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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
My title calls the relationship of theology and the new American culture “problematic.” That relationship is a problem, I think, on many sides and various levels. The issue involves questions I do not even know how to ask meaningfully, let alone resolve.
1 For example my own analysis below presupposes the kind of work done by Miller, Perry in Errand into the Wildernesś (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar and Niebuhr, H. R. in The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper, 1937)Google Scholar.
2 Cox's, HarveyThe Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965)Google Scholar is the classic example of this kind of theology. Many lesser lights continue the attempt over different aspects of culture they find more significant. For example, see Bloy, Myron, “The Counter-Culture: It Just Won't Go Away,” Commonweal, 10 17, 1971, pp. 29–34Google Scholar, and Johnson, Robert, Counter Culture and the Vision of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1971)Google Scholar. A summary of Michael Novak's work would make a fascinating account in this respect as he originally gave a theological blessing to the “youth movement” but then has begun to be more and more disenchanted with it. For a well-balanced assessment see his “American Youth and the Problem of God: A Theological Reflection,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society (New York, 1972), pp. 138–155Google Scholar. Many of the essays in this volume are of interest for the subject of this essay.
3 The issue of the relation of religion and “secularity” is of course an important and significant problem for the theologian. The problem with The Secular City was the assumption that the meaning of “secularity” and its relation to our contemporary culture was clear. For an excellent collection of essays concerned with this issue see Childress, and Harned, , eds., Secularization and the Protestant Prospect (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970)Google Scholar.
4 Cox, Harvey, The Feast of Fools (New York: Harper, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cox explicitly denies that there is any conflict between his earlier and later books and calls the latter only a “companion piece” to The Secular City. However, it is extremely hard to see how he can have both worlds; the “festive radical” he calls for surely seems bent on tearing down a good deal that the pragmatictechnological culture wishes to preserve. He is right, however, that there is a continuity between the books as he continues to have a rather touching faith in the goodness of his fellow creatures.
5 James Sellers says, for example, “Christian theology plays its role by seeking to identify those elements in the [American] tradition that express the Gospel, while it is at the same time open to those new elements in our contemporary situation that express new challenges and call for new expressions of the Gospel.” Public Ethics: American Morals and Manners (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 226Google Scholar. Herbert Richardson attempts to identify theology with what he calls the sociotechnic age. Thus, he says, “A sociotechnic theology must develop new ethical principles which will enable men to live in harmony with the new impersonal mechanism of mass society. This ethic will affirm the values of a technical social organization of life in the same way that earlier Protestantism affirmed the values of radical individualism and capitalism.” Toward an American Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1967) p. 25Google Scholar. Sellers and Richardson have the virtue of not being mesmerized by the “righteousness” of the counterculture but their theological difference with the counterculture theologians is only over which part of the culture they wish to make the engines of theology serve. To provide one final example, Leroy Moore suggests that the great unfinished theological task of the American church is to construct a theology to support the pluralism and freedom of the American culture. “From Profane to Sacred America: Religion and the Cultural Revolution in the United States,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 39 (09, 1971), 322–324Google Scholar.
6 Since I am primarily concerned in this context to criticize what I interpret to be a new form of the “Christ of culture” position, my understanding of the relation of “Christ and culture” may appear more negative than it is. A culture may offer many positive forms of life congruent with the demands of the Gospel. My concern in this essay, however, is to deny that this congruence can be a priori asserted in the name of relevance or social reform, but occurs only because Christians first take a critical and discriminating stance toward the society in which they happen to find themselves.
7 I suspect that this is also true for the university. However, it remains to be seen if the university's commitment to truth in the abstract is sufficient to withstand the temptation to become mistress to the reigning culture. For a position close to my own in this respect see Schall, James, “The University, the Monastery, and the City,” Commonweal, 04 7, 1972, pp. 105–110Google Scholar.
