, who is personal, addresses humans and expects response. The drama of daily living results from that conversation.

Later Judaism could not leave things so wintry. The Talmud quotes a rabbi: “The end purpose of everything our Mishna has described is the life of the world to come.” The motive of the rabbis was less to elaborate on the sketchy traces of belief in afterlife within the Bible than to make sense of their faith in the justice of God. God, they thought, had to do more than the Scriptures revealed, in order to even out the injustices of this world.

Such rabbinic notions introduce a springtime. The Psalms leave those who pray them with a winter radiated by awareness of the divine power over both death and life. The rabbinic teaching on immortality that tempered the psalmic faith began to offer an escape from death by an escape after death. Jewish messianism, because it proposed a purpose to future history, also qualified the old faith of psalmists in the trustworthiness of a God who made each day meaningful on its own terms.

After centuries of rabbinic teaching on immortality, Jewish faith in messianism, and Christian witness to the resurrection, it is hard to pull the screen back down to cloud the future as the Psalms did. Moderns reflect on the past as if all people in it faced death with equanimity because they believed in recompense in a life to come. That belief appeared in the interval between the era of the Psalms and our own. Faith in a life to come has by now disappeared from the consciousness of many. They live under the confining canopy of their unguided years. Novelist John Updike (in the New, Yorker of January 11, 1982, p. 95) refers to this interval “when death was assumed to be a gateway to the afterlife and therefore not qualitatively different from the other adventures and rites of passage that befall a soul. . . . Most men until modem times prepared for and enacted their own dying” with a sense of calm, even matter-of-factness. Somehow Updike implies an affirmation in writing that at best says, “Blackness is not all.”

Blackness of winter night dominates modern literature and consciousness. Lacking both faith in an afterlife and trust in a Lord of life, those who exclude God from their temporal horizon are left then only with the pain, never with value or meaning. Updike cites an example from a diarylike novel by Lars Gustafsson, The Death of a Beekeeper, to suggest the measure of pain. This Journal records the last days of a Swedish beekeeper who, as he is dying of cancer in 1974, isolates himself in his beloved cottage. The novel is at home with wintriness:

It was gray, pleasant February weather, fairly cold and hence not too damp, and the whole landscape looked like a pencil sketch. I don’t know why I like it so much. It is pretty barren and yet I never get tired of moving about in it.

Such prose could be translated back into the language of Psalms, which also allow for at-homeness in a bleak landscape. The diary, however, records the winter night, the pain without relief. One can only enter the novel by reading into it a prolongation of the brief stabs and piercings that almost everyone has had momentarily in, say, the dentist’s chair. Can we find a God worthy of trust on this horizon?

What I have experienced today during the late night and in the early hours of the morning, I simply could not have considered possible. It was absolutely foreign, white hot and totally overpowering. I am trying to breathe very slowly, but as long as it continues, even this breathing, which at least in some very abstract fashion is supposed to help me distinguish between the physical pain and the panic, is an almost overpowering exertion. . . .

The reader imagines herself in such a winter night, without promise of relief, without a responsive God to break the silence:

This white hot pain, naturally, is basically nothing but a precise measure of the forces which hold this body together. It is a precise measure of the force which has made my existence possible. Death and life are actually MONSTROUS things.

Death and life become monstrous because dying is monstrous. Death is no longer the divider from God that defines humanness, life, and thus the good. A sufferer is left with mere breathing to divide and define pain and panic.

A summery faith of the exuberant sort moves rapidly past such pages. Self-help philosophies address other aspects of life. They not only fall silent in the face of such pain but refuse to hear the cries of pain uttered. On such terms, sunny styles of religion cannot serve as a basis for any solidarity of experience with those whose horizon excludes God. On that horizon, nevertheless, is a faithful reporting of the human condition.

A Judeo-Christian Looks at the Judeo-Christian Tradition

A 19th-century American once had to explain why he had been tarred and feathered in a small town. The hapless fellow told interviewers that the community had put him to the test on the Monroe Doctrine. "I told them that I loved the Monroe Doctrine. I lived by the Monroe Doctrine. I said that I would die for the Monroe Doctrine. I just told them that I did not know what the Monroe Doctrine was."

Today, people are tested by a new shibboleth, the "Judeo-Christian tradition." And though the tar pots and bushels of feathers are only figurative, haplessness is still in. One may believe in the God of Israel; believe that, as President Ronald Reagan has said, "We’re all children of Abraham"; and believe that the biblical script is important for our society—count me in among such believers—but still have trouble with "the Judeo-Christian tradition." One may believe in it, live in it and die for it, but still not be quite sure what it is.

In The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (Harper & Row, 1970), Jewish theologian-novelist Arthur A. Cohen questions the theological appropriateness of the term and suggests that it was essentially an invention of American politics. Three cheers for that earlier political use, for it grew out of an effort to promote interfaith concord and to put an end to ageless prejudices. Now that the "Judeo-Christian tradition" is back for a second round in American politics, give it at best one and a half cheers, for its use can also license or disguise mischief. Criticism of the term will not and probably should not abolish its use (though I, for one, believe a better historical case can be made for referring to "the biblical tradition"), but it may encourage citizens to regard it with suspicion.

The term started to come back when people needed an adjective to go with "tradition." Some of the utopians of 20 years ago wanted a cultural tabula rasa, a historical clean slate, that would permit them to bring in the Age of Aquarius or the secular millennium or whatever. Reactors to these rejecters then began to plead for tradition, and they still do. The shelves marked "tradition" become attractive, however, only when they are stocked with attractions. In the United States, "Judeo-Christian" turns out to be the most marketable. The new conservative intellectuals, politicians and populists began to advertise the virtue of this tradition, and soon support for it became a test of true Americanism. The word went out in education, mass communications, public philosophy and political life: "Be the first kid on your block to reappropriate the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition." You will hear more about the term in debates about our pluralism—for instance, in discussing military chaplaincies. But what happens to the "Judeo-Christian tradition" when the Muslim constituencies get chaplains, or, in civilian life, when California’s Senate chaplain is a Buddhist?

The most controversial use of the term is in judicial and legislative debates. It comes up in controversy over school prayer amendments or in education bills. In one recent bill, undefined and indefinable "secular humanism" was legally ruled out of the schools in the interest of Judeo-Christianism, the faith of the majority. What it comes down to is the notion that this majority faith should somehow be legally privileged if not formally established as America’s faith. The campaign succeeds old and failed ones that would have passed a Christian amendment to the Constitution officially designating America a Christian nation. This new campaign stands a better chance of success than did the older, more restrictive-sounding ones, though not a few Jews and other Americans think that "Judeo-Christian" is often a code word for those promoting a Christian America.

I offer, then, a bill of particulars against the political use of the term.

First, as the Monroe Doctrine story suggests, we don’t know exactly what this tradition is, which makes it a dangerous test of values and citizenship. The tarred and feathered victim could at least have looked up the Monroe Doctrine in a book and read about it. Those hit by wielders of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" won’t know what hit them.

Not only do we not know what the tradition is, we might do well to suggest what it isn’t. Cohen’s argument on this point raises scores of historical and theological issues too complex to revisit here. They come down, theologically, to the fact that though the Jewish and Christian faiths are kin—we do share the same God and the same covenant—as philosophies of history they are only analogous. And it is as philosophies of history that they impinge on the civil order. Being analogous, they have similarities in their differences and differences in their similarities. Each is misused if this is forgotten. As Cohen points out: "The Jews expected a redeemer to come out of Zion; Christianity affirmed that a redeemer had come out of Zion, but that he had come . . . for all mankind. Judaism denied that claim" (p. xi). To muffle the latter observation is to do an injustice to Christian truth claims; to subsume the former into the latter leads to a violation of Judaism—or worse, a violation of Jews.

Such violations, often glossed over in the "Judeo-Christian tradition," have provided the main plot of Jewish-Christian interaction. Indeed, if we want to do justice to the Judeo-Christian tradition, we would have to talk mainly about imposed ghettos, pogroms, persecutions and killings. If the "Judeo-Christian tradition" is a civil counter to that history (in which case, give it one and a half cheers), theologically it threatens both components (hence, withhold the other one and a half cheers).

