Luce himself contributed the culminating article, which was on religion. Luce reflected on how religious and material progress might continue to go hand in hand. He recognized that the nation in 1955 was in some ways undergoing a cultural crisis that conceivably could have demoralizing consequences. “Science,” he wrote, “discloses no ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose.’” Moreover, “our artists and our novelists have disintegrated the human personality into the miserable shreds of degradation.” Americans overwhelmingly continued to have an immense regard for “human dignity” and still believed that life had purpose. Yet a haunting question remained: “Is our talk a last collective shout in a cosmic graveyard?” he asked. “Twenty-five years from now, will men believe still that there is in life a ‘dignity’ infinitely precious—that liberty wagered against death will win and is forever worth winning?” Luce believed that the strength of America was that most of her citizens still accepted the Christian idea that life’s purpose was God-given. “Our acceptance of the Christian answer,” he conceded, “is apt to be careless, shallow and ignorant, both in theory and in practice; but it is the one we are used to; it is the one which, despite our quarrels and uproars, has given to American life and politics a remarkable consensus.” He also believed that the consensus was based on a widely shared sense of divinely instituted principles. At almost the same time as he penned his Fortune article, he used a university address to respond to Walter Lippmann’s call for a basis for a public philosophy. “Mr. Lippmann,” said Luce, “writes as a pessimist, I speak as an optimist.” His answer to the dour Lippmann was simply that America already had a public philosophy, one that only recently had been reiterated by President Eisenhower himself, who had proclaimed that the nation’s laws were “rooted in moral law, respecting a religious faith that man is created in the image of God.”4
The central question facing Americans, Luce emphasized in his Fortune speculations, was whether they would preserve their publicly shared faith in the face of the intellectual and social challenges of the coming era. Continuing growth and change in response to new challenges was the essence of the Protestant modernist agenda. Christianity, Luce assured his readers, would endure to the end of time, yet it would have to adjust to changing civilization in order to do so. Luce cited the missionary slogan that “the gospel must be preached in every tongue,” but interpreted it to mean that “it must be preached in the different language of every different age.” The great intellectual challenge to the faith in the early twentieth century had been modern science. But America, Luce assured, had moved beyond the Scopes trial and its false choice of science or religion. The consensus now, he believed, was that science and religion were not in conflict but simply “two distinct worlds” with correspondingly distinct standards. That recognition had brought peace between science and religion. The next step was to bring cooperation. That was what Luce foresaw, or at least that is what he hoped for: that by 1980, there would be a new view of man in “collaboration with God in the whole of evolution.”5
Henry Luce’s hopes that by 1980 most Americans would share a common faith proved almost as far off the mark as the Fabulous Future predictions that energy would become virtually free. In Luce’s case, he was projecting the theological modernist hope into the future. That hope was that the essence of true theism, derived largely but not exclusively from the Christian heritage, would serve as a higher point of reference in guiding the United States as the country led Western civilization and the world in “the American century.” That shared faith would be pluralistic in the sense characteristic of the 1950s, in that it would be inclusive of peoples of many sub-faiths. For Luce and for many of his generation, such a growing inclusive pluralism fit their experience. Religion had not declined, as many during the cultural crisis of the 1920s had predicted it would. Public expressions of a common faith were growing. Yet the sort of shared, generically Christian/American religion that Luce was projecting into the future was already too problematic to long endure as a substantial part of American public life.
The fact was that despite the religious revival taking place at almost every level, American culture of the 1950s was simultaneously strikingly secular. “Secular” here means only that most activities were conducted without direct religious reference, not that they were necessarily antireligious. For instance, religious faith had only tangential influences throughout the economic system or in typical workplaces, huge areas of the culture. Furthermore, growing dependence on technology created other vast areas of technical activity that by their nature had little to do with faith. As the French sociologist-philosopher Jacques Ellul would soon be pointing out, “technique” had to do not only with literal technology but also with the technological principle that determined so much of modern activity in culture, business, and even sports. That driving principle was the search for the most rational and efficient means of getting a job done. So a modern corporation, for instance, might as a matter of course uproot “personnel,” with no regard for family, religious, or community considerations, and move them to a distant city, because that was the most efficient way to maximize profits. Moreover, if what is considered important to pass on to the next generation is an index of the priorities of a civilization, it is revealing that religious considerations had almost nothing to do with the subject matter taught in public schools. Even most religious people were content to supplement secular public-school teachings merely with a twenty-minute Sunday-school lesson. In higher education, religion could be studied as an area of special interest, but it was rarely considered as a possible norm or even as a point of reference regarding the vast majority of what was taught. Indeed, the dominant public discourse of the era that we have been considering was conducted mostly without religious reference. Faith was sometimes a matter of controversy that entered into politics and the news, but most often it was treated as a special interest, so that even in Henry Luce’s Time, where it sometimes rated a cover story, it was otherwise confined to its own section, beside leisure, sports, and the arts.6
The paradox of having so many religious people participating in a culture so detached from religious concerns is best described in terms of the “privatization” of religion. In diverse modern societies, privatization is the most common way of dealing with traditional religious faiths. In the religiously diverse United States, it has typically been considered fine to practice a specific religious faith as a private option, but one’s faith is not supposed to intrude in any substantive way into the spheres of one’s public activities. Some degree of privatization seems almost necessary in a highly diverse society in which many activities are technologically defined. Privatization helps people to cooperate in public activities. Since the late twentieth century, privatization has been conspicuously the dominant (though far from unchallenged) way of dealing with religious diversity. What is less recognized, at least in popular perceptions, is the degree to which privatization was already far advanced in the very religious 1950s.