8 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner's, 1962)Google Scholar. Some may interpret this essay as a reassertion of Niebuhrian realism against the idealism and romanticism of the new politics. However, this would be a serious misunderstanding for even though I continue to have deep sympathies with Niebuhr's insights I think much of the recent criticism of “Christian realism” as a position has been just. It would take me too far afield to go into this matter but generally I think Niebuhr failed to appreciate the positive nature of society, or, in more theological terms, he tended to continue to assume, admittedly in a more dynamic fashion, the Lutheran dichotomy between the orders of creation and redemption. However, even if that is the case many of Niebuhr's contemporary critics ignore his positive appreciation of community for the flourishing of the self. Moreover, the critics are wrong in their claim that Niebuhrian realism is essentially conservative. This appears to be the case due to Niebuhr's refusal to develop any principles of justice on which discriminating social judgments could be based. In the absence of a substantive view of justice, Niebuhr's realism was and is open to conservative distortion.
9 I do not mean this to be taken as my own ethical judgment about the Vietnam war. Rather, I am discussing the war insofar as it has become a cultural symbol. It is one of the marks of our ethos that it is so difficult to discuss the war as an issue of ethical ambiguity, for either one must think it a complete evil or a complete good.
10 For a fascinating account of the idea of innocence in early American literature see Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1955)Google Scholar. Barth's, JohnThe Sot Weed Factor is a marvelous satire concerned with the myth of America's birth in innocence (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1966)Google Scholar. See also Merton's, ThomasConjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 32–40Google Scholar.
11 It never seems to occur to the current radicals that part of our problems is the result of the incompatibility of positive moral values. For example, the early S.D.S. manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, seems to assume that we can reduce poverty, provide better housing, destroy racism, and at the same time decentralize the governmental process and decrease our dependence on technology. Zbigniew Brzezinski is closer to the truth when he says, “Today's America has set higher standards for itself than any other society: it aims at creating racial harmony on the basis of equality, at achieving social welfare while preserving personal liberty, at eliminating poverty without shackling individual freedom. Tensions in the United States might be less were it to seek less—but in its ambitious goals America retains its innovative character.” Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 257Google Scholar.
12 Harding, Vincent, “The Afro-American Past,” in New Theology No. 6 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 175–176Google Scholar.
13 I do not mean to imply that there are not often profound differences between those associated with the New Left and members of the counterculture. However, for my purposes there is no reason to try to carefully distinguish between them. The standard works describing this phenomenon are of course Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden City: Anchor, 1969)Google Scholar; Reich, Charles, The Greening of America (New York: Bantam, 1970)Google Scholar; Jacobs, and Landau, , The New Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1966)Google Scholar; and for a good collection of Movement literature see The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, edited by Goodman, Mitchell (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970)Google Scholar.
14 It is interesting that Roszak relies so heavily on book, Jacques Ellul's, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964)Google Scholar, for the implications of Ellul's analysis is that there is no way of opting out or fighting a technological society without becoming part of it. This is but one example of the failure of the New Left to find adequate intellectual positions that would make intelligible the profound dissatisfaction they feel.
15 Reich, , op. cit., pp. 6–7Google Scholar. One wonders why Reich thinks work was otherwise in the past.
16 Ibid., p. 7.
17 Ibid., p. 395. The New Left makes no attempt to distinguish between a political and a cultural revolution. That is why it often appears totalitarian. It wishes to transform the political form of society to get at the general culture. In some ways Reich's naive view of the necessity of changing “consciousness” first is nearer to the truth, but that implies a far longer, harder, and more ambiguous process than many associated with the New Left want to contemplate. For that reason Reich is considered by many of the New Left to be dangerous, since he assumes social change can occur without a transfer of power.
18 Brzezinski, , op. cit., p. 232Google Scholar. He goes on to claim that the New Left “is an escapist phenomenon rather than a determined revolutionary movement; it proclaims its desire to change society but by and large offers only a refuge from society. More concerned with self-gratification than with social consequences of its acts, the New Left can afford to engage in the wildest verbal abuse, without any regard for the fact that it alienates even those who are potential supporters. Its concern is to create a sense of personal involvement for its adherents and to release their passions; it provides a psychological safety valve for its youthful militants and a sense of vicarious fulfillment for its more passive, affluent, and older admirers.” Though I am sure there is much truth in this kind of ad hominem, we must be careful not to let the excesses of the youth culture blind us to its importance. For without such protest, I suspect we would feel a good deal less the oddness of our everyday life than in fact we do.