Third, the civil sense of the term has an inner contradiction. The New England Puritans and their putative heirs have to draw on the "Judeo"- side, since it is the law of Moses that provides scripts for their theocratic intentions (intentions that survive in much "Judeo-Christian" talk today). The "-Christian" side of the hyphen, which would draw on the New Testament, is not of much help in defining laws for civil society. The New Testament is too eschatological to display many values for a Christian society; its writers are preoccupied with life in a cosmos not of their making, not to be made by them, and ruled by "principalities and powers, Caesars and the Antichrist. What the Hebrew Scriptures set up theocratically, the New Testament knocks down eschatologically. President Harry S. Truman liked to say that American life should be ruled by the Sermon on the Mount. Picture that ethic legislated: we would have a nation of 200 million-plus amputees, right eyes and right hands being removed from all but the listless or lustless. We would also, of course, have a nation without weapons, though it is not likely that we would follow Jesus that far. We would employ well-paid government exegetes to obscure those sorts of commands while asserting the militant ones of the theocracy.

There’s a fourth problem with the "Judeo-Christian tradition": clearly the term is designed to exclude someone. The best candidate is the secular humanist, the liberal individualist, or the Enlightened Founding Father (until the last of these gets baptized into "born-again" status). Yet in areas of justice it is hard to think of anything distinctive that the tradition contributes. Substantively, what do its partisans contend for that is not available somewhere in ancient or modern philosophy? The motives for being just and ensuring justice are distinctive in Jewish and Christian faiths, and that is terribly important. Yet the contents of just acts done on Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, Millsian or Jeffersonian grounds can be the same as those done on Jewish or Christian ones.

The issue, then, is that of the place of religious motivations in the public realm. Privileging the "Judeo-Christian tradition" means putting a premium on a particular scriptural revelation not open to all. Not open, that is, unless, as the Founding Fathers feared, the state wants to make hypocrites or knaves of rulers and citizens by forcing them to pretend. To turn Jewish and Christian faiths into generic philosophies for civil purposes is to misunderstand whatever in them ever gave people hope or power, and amounts to a desecration. That result is a high price to pay for attaining a momentary political advantage.

In creating motives for following the laws of the "Judeo-Christian tradition," one must also deal with sources and sanctions. The Jew delights in the law of the Lord and pleases the Lord by following it. "The love of Christ controlleth" the Christian, who would follow the new commandment of love for God’s own sake". As for sanctions, check out the McGuffey ‘s Readers and other school texts invoked by today’s traditionalists, which truly get into rewards and punishments. The Third Reader, after talking about a boy who snitched a too-large piece of cake from his mother’s plate, reminds students: "There is a day of most solemn judgment at hand. When you die, your body will . . . moulder in the dust . .but your spirit . . . will have gone to judgment. How awful must be the scene which will open before you." As for God, the Savior and the angels, "Do you think they will wish to have a liar enter heaven. . .? No! They will turn from you with disgust" and throw the offender into the eternal fire. Bringing back the "Judeo-Christian tradition" to the classrooms is sure to be interesting.

Apparently the "Judeo-Christian tradition" evokes for some the Little White Church and the Little Red School House. It signals a weariness with pluralism, and promises to restore a time of civil harmony. But would we have consensus of values if this tradition were re-established? Look at the record.

If ever there was a homogeneous version of this tradition in national life; if ever, after legal disestablishment, a faith was re-established in the popular ethos; if ever there was agreement on biblical authority, on God, Jesus, heaven and hell and the true, the beautiful and the good, then it was in the high years of what one of my book titles terms the Protestant Righteous Empire. Did all that commonality breed civil peace? Hardly. Those "high years" were just before 1861 and the Civil War.

What would privileging the "Judeo-Christian tradition" mean for civil peace today, when the profound disputes are within the faiths that make it up, not between them and the secular world? Southern Baptists fight Southern Baptists with more passion than either flank fights Muslims or Buddhists or secular humanists. As soon as we can get their two parties to agree, and then get them to be reconciled on civil matters with northern Baptists, and then have all Baptists come to terms with the Catholic bishops’ statements against the Bomb, or get all Catholics to do so, then the tradition will settle arguments and produce common values. Until then, the tradition itself is broad and loose, and we are all better off for that fact.

One of the most curious features of the recent plumping for the "Judeo-Christian tradition" is the way its advocates regard capitalism as the necessary corollary and expression of that tradition. This view ignores the fact that the God of the tradition got along without capitalism for a millennium or two, and that capitalism gets along without this God in Japan and elsewhere.

The real curiosity, however, is that such advocates want the government and the public schools—the coercive, not the voluntary, elements of American life—to propagate the tradition. Why ask the schools to promote faith and not ask the same of the truly distinctive expressions of free enterprise life, where persuasion has such potential? Find traces, please, of the Judeo-Christian tradition anywhere in the world of advertising or primetime television.

Fundamentalists say that a small cabal of secular humanists screens out the tradition’s symbols. But deal with advertisers, public-relations experts and mass communicators and you will find that practical-minded people, not secularists, are screening them because the partisans of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" are divided against each other. As for foundations or corporations, which make their money off consumers within the "Judeo-Christian tradition," what law says that they should devote such a tiny percentage of their funds to anything broadly defined as religious? Is it not a sign of weak faith or bad faith to force coercive elements in public life to propagate what voluntary ones do not?

The last thing this heir of the Judeo-Christian tradition, whatever it is, wishes to do is to take away from the grandeur of its expressions. The first thing he would do is to promote the teaching of elements of the tradition in schools. Our record in this respect is appalling; we remain a nation of idiots concerning religion’s positive and negative elements in our culture, past and present. The second thing he would do is celebrate the institutions—synagogues, churches, religious schools—which promote loyalty to whatever ever gave life to the tradition. These institutions have hardly profited at all from all the talk about the virtues of that tradition.

Finally, this Judeo-Christian would celebrate elements of the tradition that can be chosen voluntarily and promoted publicly. In a time of moral crisis and political upheaval, biblical themes like freedom and sin, creation and liberation, deserve fresh examination and hearing. They are not likely to get it if we make an icon out of the tradition and use it as a test of citizenship.

Whatever is worthwhile in that tradition has prospered best when people propagated it voluntarily—because they believed it and lived by it and commended it to others by word and example. Whatever is mean and ugly or even terrifying in the tradition has been and is most likely to be promoted through coercive means. The trend toward coercion today is best fought by people who know and love the faiths behind the tradition, who articulate them clearly and live by them passionately, but who also understand and live with their fellow citizens who see these faiths differently.

The Frightful, Beneficial Mess of American Religion

Why does religion in America not produce or encourage lethal conflict, as it does in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the subcontinent of Asia, and many other places? How is it possible for groups of Jews, Catholics and Protestants to form alliances for the sake of the common good or to protect their own interests, and later break them? Religious differences in the United States are numerous and varied, yet they rarely lead to extended violent conflicts. Determining the reason for this relative tolerance could prove useful for future civil crises.

The uneasy peace among the diverse American religious groups must be attributed to something other than special natural virtues possessed by people who live here. The godless U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment surely contribute. The geographical dispersal of religious groups has helped. In Lebanon, for instance, one knows where to point the guns: on one side of a hill are Muslims, on another are Christians, across the valley are Druse, and to the south are the Jews. While in most American areas one religious group predominates, it shares space with others, and people interact on many levels.

One of the best explanations comes in a combination of quotes from the 18th century. Voltaire observed about England what became true in the United States: "If there were one religion in England, its despotism would be terrible; if there were only two, they would destroy each other; but there are 30, and therefore they live in peace and happiness. " James Madison seconded the notion in The Federalist papers: "Security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights; it consists in the one case in a multiplicity of interests and in the other in a multiplicity of sects."

But the variety of forms and shapes of those "sects" is also important. Without pretending to exhaust the explanations, let me therefore add one more, which occurred to me while doing research on American religion in what John Higham called "the tribal twenties" and the dreary aftermath in the 1930s. Some, afflicted with nostalgia, romantically remember these as "the good old days." They were anything but that. Citizens came as close then as ever to shooting each other across religious boundaries. This was an era of the Red Scare, immigration restriction, the Ku Klux Klan in the North, men versus women, wets versus drys, Zionists versus anti-Zionists, birth controllers versus their opponents, Coughlinites versus everyone else, fundamentalists versus modernists, and, through it all, "everyone else" against Jews, Catholics or various kinds of Protestants. Still, there were few actual fatalities on that spiritually and politically torn terrain. Why did American conflict take on this peculiar character and how can potential damage from future outbreaks be limited?