The extent of privatization during that decade was obscured by its incompleteness. There was still enough regard for religious expression in public for it to seem as if faith were integral to national life. World War II, the Cold War, and the religious revival had temporarily slowed the longer-term trends toward privatization. Even some very traditional religious viewpoints were getting good press in a way they had not in the 1920s or 1930s. Billy Graham is the outstanding instance. He had the ear of presidents and, despite his essentially fundamentalist gospel, had made his peace with the mainline Protestant establishment. He was a major voice to be heard on public issues. That popularity overshadowed the fact that most of the preachers who proclaimed such a born-again message—even some with very large followings, such as Pentecostal Oral Roberts—were clearly cultural outsiders with no such voice. Catholics had also gained in mainstream recognition and respectability since World War II. Despite some renewal of anti-Catholicism marked by Paul Blanshard’s 1949 best-seller, American Freedom and Catho
lic Power, by the end of the 1950s relations between mainline Protestants and Catholics had thawed. At the popular level, Bishop Fulton Sheen’s TV show, Life Is Worth Living, in which he explained Catholic doctrine with a dramatic flair, became one of the most popular shows of the era. And the progressive Catholic priest Father John Courtney Murray received much favorable attention for his essays in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, published in 1960 when Senator John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was running for president. In addition, major mainline Protestant theologians, of whom Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were the best known, consistently commanded significant attention in the national conversation. All of these made the cover of Time magazine.7
These conspicuous public expressions could make it seem that some sort of shared religious faith was alive and well and might have a bright future even as it became more inclusive. The mainline Protestant establishment seemed in many ways to be thriving. All the biggest and oldest denominations were growing. The National Council of Churches provided a prominent public voice for mainline Protestants. Nonetheless, that degree of cooperation also obscured the extent to which American Protestantism was in fact deeply and often sharply divided between North and South, white and black, Anglo old-stock versus newer ethnic, and inclusive mainline versus exclusive and often separatist fundamentalist, conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals. Many of these had no public voice, except perhaps locally.
Such divisions, and the degree of privatization they fostered, were also obscured by a compensating increase in generalized public religious affirmations, especially of an undefined common theism. The Cold War was widely perceived as a battle against “godless communism.” For many Americans, including American leaders, that was not simply a rhetorical issue. President Harry S. Truman and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as many leading diplomats, regarded the conflict with the atheistic Soviet Union as involving a spiritual conflict.8 President Eisenhower, moreover, was especially effective in promoting what later became known as American “civil religion” as a way of strengthening a consensus of domestic resolve in the struggle against communism. Civil religion is a popular piety that treats the nation itself as an object of worship. It involves engaging in symbolic rituals, such as honoring the flag and observing national holidays, as well as hallowing the memories of great leaders. In the 1950s, such shared national piety played a significant role in building a sense of consensus. In 1954, Congress reinforced the popularity of such trends by adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and two years later it adopted “In God we trust” as the national motto.
Such acts of national piety strengthened a sense that the nation’s religious heritage was doing just fine, despite a lot of evidence that could have been interpreted to the contrary. American disestablishment of religion had allowed room for formal religious expression even within the government and public schools. The US Congress as well as state legislatures and many public events were opened with predominantly Protestant invocations. In public schools, Bible reading and Christian prayers were common. Public school Christmas programs were likely to be largely Christian, and schools sponsored Christian baccalaureate services for graduating seniors. Many localities maintained Sunday “blue laws,” such as prohibiting the sale of alcohol on that day, as a continuing expression of Protestant privilege. Most of these religious expressions were leftovers of the era of Christendom, but the fact that they were still in place signaled a formal respect for that heritage.
In popular culture, even though entertainment was overwhelmingly secular, there was enough public celebration of religion and room for religious options to make it seem at least religion-friendly. Celebrities spoke sentimentally of “the man upstairs.” Film star and sex symbol Jane Russell famously characterized God as a “livin’ doll.” Movies typically cast Catholic priests as manly and caring.9 Religion also sold well, so film spectacles, such as Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, and The Robe, became blockbuster hits. “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” performed by the English singer Laurie London, reached number one on the hits charts in 1958. Elvis Presley’s Christmas album, which included one side of religious numbers, became an all-time best-seller. The combination of widespread religious practice and public religious expression created a sense that religion was fundamental to American life, or at least should be.