19 Reich, , op. cit., p. 338Google Scholar. The romantic element in Reich's account of our modern situation is unmistakable. He assumes that if we could just strip from our existence the old forms of consciousness and structures, we would find the naked-beautiful-creative-loving self. The Port Huron Statement also argues that men have “unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love,” and “unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding and creativity.” The current attempt of theologians to identify with this understanding of man makes one wonder how deeply Reinhold Niebuhr's work is capable of penetrating the American spirit.
The contradictions in Reich are obvious but perhaps the most important is the tension between his stress on community and individuality. Though he insists that the self can only be realized in community (p. 417), it is a community only of autonomous, self-realizing individuals who must refuse to accept any group responsibility, for “the individual self is the only true reality” (p. 242). Thus the individual of Consciousness III rejects all general standards and classifications since each person is intrinsically different, and values are but the subjectivistic choice of our sovereign will. While we can use no person as a means, it is equally wrong to alter oneself for someone else's sake (p. 244). What makes Reich's position so ironical is he entirely fails to see that he has restated the bourgeois individualism of pluralist democracy in a new style. He has reaffirmed the ethic of the middle class in a form that its children will accept.
20 Of course, I do not mean to deny that technology poses many different and complex problems for our society. But as it is often used in radical literature, technology is but a symbol for all that is wrong with our society. That makes the term descriptively about as interesting as saying, “We are all sinful.”
21 Nisbet, Robert, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 4Google Scholar. My general debt to Nisbet's thought should be apparent in this essay.
22 Ibid., p. 10. In this paper I am concerned with the more general cultural aspects of this phenomenon. However in my “Politics, Vision, and the Common Good” I have tried to relate these individualistic and utilitarian assumptions to the nature of pluralist democracy and the resulting political problems. Cross Currents, XX (Fall, 1970), 399–414Google Scholar.
23 One of the striking things about the development of the New Left is how dependent it is on the paradigm of community and solidarity which many of its leaders shared while working in the early civil rights movement in the South. In effect, these people have moved from one cause to another in an attempt to preserve their original experience of community. Moreover, their political ideal derives from this experience as they wish somehow to apply this experience of community to wider society. In a sense, the New Left is a sectarian community trying to make a church of society. For as the Port Huron Statement says, participatory democracy must provide the necessary “means of finding meaning in personal life”—that is, it must at least provide the opportunity for salvation. For an interesting but unsuccessful attempt to relate the New Left to traditional forms of Christian sectarianism see Gish, Arthur, The New Left and Christian Radicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969)Google Scholar. In this context the New Left differs significantly from the adherents of the counterculture as the former continues to exemplify and embody the American faith in man's dominance over his environment, both political and natural, through work and activity. It may be that some form of the more passive counterculture is a significant alternative to the American spirit.
24 For a good summary of this contrast see Nelson, James, Moral Nexus (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), pp. 131–144Google Scholar. This sociological point is important for it makes clear why America was able to give actual institutional form to its basic value commitments. Every society emphasizes some values as peculiarly its own, but seldom have societies had the institutional means to make their “preferred” values dominate all other forms of values embodied in other social relations as has America. By characterizing America's stress on individualism I do not mean that other societies do not share this value nor that Americans do not share some values that tend to qualify their individualism. However, I have isolated the idea of “individualism” here because I think it illuminates the current American malaise.
25 Slater, Philip E., The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 7Google Scholar. Slater's book is easily the most suggestive of the popular critiques of contemporary American society. For Slater, technology is not an evil in itself; the power of technology becomes perverse only when we attempt to regulate it with the assumptions of an individualistic society. It is extremely interesting to compare Slater's book with Reich's. On the surface they seem to be in agreement, since both find our society overcompetitive, impersonal, garish, and boring. Yet Slater's analysis is fundamentally antithetical to the naive individualism characteristic of Reich's book.