One clue came from a study promoted in 1933 by the much-needed National Conference of Jews and Christians (as the National Conference of Christians and Jews was then called): Claris Edwin Silcox and Galen M. Fisher’s Catholics, Jews and Protestants: A Study of Relationships in the United States and Canada (Institute of Social and Religious Research and Harper & Brothers, 1934). The authors spend a few pages puzzling over the form of religious clusters, and their observations can help us understand today’s discontents and contentments.

We usually focus on the content of faiths and policies in disputing groups; for example, the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letters, the sermonic messages of Martin Luther King, Jr., and black churches, Mormon doctrines about equality or inequality, New Christian Right teachings based on revealed truths, or Jews’ concepts of the land of Israel. Silcox and Fisher agreed that "philosophical differences" among the groups they studied were powerful, such as in arguments over birth control. But as sociologists they wanted also to examine social forms. "After all," they asked, "who and what are Protestants, Catholics and Jews?"

The Jews first: "The bitterest comments against the Jews come, not from the people who are the most intimately associated with the churches, but from those on the periphery, if not entirely outside church life altogether. " But " What are the Jews?" Do they constitute a racial group, a religious group, a national group, or just a group? The authors quoted important Jews who supported one of these designations against the others, or supported combinations of them. Silcox and Fisher thought that multiple definitions worked against Jews by providing multiple reasons for prejudice: "In short, the whole situation is a frightful mess, and by his strange dexterity in playing the triple role of a racial, religious and national group, the modern Jew brings down upon his head a triple type of antipathy. " I would argue that the Jew thereby made a contribution to civil peace by being hard to focus upon as the object of prejudices and hatreds.

The authors had as much trouble then as we do now answering, "What is a Protestant?" "The Jew divides the human race into Jews and non-Jews; the Catholic into Catholics and non-Catholics." But even in those tense times, it was hard for Protestants to do such dividing. Should they include or exclude Mormons and Unitarians? Was the Episcopal Church Catholic or Protestant? What about the fact that there were "more important lines of differentiation within any of the recognized Protestant denominations than between them," as the then-current fundamentalist-modernist struggles made all too vividly clear. Protestant differences were "temperamental, sometimes racial and historical, occasionally doctrinal, and not infrequently almost purely social." The authors did not know then, nor do we today, exactly what Protestants were or what Protestantism was.

As for Catholics—for the moment Roman Catholics only—Silcox and Fisher knew that there were "much greater unity and less ragged edges" than in Jewish or Protestant communities. Catholics had a more centralized administration and policy, formal parish and other jurisdictional boundaries, and, of course, an officially defined and tended doctrinal system. But "while unity is a note of Catholicism, diversity is also present," as one glance at ethnic or national differentiation, religious orders and communities, and personal factors made clear. All these affected "the future cooperative adjustments between Catholics and the larger community." They still do, a half-century later.

These groups and others should first be located along certain generic lines before dealing with the species within them. These conceptions still raise fears and prejudices that mark American life and "cooperative adjustments."

Protestantism in 1934 included the overwhelming majority of Americans, and today 49 percent of people surveyed tell pollsters they "prefer" various forms of Protestantism—or 58 percent will do so if one includes black Protestantism, though we shall see that formally it differs from other Protestant bodies. From 1607 until 1789 Protestant churches were more often than not legally established, and after disestablishment they were reestablished in custom, mores, ethos and clout—and remained so when Silcox and Fisher wrote and continued so symbolically until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960.

What is postestablishment Protestantism? It is perhaps best thought of as a movement of peoples, some of whom define themselves doctrinally, some by polity, but who cohere often on the basis of shared memories, practical necessity (e.g., clerical pension plans) and—more than one might have expected—ethnicity. Mention Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Finns and Icelanders, and one thinks of Lutherans. The Scotch-Irish have found their home in Presbyterianism. Episcopalians are held together not by doctrines as much as by some elusive factors—but one need not be long in their company before becoming aware of Episcopalians as a people. Southern Baptists are also a people, though today many linguistic and ethnic varieties are mixed with their historic Anglo-Saxon peoplehood.

Protestants, then, with all their internal diversity, have not been "a racial group, a religious group, a national group," but just "a group," to use Silcox and Fisher’s terms. And nonwhite Protestants are better off for being, in the terms of our mentors from 1934, "a frightful mess" of a movement. They saw themselves as a movement of reform within Western Christianity and, for all their institutionalization, they still bear the marks of a movement.

American Protestantism has promoted and still often employs, almost unconsciously, certain fundamental ideas when it moves into the public order. Most Protestants see the political sphere to be a gift of God, an arena for divine service. They inherit the language of covenant, which can lead them sometimes irresponsibly to claim God for their causes, and at other times responsibly to seek to discern the divine will and follow it. Frightfully messy as they are, virtually all feel sufficiently at home in the political order to protect their own interests. Try

taxing them, violating their zoning interests, or overregulating them to learn how political they are and can be. Characteristically they define themselves as seeking the public good and thus doing more than saving souls.

When this movement of peoples still retained enough vestige of establishment to prevail as a people, others suffered. In the 1920s and ‘30s they had enough of a consensus against Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith, the birth of Israel, and the immigration of non-Protestant peoples to make them look like a bloc. They have no such causes today, and if they did they have no forums for expressing them.

One illustration: during the Six-Day War in Israel in 1967, Jews called on Protestant bodies to provide their immediate support. Few if any of such bodies did. Individual editors, writers, preachers and others spoke up; some groups did, as causes or caucuses. But Protestants had to explain to Jews that the white Protestant half of America did not cohere sufficiently nor have mechanisms to act efficiently to be of instant help. Pro-Arab sentiment by a few Protestants, including some highly placed figures, was far less significant than the fact that a "movement of peoples" cannot unite very quickly.

Whatever the immediate problems of 1967—and they were terribly urgent—Jews profit more from the frightful mess of Protestantism than if it were the official or unofficial established church or, worse, a single political bloc. Jews will lose support from some in this Protestant movement while picking it up from others. On some Israeli causes they will find their best allies in dispensational premillennial fundamentalism, while on issues of civil liberties and other causes they will coalesce with moderate-to-liberal Protestants. That has worked to their good and the common good, and to interreligious and civil peace.

The Jews, meanwhile, are more distinctly a people. Race alone does not make a people, though it may be the more prominent feature in public perceptions. Thus Jews are not the only group that is "a people," and that also works to their good and the good of others. Blacks are a people. Members of the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches are really Methodists, and National Baptists ("of America" or "U.S.A. Inc." in their conventions) are really Baptists. But to white Methodists and Baptists, sociologists and the public, they are "the black churches."

So the Muslims are also seen as "a people," however racially and ethnically diverse they are. Mormons, whether white or, as they increasingly are, nonwhite, make up a people. Before addressing the Mormon History Association some years ago I had to tear up my manuscript after hearing the Mormon papers. It had become clear to me that this was not a "church," despite the name the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but a people. This fact is most noticeable in Utah, but I felt it also at this Omaha conference and have recognized the same kind of bonding elsewhere.

Peoples may have doctrines and polities, but they have peoplehood most of all. I recall a great Reform rabbi once thundering a sermon in defense of Jewish theism to his congregation at its centennial. He voiced profound theological kinship with much of what the Christian theologians present (Rosemary Radford Ruether, Schubert Ogden and I) had had to say. But then he made it clear: "When the life of Israel is at stake, I would have less in common with these three believers, despite their common witness to our God, than with the atheist Golda Meir." You have to know how seriously this rabbi took God, our God, to know how important this typical affirmation of peoplehood was.

For five mornings in 1961 I addressed hundreds of black pastors at Hampton Institute. They took notes. In the afternoon each day Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed them. They participated. Not often given to envy, I found myself that week envying not only King’s rhetorical and spiritual gifts but the fact that he was relating to a people. Most of the hearers were from small, poor, southern black congregations, but they were a people on the move. I was to head back to a fine, comfortable white suburban parish. Were we or other white Protestants, or Protestants as a people, on the move? It was hard to discern the plot.