The superficialities of much of this common public faith did not go unnoticed at the time, especially by those who held out for the more specific faith of a particular religion. The most influential work calling attention to the tensions between these two kinds of faith was Will Herberg’s sociologically based study Protestant-Catholic-Jew, published in 1955. Herberg had gone through the requisite radical phase of intellectuals of his generation, but had been influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr and had become conservative regarding both religion and culture. Being Jewish himself, he celebrated that Catholics and Jews were becoming part of the American mainstream, but he believed it was at the price of effectively subordinating their traditional religious beliefs and practices to the operative religion of most Americans, “the American Way of Life.” That operative shared religion included faith in the dignity of the individual, the superiority of American democracy, and the pragmatic doctrine of “deeds not creeds.” It thus turned religion from being the highest value into an instrument for promoting other values that in practice proved to be a person’s higher concerns. Many Americans who professed faith neither knew nor cared much about the particulars of their religious tradition.10
Martin Marty, a young Lutheran scholar, offered further insights into the situation in The New Shape of American Religion, which appeared in 1959. The so-called revival of religion, Marty explained, was largely a revival of “interest in religion.” Unlike earlier American awakenings, this one was not primarily a renewal of Protestantism but “a maturing national religion.” And this national religion, which was shared even by many of the unchurched, was strikingly vague. Most Americans seemed to be in favor of a God of “religion-in-general.” Marty quoted Eugene Carson Blake, president of the National Council of Churches, who had characterized this religion as “America’s humanistic nationalism.” “This ideology is what an American is if nobody tampers with his attitudes,” said Blake. “His articles of faith are science (in its engineering applications), common sense (his own ideas), the Golden Rule (in its negative form), sportsmanship, and individual independence.” Blake called this faith “humanism” not because such Americans did not believe in God, but because God for them served as a sort of useful ally in support of these beliefs.11
The problem, as Marty himself framed it, was a variation on the theme of the decade: conformity. Even Americans who were active in churches, said Marty, were likely to subordinate their professed traditional theological beliefs to the pervasive national creed. Americans had built a consensus around a “religion of democracy.” They often blended their traditional religious beliefs with faith in America. President Eisenhower’s typical utterances, such as “A democracy cannot exist without a religious base,” reinforced this blending. The underlying beliefs of most Americans, even though they might be expressed in Christian terms, were essentially “secular and humanistic.” Their humanism could be found not only in their faith in democratic government, but also in the self-help faith of a Norman Vincent Peale and in general affirmations that religious faith was a step toward wholeness and self-fulfillment. Belief in nonconformity had become the new conformity. So church people, ironically, often conformed to the prevailing secular American ideals of autonomy and individuality. These ubiquitous ideals of an “independent, individualistic or autonomous man” were essentially secular, as they owed more to America’s enlightenment heritage than they did to its Christian background. “‘Enlightenment’ man,” declared Marty, was “behind much of the Protestant compulsion to create a new individualism.”12
If, as Herberg, Marty, and many others were pointing o
ut, characteristic American religious belief often intersected with the mainstream culture in ways that only reinforced essentially secular trends, what was the alternative? In answering that question, no one was more often cited as a prophetic counterexample than Reinhold Niebuhr. Will Herberg and Martin Marty were both admirers of Niebuhr. Martin Luther King Jr. was also significantly shaped by Niebuhr, and in turn helped to show how African American Christianity could be the most conspicuous exception to any claims of insubstantial religious influence in public life. So wide was Niebuhr’s influence, not only in mainline Protestant churches but even among liberal intellectuals, that Harvard philosopher Morton White tagged a significant contingent of his followers as “atheists for Niebuhr.”13
Niebuhr’s reputation was well deserved. He was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and he is well worth studying today. He taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, just across the street from Columbia University, and thus was near the epicenter of American cultural life. As a prophetic voice he was most effective in challenging the assumptions underlying both of the great ideals of the day, faith in science and faith in self-determination. The underlying assumption in both cases was optimism about the ability of humans to control their own destinies. Niebuhr countered that optimism by rehabilitating the Christian doctrine of “original sin.” At the core of the human condition was an egotism marked by a tendency to think too highly of oneself. Freedom, or the ability to transcend the determination of mere natural forces, was what distinguished humans from the beasts. But humans also had an inbuilt tendency to mistake that transcendence for an autonomy in which they viewed themselves as captains of their own destinies. Especially striking in Niebuhr’s analysis of original sin was the idea that humans were corrupted not only by their open vices, but just as much by their virtues and accomplishments, which became sources of their pride. Niebuhr was a master of the telling paradox. “A too confident sense of justice,” he characteristically observed, “always leads to injustice.” Everyone, individuals as well as nations, needed to be humbled, and to be humbled they had to see themselves from a larger perspective, ultimately from the divine perspective.14
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment Page 12