For an analysis that I find in many ways similar to Slater's, yet more profound, see Weil, Simone, The Need For Roots (New York: Harper, 1952)Google Scholar. For example, she says, “When the possibilities of choice are so wide as to injure the commonweal, men cease to enjoy liberty. For they must either seek refuge in irresponsibility, puerility, and indifference—a refuge where the most they can find is boredom—or feel themselves weighted down by responsibilities at all times for fear of causing harm to others” (p. 13). Even though this was written with France in mind, there is no better analysis of the difference between the American middle class and the young as the former retreats into the suburbs of uncare to avoid the moral agony of being alive in such times, and the latter rush to claim total responsibility to assure their moral righteousness. We no longer seem to have any way to appreciate the man that faithfully fulfills his limited duties in this time and this place. To quote Weil again, “Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one. For people who are really uprooted there remain only two possible sorts of behavior: either to fall into a spiritual lethargy resembling death, like the majority of the slaves in the days of the Roman Empire, or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so” (p. 47).
26 Slater, , op. cit., p. 21Google Scholar. Contrary to the radicals' charge, Americans are not forced to conform by an oppressive system, but their very individualism produces uniformity. In a highly cooperative and traditional society variety and eccentricity can be tolerated. It is assumed the social order is a going concern. In a highly individualistic society, however, eccentricity represents to the individual the threat of societal chaos and anarchy that he cannot bear to contemplate. In other words, the conformist aspects of American society are a correlate of our inability to handle the freedom that society forces upon us. In America there is seldom a battle between individualism and conformity, but a conflict between antithetical styles of conforming. For a still provocative treatment of this theme, see White, Winston, Beyond Conformity (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961)Google Scholar.
27 Luckmann, Thomas, The Invisible Religion (London: Macmillan Co., 1967), p. 97Google Scholar. For similar analyses that have influenced my presentation see Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1969)Google Scholar, and Berger, and Luckmann, , The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar.
28 Luckmann, , op. cit., p. 98Google Scholar.
29 Bell, Daniel, “Religion in the Sixties,” Social Research, XXXVIII (Autumn, 1971), 474Google Scholar. In no way should what I am saying be taken as a denial of the religious integrity of many who share this kind of religious experience. The mystic has an honored position among the religions of the world.
30 For example, Alvin Toffler says, “What is involved in increasing the through-put of people in one's life are the abilities not only to make ties but to break them, not only to affiliate but to disaffiliate. Those who seem most capable of this adaptive skill are also among the most richly rewarded in society.” Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 105Google Scholar.
31 Bell, , op. cit., p. 488Google Scholar. A topic I have not treated associated with the new culture is the rediscovery of the body and sensuality. I suppose one of the reasons for this is my uncertainty whether the body has ever been lost. However, for an interesting analysis of religion and the “new American culture” written from this point of view, see Leroy Moore's article cited above.
32 Robert Bellah's famous article, “Civil Religion in America,” made respectable again the idea of a theology of support for American ideals. It is indeed a temptation hard to resist as so many of the values of the American ethos seem to have such a natural relation to the Gospel. Bellah's, article can be found in Secularization and the Protestant Prospect, pp. 93–116Google Scholar. To see the influence of Bellah, see Novak's suggestion of the need for a new American “story” and Richard Neuhaus' idea of the new American “myth.” Novak, , Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove (New York: Harper, 1971)Google Scholar, and Neuhaus, , In Defense of People (New York: Macmillan, 1971)Google Scholar. Neither Novak nor Neuhaus makes clear the relation of theology to the development of such a “story” or “myth,” or how such a “story” can embody the sense of the tragic I have tried to articulate above.
33 Theologically, the attempt to alleviate our personal aloneness by constituting the American people, as such, as the primary group of our society must be resisted. Such an attempt inevitably runs the risk of imbuing the political order with more significance than it deserves. The greatness of realism, for all of its weaknesses, was its appreciation of the ambiguity of the political. A national purpose we need, but not at the cost of the development of the individual through groups less quantitatively extensive than the nation but qualitatively more substantive. Nisbet, I think, is quite right that the great danger of the current quest for community is the totalitarian potential of constituting the state as the one source of ultimate meaning for society. Politically the hard problem confronting America is how to embody at once a substantive sense of the common good as an alternative to interest group or pluralist democracy as an end in itself without destroying the authentic diversity that a healthy society must have.