Jews have their story, from Abraham and Exodus through the Exile and past the Holocaust. Mormons have their stories, as the Book of Mormon and their saga of a cross-country trek and kingdom-building make clear. Blacks’ story is about Promised Lands, Moses, and victory over slavery and segregation. These stories and the sense of peoplehood (which has very little to do with the concept of the Volk which got Europeans, especially Germans in so much trouble) give focus to the public and political life of the many entities which make up these peoples. Once again, it is all a "frightful mess" to those who like neat definitions or boundaries. But it is healthy for the common good that those who are not the people—for example, "gentiles," whether on Jewish or Mormon soil—can create and drop coalitions with different elements among these peoples, for differing causes.

Catholicism, on the other hand, while including peoples, as Silcox and Fisher pointed out, is a church and not a movement, bloc or sect. In 1934 most Protestants were fearful of this churchly aspect and of Catholicism’s putative unity not only in doctrine and polity but in policy and program. A half-century later Catholic dissent and diversity are as visible as any unity.

Neighbors of Catholics know that four out of five Catholic women of childbearing age disagree with and disregard papal teaching on birth control. Informed Catholics are on many sides of the issues that bishops address in respect to nuclear weapons, the economy, or, women and their roles. Informed non-Catholics know that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II succeed through coercion, as in the case of ruling women out of the priesthood. But each act of coercion only stimulates more dissent where coercion is ineffective and attempts at persuasion fail.

The result is a "frightful mess" in the eyes of Catholic traditionalists, intransigents and legalists, but it works toward the public good. This messiness is especially evident in a free society. But Catholicism has always been a catholic church, making the potential for diversity great even as it now increases and is manifest. Catholicism did not turn out to be a bloc, and that benefits the common good, allowing for the forming and dissolving of coalitions on a variety of causes.

Bloc Catholicism appeared formidable. Protestants thought Catholicism could "win" America if it managed to attract 51 percent of the people. They thought Catholics had to and would take orders, had to and would act united—that they were a monolith or a juggernaut. Catholics did sometimes vote in blocs when Catholic self-interest was at stake, as Protestants, Jews, blacks or Mormons sometimes have done when their interests were at stake. But on most issues some Catholic element or faction will coalesce with a non-Catholic for civil purposes.

Of course, Catholic doctrine and "philosophical backgrounds" are still relevant. They show up on concerns about abortion and genetic issues; they lead Pope John Paul II to criticize our consumerist capitalism and to promote certain kinds of human rights. But if these approaches always showed up in coherent form with coercive intent, as they would in a bloc or a sect, the republic would suffer.

Those who would coerce, who prefer closure to openness, who cannot stand messiness, who are fanatic about their readings of divine revelation and human doctrine, are uncomfortable with our frightful mess. But the National Conference of Christians and Jews would never have emerged had there been an unyielding Protestant bloc or an effective Catholic sect. Those who like neat definitions and boundaries, unanimous opinions within groups and utterly predictable action toward out-groups, abhor the mess and yearn for homogeneous kingdoms past or future. They need not wait: they can find all kinds of neat and well-defined religious doctrines and polities in many other nations. But unless you are part of the group that is running the show, you wouldn’t want to live there. Two cheers, at least, for our frightful mess.

Historic Church Preservation: Clues from the Almost Incommunicable Past

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed. we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Willa Cather, My Ántonia

Those who promote the preservation of historic buildings find houses of worship strategic. Such buildings often represent the most formal and ambitious efforts of those who once populated America’s towns and cities. While shops, houses and many other slighter structures have fallen into decay and been destroyed, stately if now shabby churches and synagogues have survived. Congregations that have survived to use the buildings often want to restore them. Neighborhood and civic groups have often assumed the responsibility if descendants of the old congregations have long since moved away. Very often the issue is treated in historic, aesthetic or practical terms: dollar signs, issues of brick and mortar, and debates about architectural design dominate the discussion.

Building preservation also has humane and humanistic dimensions. Theodor Adorno observed that since most human history is suffering, never to remember is to dishonor the sufferers and rob them of the dignity that telling their story grants them. To choose to forget, then, is dehumanizing. Of course, not all church buildings signify suffering: some of them served to flaunt a congregation’s power and wealth. Yet churches and synagogues evoke awareness of the cycles of life; they call to mind earnest prayer and resolve, the observances of birth, marriage and death. Preserving at least some of them helps retain communication across the generations.

We often forget the role that physical objects play in defining the human. During riots at Columbia University some students trashed research notes accumulated by a professor over 18 years of work. They justified themselves by claiming they were humane: they did not touch people, they only attacked objects. But these notes were not only a tool, a record of his years; they were extensions of his personality. We all have certain tools or instruments with such a character. Some people’s homes have personality. In visiting a restored house of a famous historical figure, one can establish a communion across time.

A poignant literary episode that suggests the devastation that temporal distance causes to such communion occurs in Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Protagonist Jim Burden grew up with the Czech immigrant girl Antonia Shimerda in pioneer Nebraska. For two decades after leaving the prairie, Burden, who became a lawyer in New York, shunned the idea of returning to visit Antonia, now a grandmother. "In the course of 20 crowded years, one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." Yet eventually he took the risk of letting reality displace illusion. He paid a visit.

Burden returned to the old wagon-road crossing where he had first met the slightly older girl so many years before. In an eloquent passage, Cather, through Burden, describes the scene where the ancient tracks had been progressively disappearing. He found, of course, that he could not really return to the past. Yet the physical evidence of their time and place together as children remained. That road enabled him to recall "the precious, the incommunicable past" the two had shared. If indeed people who have had a common experience find the past difficult to retrieve, how much more so those who never knew each other in the first place. In the literal sense the past is irrecoverable, "incommunicable."

Yet some sort of communication does occur. There is irony in Cather’s tale: for the reader, the otherwise irrecoverable is partly recovered, though transformed, by the novelist. Not all of the past is communicated, but the author allows the reader to participate in an experience that would otherwise be out of range. The effect is profoundly humanistic.

Historic religious buildings are analogous to the wagon tracks where Burden and Antonia met. Congregations, volunteer agencies and citizen groups that preserve and restore churches are like the novelist: they help new generations retrieve traces and imaginatively reconceive otherwise incommunicable pasts. This project is part of humanistic study. "By awakening a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, [the humanities] tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience. They increase our distinctively human potential," said a Commission on the Humanities sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, in its report The Humanities in American Life (University of California Press, 1980)

The brick and mortar, the furniture and paint of church preservation are necessary, but much of the effort to preserve physical properties stays with externals. We lose the connection to people. Most of the literature on restoration is technical and aesthetic. From time to time we need to step back and ask what humanistic purposes the renewal of such buildings sets out to fulfill.

To praise preservation is not to propose that all old buildings are worth saving. The past and evidence of it can be oppressive, overwhelming. It is possible to hope for too much communication from the past, to nurture too much memory. Yet thoughtful people can find a balance: letting the past speak to them while preparing to live in the present and the future.

Restored houses of worship are strategic in that they carry so many connotations -- ethnic, familial, congregational and personal. A superficial view suggests that physical properties belong only to the decor, not to the stuff of life. True, "ethnics" retrieve old-country recipes and post (probably fictitious) coats of arms above their mantels when they cannot relive the immigrant or old-country experience and can rarely even recover the old language. Church buildings have similar limitations as guides to the ethnic experience. And just as families select artifacts that suggest past happiness in order to soften the blows inflicted by actions of family members in less happy times, congregational histories can create illusions: authors might relate in two sentences the experience of an unhappy pastorate that led to two decades of misery -- and distort the whole story by dwelling on the beauty of the old sanctuary, hence suggesting general happiness.

It is one thing to retrieve elements that communicate the almost incommunicable transactions of one’s personal past. To experience the communal past of people one did not know and who, because of their death, have become inaccessible is more difficult. As individuals we have no personal memory of events beyond the span of our own biographies. In culture and society we therefore lack all access to social pasts unless a novelist re-creates their features or preservers ensure that a hallowed building can endure into a new generation. We turn to the novelist, the historian, the preserver not as a matter of routine but only when we "stop to think."

In John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, a migrating "Okie" family is told not to waste vital packing space on photographs, a china dog and other artifacts of family experience. But one of them asks, "How will we know it’s us without our past?" Religion, through myth, symbol, rite, ceremony, art, music and architecture, helps communities know "who they are" by giving them representations of some elements of their past, which is also the past of someone else -- the departed, the moved-away, the displaced, the fallen away, the dead. Three elements of which my colleague David Tracy speaks -- finitude, contingency and transience -- simply overwhelm people unless someone fosters their imaginations by retrieving, retelling and restoring something that will help them interpret their experiences.

To be free for such activity, people have to be ready to let many things go. The world would be piled high with relics if everyone wanted to preserve everything. The restorer, therefore, with some regret about the realities of finitude, contingency and transience, begins her work with a painful prayer of thanks for loss, for forgetting. Katherine Whitehorn in the Observer (November 2, 1980) gave this a mythic cast: After God had created all things, "On the seventh day He saw all that He had made, and realized the way things would go. On the eighth day He bestirred Himself again, and created moth and rust, His final stroke of mastery." Deciding to save something therefore has to be an act of calculation, risk and true commitment.

For comparison, think of family photographs. They represent attempts to rescue something from the almost incommunicable past; they are the figurative eroding wagon trails of our imaginations. We know that they distort. They usually show people displaying eternal smiles, which are usually unrepresentative of the faces they really wore. Pictures also have borders. With their edges they domesticate, they make safe the experiences we want to recall. Most of them are posed, so they represent a frozen and overordered experience. Or they were taken on days of triumph -- at graduations, homecomings from hospitals, or competitions. Thus they isolate the artificial elements from life, since the days of most people, most of the time, are prosaic, filled with failures and suffering. So it is possible to overpraise photographs and memory. Scholem Asch was right to remark in his novel The Nazarene: "Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence."

And yet we advocate rescuing and preserving some churches for intrinsic reasons and because they trigger memories and imagination. Far from idolizing the past, selective church restoring and preservation is a high-risk projection into the future. And as a committee projects, it should rely on some humanistic calculus.

Different criteria apply to religious buildings than to others. According to George David Miller, who in his article "Ordo Amoris: The Heart of Scheler’s Ethics" has condensed one credible calculus by philosopher Max Scheler, the "regions of values" can be ordered this way:

The "highest" value-modality is the holy (characterized positively by the holy, negatively by the unholy) ; the next "highest" is the spiritual (characterized positively by the beautiful, the right, and the pure cognition of truth and negatively by the ugly, the wrong, and the positivistic quest of truth in terms of controlling nature) ; the third "highest" of the value-modalities is the vital (characterized positively by the noble and negatively by the vulgar) ; the next "highest" region is the useful (characterized positively by the useful and negatively by the nonuseful) ; and the ‘lowest" region is the. pleasant (characterized positively by the agreeable and negatively by the disagreeable) [Listening, Fall 1986, p. 218].

This scheme of Scheler can help correct the usual approach which, following aesthetic and antiquarian interests, reverses the order. Especially when a civic group that does not share the liturgical premises of a congregation becomes involved in preservation -- and such groups often perceive what heirs of a congregation do not see -- the tendency is to begin with the issue of beauty. Or when a congregation preserves a house of God, its interest is often on the second level, of utility. Those are Scheler’s bottom two ranks: the pleasant and the useful.

Often preservers are motivated by the impulse to honor those who sacrificed, whose immigrant lives were ennobled by the devotion they gave to a structure in the new country or by their ability to create a space in which tenors of life, which came in abundance, could be controlled. Preserving their achievement then pays attention to the vital, the heroic. But the people who built and used the buildings were not simply moved by beauty, utility and nobility. They made the sacrifices to build as part of their search for the pure cognition of truth in forms of spirituality that promoted the right along with the beautiful. Those who were successful built a space and enacted experiences in which they had access to the holy, and thus in worship they turned their backs on the profane and unholy. Scheler’s hierarchy of values can help one determine what to preserve and how to preserve it.

Keeping in mind those who used the building in earlier generations will give preservers an interest in representing the ordinary life of the people. Often one sees a restored building that verges on cuteness or on what Joseph Sittler used to call a Suburban Dress Shoppe appearance. Everything is too glossy, too tidy. One forgets that the 19th-century worshipers came in from streets redolent of horse manure, to a building whose heating plant left coal dust on the higher reaches of the furniture. They no doubt sat in some disarray, and saw their children now and then scuff a pew. It would be absurd to refabricate or accent surviving traces of such drabnesses and marrings. But to use images of real life instead of museum-case perfection helps present the holy as experienced in the midst of the ordinary, where it matters.

A second way of making Scheler’s higher concerns a priority is to recall how holiness and spirituality had to be developed in the contexts of a sacred building. While it is good to rescue the last beautiful building on the block, happy are the preservers who can keep a building in a neighborhood where it is integrated with the surrounding profane structures. Such preservation probably implies humanitarian as well as humanistic commitments: so many of these good buildings are in settings where the homeless take shelter on the steps, where declining values afflict nearby homes and businesses.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said that observing the sabbath was a temporal recognition of the hallowing of all of life. So architectural and artistic preservation, when it values sacred space in the context of ordinary surroundings, assists in the hallowing of the rest of life, decades later.

One finds the holy in the encounter with otherness, with the Other. This other may come for a Jim Burden in the form of an Antonia, who years before had spoken a different language and presented a partly forbidding culture. It may lie in the wagon trails that evoke old meetings. The Other can be present in the friend, the neighbor, the stranger, in the "least of the brethren" and sisters who represent need. Surviving sacred buildings were used for more than satisfying worship needs. They marked passages on the way of ordinary life. They provided locales for conversations that were capable of changing lives.

The implied polemic in this humanistic approach to preservation is against nostalgia, antiquarianism, idolatry of the past; against mere prettiness and artificiality; against restoration that ignores contexts and the human stories that were worked out in past encounters with the holy. Attempts to reconceive the contexts of ordinary life and neighborhood, to replicate with more a sense of realism than an impulse toward beautification, to help imagine the lives of the people who built and used old houses of worship, make preservation worthwhile. At their most successful, restorers retrieve from the incommunicable past something of two elements the world too often otherwise does without: the experience of the truly human and the surprising holy.

When My Virtue Doesn’t Match Your Virtue

The recent change in the cultural climate, one that everyone from fundamentalists to People for the American Way helped produce and to which each responded, has occasioned fresh talk about civic responsibility. The grand shift in experience and thought throughout the West, as it loses its center, makes such reflection and talk urgent.

In the United States, given its earnest Puritan, Enlightenment, Catholic and Jewish heritages, it is natural that the focus is on morals. The language about morality has reintroduced a term congenial to the founders and framers of the republic: virtue. It is hard to think of a world more "out" 20 years ago and more "in" now.

In traditional Western thinking, people derived the virtue to obey the law because God, the Supreme Lawgiver, issued it through the king, who ruled by divine right. The American colonists in 1776 figuratively killed the king and practically removed thought about divine right from above. Therefore, basic virtue along with its corollaries had to come from below, as it were -- from the citizens themselves. They had to be or become virtuous, through whatever means. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not talk about virtue, obedience or justice. Instead they provide a framework that both allows for and assumes their development.

Some scholars contend that the constitutionalists paid little attention to virtues. Others find a moral preoccupation, almost obsession, in most of them, when they were not busy drafting a constitution. For instance, James Madison, as "Publius" in The Federalist papers, wrote that "justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It has ever been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit." The founders considered justice one of the chief virtues.

The problem in a republic, however, was not simply that individuals argued about what the virtues were or how they were to be formed and expressed. The constitutionalists and federalists were much aware that people exist in factions, interest groups and sects that differ with one another over the most profound aspects of virtue. The First Amendment’s religion clause helped assure that these factions had freedom to emerge and persist. Hence, legally, we have the basis for pluralism.

Pluralism was further realized as competitive interest groups and factions kept arriving with each immigrant cohort. New "agencies of the mind and spirit," as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called them in 1940, kept being invented, changing, prospering and fighting with others.

John Courtney Murray posed the issue of pluralism well: "As we discourse on public affairs, on the affairs of the commonwealth, and particularly on the problem of consensus, we inevitably have to move upward, as it were, into realms of some theoretical generality -- into metaphysics, ethics, theology." But confusion results because there exists among us a "plurality of universes of discourse. These universes are incommensurable." More profoundly, we "do not share the histories that lie behind many of [our] fellow citizens." Therefore, "we are aware that we not only hold different views but have become different kinds of men as we have lived our several histories.’’

One current example illustrates Murray’s point. In America we do not have an abortion debate; we have what Murray calls a confusion, because the antiabortion and pro-choice factions, interests and sects express incommensurable universes of discourse, and they both result from and produce several histories and different views and kinds of people.

So what do we do in a republic when my virtue does not match your virtue, when my discourse, metaphysics, ethics, theology, history, views and kind are or seem incommensurate with yours? One can ignore the issue. Or a person or group can try simply to overwhelm the larger community: get 51 percent of the voters to impose laws based on their factional understandings. That is all, or at least a big part, of what politics is about. Or people can invent an apparently common universe of discourse for the 80 percent or so who find themselves at home in "the Judeo-Christian tradition." Then let minorities and dissenters watch out.

The founders and framers anticipated these problems and proposed solutions. Some like John Jay tried all at once the strategies of ignoring, overwhelming and inventing when he claimed that the emerging republic was "one connected country" and "one united people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in manners and customs." But that generalization did not allow for what Jefferson called ‘the Jew and Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination" already in America. It cannot encompass the wild and growing pluralism of our own day. Nor did it notice how within a people "professing the same religion" incommensurate universes of discourse participate in bloody factionalism. For instance, when was the U.S. more Protestant, or biblicist, or evangelical than around 1861-1865, the time of the Civil War?

When my virtues do not match your virtues, we do not have to resort to strategies of ignoring present realities, overwhelming minorities, or inventing fictional homogeneous pasts. There are other strategies. Some of these strategies -- also apparent in the founders’ times -- are negative. Bruce A. Ackerman, in Social Justice in the Liberal State (Yale University Press, 1980) , arguing for an astringently secular, rational model, is faithful to the framers at least in the proposition that "nobody has the right to vindicate political authority by asserting a privileged insight into the moral universe which is denied to the rest of us." So one’s revelation, one’s scriptures, one’s bible, one’s magisterial teaching may give one a privileged insight; but those outside the fold cannot -- unless hypocritical -- share the insight based on that revelation.

Thus we cannot resolve the abortion confusion because "the Bible says. . ." In their contentions during the 1984 presidential campaign, New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Cardinal John O’Connor came to this point. The governor said that while he agreed with Catholic magisterial teaching on abortion, it was based on a privileged insight others did not share. The cardinal replied that Catholics wanted U.S. law to criminalize abortion not because of the revelation or magisterial teaching but because, to paraphrase, the prolife position accorded with natural law; it belonged to the structure of things, and was accessible to all reasonable people.

Neither Cuomo nor O’Connor gave a comprehensive or fully satisfying address to the issue. But they both were more than half right in their basic contention against the "privileged insight" view. If a cardinal tells us that Catholic teaching on a particular subject is a simple deduction from the nature of things and natural law, then others can counter that their natural law and reason take them to a different conclusion.

Today in these postmodern, post-Enlightenment times, many secular philosophers also see secular rationality as an expression of a time-bound, metaphysically unstable, uncritical faith. One need not go so far as to say that all reasoning begins in privileged insights, as some analysts do. It is enough to observe that few university philosophy departments today teach Enlightenment rationality as the truth about life. Most history departments teach about the way it emerged, developed, was assaulted and transformed, and sounded very different when its heirs, people like John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, gave voice to it scores of years later.

An eloquent critique of secular rationality as the only basis for a discussion of a republic’s virtues is Kent Greenawalt’s Religious Convictions and Political Choice (Oxford University Press, 1987) , an appraisal of Bruce Ackerman, John Rawls and other philosophers. Greenawalt proposes that we include religious communities in public discourse. He says, however, that they cannot enter the discussion using revelation-based or ecclesiastically engendered insights. He stipulates that the Rawlsians and the religious communities use neither "secular rationality" nor "revelation" as their base. Instead they .should proceed from "publicly accessible" bases and arguments.

Greenawalt would say, and I would say more loudly, that religionists who do not invoke the privileged insights of their revelation or magisterium can enhance and qualify rationality with community experience, intuition, attention to symbol, ritual and narrative. Of course, these communities and their spokespersons argue with one another. But so do philosophical rationalists. Argument, after all, contributes to the search for virtues and for ways to express them.

Through reason, experience, intuition, symbol, myth, ritual and narrative, the subcommunities do make up a larger, if always contentious, community. Their histories intersect, connect and overlap.

They form diverse coalitions across ever-varying boundaries. The Moral Majoritarians who entered a profound covenant with Catholics against abortion went on to oppose the bishops’ program on, for example, nuclear weapons and the economy. On these issues, Catholics enter covenants and have shared experiences and intuitions with Jews, secular rationalists and liberal Protestants who do not find the case for outlawing abortion to be part of their reading of natural law.

My virtue and your virtue do not match because of our participation in separate histories and experiences. Yet after two centuries it is clear that common stories have also developed, stories that antecede the Puritans and go beyond Martin Luther King, Jr., or Dorothy Day. Justice Frankfurter spoke of the "agencies of mind and spirit which may serve to gather up the traditions of the people," and said that these concerned a "continuity of a treasured common life," and that the "ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment." Such a common life has provided and can provide a base for at least some matching of virtues, toward the promotion of the "permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

The Constitution and the Congregation: Time to Celebrate

The Bicentennial celebration of the United States Constitution has begun and will last through September 17. It should have enough momentum to carry through much of autumn. And since religious forces benefited most from the Bill of Rights, which was drafted in 1789 and ratified in 1791, believers will be able to prolong the party another two or four years.

It is more difficult to toast a piece of parchment than a statue, so we won’t be seeing Tall Ships in New York Harbor as we did when the Statue of Liberty reached 100 years of age. Indeed, the Constitution, left to itself, is a dull document. Nonetheless, Christian (and Jewish, and other) congregations can take pleasure and find value in observing the occasion. They need not treat the Constitution as a sacred document. Nor need they agree with Representative Jack Kemp (R., N.Y.) , who recently declared that "God is the author of the Constitution." In fact, congregational celebration of the event can take the document off the Graven Images shelf, helping people to see its imperfections (slaves, women and others did not get much out of it at first, though their heirs can now) and to find ways to make it work better.

These days many people wail about the absence of "Judeo-Christian" voices in public spheres. From the highest echelons of government, the highest ivied chambers of the academy, and the highest towers of televangelism one hears complaints from the "We’re in Monopolistic Postures" school (in German, WIMP-Theologie) What are they saying? Secular humanists have taken over. Pluralism is doing us in. We need legislation giving Judeo-Christians privilege in public schools and other institutions where we used to have the monopoly.

Heed not such calls, O latter-day Israel, "God’s Almost Chosen People," as Abraham Lincoln put it. Reliance on persuasion is better for church and for state than the subtlest coercion. The "voluntary principle" was ratified between 1787-1791, and even the slightest whisper of a hint of a breath of a tilt toward a reminiscence of theocracy will do no good for things of the Spirit and the City. We’re big boys and girls now, and might as well understand that pluralism is here to stay.

A study of the past can reveal the limits of nostalgia. When we hear that all would be well for morals and civic virtue if we privileged the Bible and the J-C tradition, we might recall that the moment when there was most agreement within the Monopoly on God, Jesus, Heaven, Hell, Salvation, Order and the Bible was, roughly, the same moment that gave us slavery in part of the Union and Civil War in all parts of it. Will we have consensus if we privilege the Bible in public institutions? We can agree to that as soon as we get consensus on its public and moral meanings from the four best-known Baptists in America: Jesse Jackson, Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell and Harvey Cox.

If we don’t get Christian amendments, anti-secular humanist court decisions, the right to write the textbooks or to post the Ten Commandments on the schoolhouse wall, that does not mean that Jews and Christians are silenced. No law keeps them from prime-time media, literary and intellectual life, the decision-making institutions of a free enterprise economy -- board rooms, foundations, advertising -- or the public sector, including the gallery, the concert hall and the town forum. If they are to be at home in such places, they have to be interesting, have something to say, and have the motive to say it. The Constitution’s bicentennial is a fine occasion on which to remember that fact, and congregations are ideal places to celebrate it. They are more or less united around their creeds and more often than not predictably determined by their locations and social class. Yet they also harbor political diversities and can serve as miniature town meetings.

As Americans probe the roots of their consensus, of the "cohesive sentiment" that, Justice Felix Frankfurter once said, must be the binding force of a free society, they will find that constitutionalism is a major element. At first glance the Constitution is a disappointing document to commemorate religiously. Were it not for a reference to Sunday. to the Year of Our Lord, and to the (very important) prohibition of religious tests for office, it would be as religionless as it is Godless. (Not "In the name of God. Amen," as the old compacts always had it, but "We the people of the United States. . ." is its substitute invocation.) The First Amendment keeps religion at some distance. Not much to note there.

The people of the 13 colonies-turned-states were morally shaped by the Bible more than by any other book, and its tradition was available for producing the public virtue on which the founders relied. But the founders themselves did not quote or refer to the Bible, did not use its God-talk for their moral talk, whether at Philadelphia or in most of their personal and public papers. You will hear much about how Benjamin Franklin thought they should pray during a dark day in Philadelphia. Note that they did not. They didn’t know what to say, how to humor the old Deist, or what to do if the oath of secrecy were broken and the public heard they were in so much trouble that they decided to pray. They dismissed the idea because they had no money to pay a chaplain. It is only legend that has Alexander Hamilton explaining that there was no prayer because they saw no reason, on a domestic issue, to call in foreign aid. Churchly piety was simply not part of convention proceedings.

Once the founders took out references to Almighty God as judge and lawgiver, they had to depend upon an informed and virtuous people to ensure compliance with the law. Anxiety resulted, and it lives on. During the current fit of "values crisis" talk, serious people again explore the religious groundings behind the moral talk that undergirds this search for public virtue. This search informs the consensus juris out of which meaningful arguments about the City can grow. Congregations can bring fresh voices to the discussion. Lawyers, laypeople, women and men of commerce, academicians, schoolteachers and pastors can reflect on their situations and their reading. Then they can present their thoughts in the public forum called the congregation.

Let me make a few suggestions to promote that reading and reflection. Among the basic works, Michael Kammen’s The Origins of the American Constitution (Penguin, $8.95 paperback) is handy, for it reprints the Constitution and other official documents, along with excerpts from letters between the drafters. Have a treat for summer hammock-reading by boning up on the narrative. Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia (Little, Brown, $8.95) is back after many printings beginning in 1966. (The Book of the Month Club helped bring it back.) There’s an updated narrative by Charles L. Mee, Jr.. The Genius of the People (Harper &,Row, $19.95) While he’s not at his best here, Mortimer J. Adler in We Hold These Truths (Macmillan, $16.95) engages constitutional ideas and ideals.

Stage-two reading goes beyond content and narrative to argument. The neoconservative argument has seldom been better set in narrative context than by A. James Reichley in Religion in American Public life (Brookings, $11.95 paperback) A notable Christian (Roman Catholic) celebration of life-in-pluralism (America thinks it may become "the Catholic book of the decade") is Richard P. McBrien’s Caesar’s Coin: Religion and Politics in America (Macmillan, $19.95) , an excellent introduction to debates, in the John Courtney Murray tradition. While I am on the Catholic track, let me also endorse Christopher F. Mooney’s essays in Public Virtue: Law and the Social Character of Religion (University of Notre Dame Press, $22.95)

Those who would like to probe deeper into historical roots and keep the argument going will add another shelf. William Lee Miller’s The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic (Knopf, $24.95) brings the Roger Williams and the James Madison traditions together. The best recent account of church-state affairs through First Amendment times is Thomas J. Curry’s The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (Oxford University Press, $24.95) The "real" religion of the founders, which was not orthodox Christianity but that of the moderate Enlightenment, is best expounded by Henry F. May in The Enlightenment in America (Oxford University Press, $10.95 paperback) and Sidney E. Mead in The Lively Experiment (Harper & Row, $6.95 paperback) You might also track down Henry Steele Commager’s The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, $9.95 paperback) For two violently different interpretations of the First Amendment, consider Leonard W. Levy’s The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment (Macmillan, $16.95) , which is an argument that (to my taste) disputes "Nonpreferentialists" -- the people who believe the First Amendment tradition allows and even charters governmental support of religion on a "nonpreferential" basis -- and then a Bill Buckleyesque book by Robert L. Cord, Separation of Church and State:

Historical Fact and Current Fiction (Lambeth, $19.95) , which is Nonpreferentialism writ large.

Here’s a possible sequence of events:

1. Schedule a ministerial keynote. Give the minister some free time this summer so she or he can bone up on the subject and provide leadership.

2. Let a church member who is a history or political science or law or religion professor, whether in high school, community college or university, hold forth. When has your congregation called on such talent? It’s likely to be there, even in small places.

3. Then give a lawyer -- most congregations have lawyers -- the joy of skipping a day of tort talk to show how to read the Constitution and discuss what it means to work in the constitutional tradition.

4. Devote a fourth evening or weekend day to a panel on religious freedom, followed by:

5. A panel discussing education and civic virtue and the role of families and congregations in promoting these.

6. This is a good time for an ecumenical event, especially one uniting church and synagogue, since there is so much discussion of the "Judeo-Christian" tradition.

The variations on that plot are countless, of course. And what do we expect of it all? Sorry, there will not be agreement between the Levyites and the Cordites, between the "Judeo-Christian" element that wants law and the biblical tradition that wants to risk all on "voluntaryism." The final settlement of thought about church-state issues will not occur, because the issues are insoluble (though addressible) Yet there may arise more understanding of why courts have such a difficult time in this impatient republic.

In A Machine That Would Go of Itself The Constitution in American 6’ulture (Knopf, $29.95) -- the title draws on a phrase by James Russell Lowell -- Michael Kammen makes the point that the Constitution regularly demands attention. Giving it attention in the churches does not, or need not, mean feeding the idolatrous side of a civil religion. The founders were friendly to religion, not necessarily because they believed it was true or saving but because they believed it was useful. As William Lee Miller says, "Citizens of this now very liberated country may find it stunning and amusing that once upon a time some of their forebears thought of religion as a kind of public utility like the gas or water works, but they did." Some still do -- promoting religion because it is useful for morals and virtue and thus for republicanism. Some of religion may be, but it’s degrading and distorting to start with this "public utility" concept of religion. The Constitution and law are, however, of intrinsic interest to all citizens, among whom are believers inside biblical traditions. They have special reasons for reflecting on the ways of God and humans in respect to law and the state. Nothing prevents the churches from adding to the bicentennial celebration some good parties of their own.

Filling in the Gaps of Liberal Culture

Book Review:

Unconventional Partners: Religion and Liberal Culture in the United States, by Robert Booth Fowler. Eerdmans, 240 pp., $12.95 paperback.

No one -- well, almost no one -- in America belongs to a church or synagogue in order to get political signals and find denominationwide company for expressing them. Many who believe in God or who hear sermons and pray and fulfill their financial pledges may welcome or tolerate their denomination’s political activities, but they did not join the church seeking a political outlet.

I know of no survey which has shown people within churches -- conservative, moderate or liberal -- to be eager for their religious bodies to be involved with specific political action in their name. I know of no survey, though admittedly there could have been some in the past 60 years, which showed that the mass of laypeople felt represented by the leaders who took political stands at convention, or in task forces or commissions. The members do not always protest specific political actions. They simply see them as irrelevant or secondary.

This is not to say that the foot-dragging laity and clergy are right. The stands taken by church leaders may be more or less congruent with the historic message and theological thrust of their religious movements. And not to take a stand may be to take a stand on many great moral issues of the day. The point, rather, is to reflect on why people go to church in the first place, why they worship and remain active, why new members come, and why religious organizations endure.

Help in pondering all this comes from this book by Robert Booth Fowler, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, who considers how far various groups have gone in their efforts to be political. One way to crack things open is to look at his two long chapters on liberal Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and "Conservative Protestants: The Challenge That Is Not."

How many divisions has the pope? Stalin’s old question could apply to the leadership of one-fourth of America that is Catholic. How much does the political order get rearranged because of bishops’ pastorals and political programming by official and organized Catholicism? Not much at all. Catholicism is now mainstream and not discriminated against in the public forum any more than Protestantism is. Yet the laity often feel uninvolved in and even alienated by hierarchical forms of political Catholicism, even when, "ironically," says Fowler, that laity is "much more liberal than pastors are.

Fowler seems to be at ease with the pastoral letters on nuclear armament and the economy. On abortion he finds laity to be impatient when the leadership is not more fervent in its antiabortion stance. On the left, "liberation theology has not as yet penetrated the great body of the American Catholic Church." He does not say leaders should not be political. He simply says what we all know: Catholics are Catholics for reasons other than political.

For two centuries "mainline Protestantism" has been best poised for and most at home with political expression and activity. It has sometimes found and used its voice on such great issues as abolition, women’s suffrage, prohibition and repeal, and the civil rights movement. American public life would be immensely poorer had it not had such expression. But even in the prime of its politicking, for instance in the fabled 1960s, no survey showed general sympathy for the pronouncements made by leaders, and there was little congruence between lay (and sometimes local pastoral) opinion and what was being said at conventions or in commissions.

Further back, "even during the popular heyday of the New Deal, Protestant clergy were overwhelmingly opposed to Roosevelt and his policies, even more than were Protestants as a whole. They remained so throughout the 1950s." Meanwhile, the Niebuhr-inspired activists in those decades were to the left of what the denominational leadership pronounced. "The gap between clergy and laity" only grew irt the I 960s, though "even the most activist Protestant elites are not, on the whole, very radical." Fowler grants a "modest success of mainstream Protestant social activism," but found this "surprising -- perhaps one should stay astounding. After all, mainstream Protestantism was America for a long time in religious terms," so when it engaged in political criticism and nudging, it was criticizing and nudging what it had largely wrought.

Voluntary Protestant organizations today like Bread for the World make some differences, and Fowler might make more of them. But he cites and agrees with hosts of surveys which have found gaps between laity and clergy in respect to activism. "No wonder mainstream Protestantism’s alleged radical challenge has not amounted to much. . . . the church’s center, its laypeople, simply are not attracted to political reform, much less radicalism or the idea of political action by the church. Indeed, classic Protestantism is largely untouched by politics -- radical or integrative -- on a daily basis. It is, instead, a traditional religion, that is, concerned with spiritual truth, faith, prayer, and fellowship. Most laypeople belong for these things."

Fowler, an expert on conservative Protestant (fundamentalist, evangelical, Pentecostal) intrusions into recent public life, is not overimpressed by such activities. He takes seriously their challenge to conventional frameworks, but he regards the challenge as "more rhetorical than fundamental," so hand-in-glove with most dimensions of the criticized culture are these conservatives. Overall, "there is good reason to deprecate the challenge of the religious right from a purely practical point of view." It never represented many, even in its prime. "In 1980, for example, only 5 percent of the electorate judged themselves strong supporters" of the Moral Majority, symbol for all the challengers; "an overwhelming 68 percent were hostile." Even in their best-shot presidential years, 1980-1988, they won very little and are not poised to win much more. Why? Among other reasons, because "overall, conservative Christians have a distinct distaste for politics," and "go to church for politics even less than do most people in the United States." And they are internally divided over what political engagements they do or should undertake and how to pursue them.

Fowler gives other challengers short shrift. Radical Christian communities like the Sojourners Fellowship draw his admiration as a form of witness, but he disagrees with leaders who claim such fellowships are "very much on the way up." These communities "do not represent significant numbers of religious Americans. Few agree with their tactics of assertive nonviolent action, with their policy goals. . . or with their implicit collapse of any distinctions between religion, politics, and society. Popular support is simply not there."

While Fowler notes that black religious leaders are often willing to enter politics, the last thing the huge Baptist, Methodist, and Church of God in Christ denominations are is radical or revolutionary. Evangelists Tom Skinner and John Perkins represent them more than, say, the more radical James Cone. "There is . . . scant evidence that Cone or other radicals altered any doctrines in the typical black Baptist or Methodist Church," and when radicals supported black power or violence, Fowler says, "views such as Cone’s fell outside the main body of black Christians."

Judaism is not Fowler’s subject, but I am sure that, after paying respect to the special case of support for Israel, he would not find its synagogue-going laity essentially or naturally political, or eager for political signals from the rabbis.

Where does this leave Fowler, and us? Fowler confirms what we have all known for decades, and cannot paper over or bluff past: people need and find churches for reasons other than direct political expression.

What do they need and seek? To answer we have to let Fowler set his terms. The key one is "liberal," which he uses as a sort of replacement for "secular culture," since the U. S. is far too religious to fit that mold.

By liberalism and our liberal society I mean three things. . . : 1) a commitment to skeptical reason, an affirmation of pragmatic intelligence, and an uneasiness about both abstract philosophical thinking and nonrational modes of knowledge; 2) enthusiasm in principle (and increasingly in practice) for tolerance not only in political terms but much more obviously in terms of lifestyle and social norms; 3) affirmation of the central importance of the individual and individual freedom. By liberal culture I mean not only these values of modern American liberalism but also its practices in our political order, our schools, our media, and the major institutions (except, to some extent, or course, religious institutions) of our society.

If you are like me, you find this description generally accurate but spiritually unsatisfying. In Peggy Lee’s words, "Is that all there is?" According to Fowler, that is precisely the question that the citizens who inhabit this culture and also go to church are asking themselves. He disagrees at great and impressive length with social scientists who argue that organized religion in America exists simply to legitimate the existing public order. "It is a mistake to see most forms of religion or the churches -- clergy or laity -- as bent on sustaining the liberal order in a highly self-conscious way." It does happen, "and real opposition is rare; but ordinarily the process operates differently, if not less potently. Religion in America is integrated into liberal culture "only in the sense that it has supported the culture, albeit unintentionally, by providing a temporary refuge from that liberal culture." So church religion "fills in some of the gaps people perceive in liberal culture." Isaiah thundered so Americans would form congregations for this modest and possibly half-corrupting role? Jesus died to fill our gaps?

Fowler may seem too content with words like "escape," "evade," "fill gaps" and "refuge" to describe religion’s role in a liberal culture. But the patient reader will understand more when he compares the notion of a refuge to that of a "retreat." People do very important things, they pursue matters of ultimate concern, in churches that offer "somewhat different ideals and practices than liberal society can . . . Indeed, this perception of difference is much of what attracts people to religion or, at least, to church and synagogue." Fowler’s point is "that religion in America has been, and continues to be, an alternative to the liberal order, a refuge from our society and its pervasive values. Yet, by providing that space from our liberal order, it unintentionally helps the liberal world." "By refuge," he makes it clear, "I mean a retreat in a religious sense, a place where one escapes liberal society or its costs and enters into another . . . realm."

One could say, as Fowler does in somewhat different terms, that effective churches seek the sacred and the transcendent; they want their liberal culture’s confinements thrown up against and opened by the scope of eternity. They seek meaning and a kind of beauty or truth which "skeptical reason and pragmatic intelligence" cannot hope to address. In worshipful retreat they intercede, in prayer, for others and, sometimes, interact with the subjects of intercession. They apply something of divine law or the message of grace to their ordinary lives, their daily vocations.

It may be that words like "eternal," transcendent" and "sacred" offend some intransigents, cut the crowds, and alienate the cheap thrill-seekers in a buyers’ market of religion. But, conversely, to believe that one can draw people from and feed into the liberal culture without offering a retreat from it, without filling the gaps it necessarily leaves, is an assured way to lose the congregation.

Fowler sees one other vital dimension in the churchly quest. People are involved with church life in order to escape also from "liberal individualism." Over against mere secularity or privatistic do-it-yourself, pick-and-choose religion, millions are serious about being gathered together. Churches can provide community in a way liberal culture never can. To assume community without building it, as often happens when unrepresentative denominational pronouncements get made, is lethal for the church and ineffective in politics. But when the community of believers is formed, then churchgoers can be impelled into the works of love, mercy, and justice to which most pages of their scriptures call them.

Mainline Protestants and Catholics: Are you looking for a framework for redirection? Fowler’s "back to basics" call can be misread as promoting a transcendent, introverted, self-enclosed worshiping community. World need is too evident to permit the church to be nothing but a refuge, a supporter of the status quo. But there is greater risk in not listening to Fowler’s evidence. Unless religious leaders understand the hungers of the heart expressed by Americans who inhabit and enjoy but are not finally satisfied by liberal culture, there will be no followers with which to work. We need congregations in which alternatives to our culture can appear in the rich and transcendent messages of our theological and worship traditions.

There is and there should be, says Fowler, some "undeniable tension between parts of organized religion and contemporary liberalism." Yet Fowler concludes: "For better or for worse, the rather remarkable relationship between religion and liberalism that I have described sails serenely on. Neither secular intellectuals nor religious activists will sink it quickly or easily." Such a culture may be judged, and its congregants redeemed, by a word of God which can penetrate that remarkable and easy relationship.