The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  If we are in an era that can plausibly be called “post-secular,” then it is all the more urgent to be thinking carefully about the role of deeply held religious beliefs in the public domain, and about how order and civility can be maintained in society when people of many different “faiths,” both religious and secular, are striving to be heard and to have an influence. There is no going back to the 1950s, when a widely shared inclusivist faith was supposed to be a contributing factor in supporting a cultural consensus. Nor does it make sense to go back to, or perhaps perpetuate, the mainstream approach of the 1980s, when many in the liberal cultural establishment viewed varieties of secularism as the only intellectually viable options.

  One ideal for a healthy society would be that it sustained diverse, flourishing subcommunities that both retained their own identities and yet also participated in the mainstream public culture. Throughout its history, the United States has had many thriving subcommunities, especially ethnoreligious ones, which have produced citizens who have had the moral and personal qualities to become leading contributors to society. African American churches, nonethnic churches, and many other religious groups have often played similar roles. Yet, although the value of such communities has often been recognized historically, and such communities have often been seen as contributing to the health of the nation, the mainstream culture has at the same time come to be defined in a way that would undermine such communities and minimize their public roles. That was certainly true of the 1950s, even though it was an era when the public consensus culture was reputed to be much more friendly to religious outlooks than it is today.

  During the past two decades, there has been increasing recognition of the need to address the problem of religious pluralism in relation to the public domain. The message here, in the light of looking at some of the roots of the problem, is simply that such discussions need to continue, especially in the nation’s shared intellectual life. It is true that when it comes to strongly held religious differences, there may be some insoluble problems. Some religious discourse allows no room for discussion with people of other outlooks. One irony in the present account is that, although it shows the long-term inadequacies of the American enlightenment’s methods of dealing with religious difference, a pluralistic society still needs something like the enlightenment recognition that humans, despite their differences, share some beliefs in common. The enlightenment heritage, whatever its shortcomings, includes much that we all should value. A healthy society needs to be built on the basis of finding and cultivating those shared principles, even while honoring principled differences.

  The most immediate practical application of what is here proposed would be that in public discussions there would not be prejudice against religiously based views simply because of their religious nature. People whose outlooks are shaped by religious perspectives might be expected to present their views through reasoned arguments that look for a common ground of widely shared concerns (such as the concern for equity in the present account). Yet there should be no assumption that outlooks reflecting trust in religious authority are second-class outlooks compared to those based on secular, naturalistic principles alone. Mid-twentieth-century outlooks still often assumed that there was a universal “objective reason” that self-evidently ought to trump viewpoints that involved religious authority. Secular viewpoints therefore became the gold standard for public discourse. That remained the case in the next generations, and the practice was reinforced by the ideal of the privatization of religion, as mainline Protestantism and expressions of civil religion receded. Yet there should be no prima facie assumption that purely naturalistic views are superior to religiously based views. Each sort of view, naturalistic or religious, should have equal opportunity to be heard and evaluated on its own merits by others in the public domain.

  One place where such issues might be fruitfully addressed would be in mainstream academia. Ideally, the diverse academy should provide a model and a training ground for learning how people of various faiths, secular or religious, might work together in a public setting while taking their differences seriously. University administrators and academic departments might see one of their roles as being referees ensuring that all responsible voices, including explicitly religious voices, get a hearing on equitable terms appropriate to a public setting. To some extent that is already happening, and by many measures diverse religious outlooks seem to be taken more seriously in mainline academia than was true a quarter-century ago.17

  Furthermore, in recent decades both Roman Catholic and evangelical intellectual communities have been providing valuable insights on these issues, and hence rich resources from which persons of other outlooks might learn. Just to speak of my own Protestant side, it is important to underscore that evangelicalism is far more complex than the present account of the populist religious right might suggest. The populist side of the movement thrives on polarizing dichotomies and for the past generation has cultivated polarized approaches to politics. But there has long been an evangelical left and also a wide variety of politically moderate evangelicals who do not fit the culture-wars stereotype. Among the most important evangelical resources that have been developing in recent years are its colleges, universities, and intellectual life. Due to its populist revivalist heritage, American evangelicalism often has been anti-intellectual or suspicious of any nuanced life of the mind. Yet, in the past generation, evangelicalism has been experiencing an intellectual renaissance notable especially for the cohort of excellent younger scholars. Evangelical colleges and universities have been thriving and have built outstanding faculties. These schools play important roles in strengthening evangelical subcommunities while preparing their graduates to participate in mainstream culture with understanding and with respect for views different from their own. Much of the thought at such schools is shaped, broadly speaking, by the Kuyperian tradition and its widely used motto, “the integration of faith and learning.” One area where evangelical scholars in such schools and at other universities have been providing intellectual leadership has been in exploring how their particular religious faiths might be related to a genuine pluralism in the public sphere. Some of the best resources for addressing such issues may come from within the many-faceted evangelical community itself.18

  Although my own outlook is shaped by Protestant Christian commitments, and this historical analysis has concentrated on the legacy of Protestantism as the most influential religious group shaping American culture, these proposals should apply to any religious subcommunity. One of the most significant changes that has taken place in the past half-century has been the vast increase in ethnic and religious diversity that has been fostered by new immigration policies. Accommodating religious diversity in American life today can no longer plausibly be talked about, as it was in the mid-twentieth century, in terms of “Protestant-Catholic-Jew.” It is instead about equity for communities that represent virtually every religion in the world.

  Finally, the sorts of people who are on center stage in this historical essay, public intellectuals, might play a leading role in facilitating discussions about the relation of the religious to the secular in the public domain. To some extent that, too, is already happening. The news media seem to now recognize the value of including different religious voices along with secular commentators, more so than they did a quarter-century ago. Furthermore, the Internet has provided public access to a huge variety of viewpoints. This access, though potentially helpful, can also be fragmenting, since most people go to sites that reinforce their preconceptions. What is needed is for the journalistic media, especially the outlets that still have access to a broad readership, to see one of their tasks as providing leadership in cultivating a public domain as fully inclusive of religiously shaped viewpoints as is feasible. Secularist commentators, rather than writing polemics denouncing religion in the name of universal reason, might better wrestle with the issues of how to respect both secular and religious viewpoints
and institutions in the public domain. All sides need to recognize that we cannot go back to either a secular enlightenment or a Christian consensus, and that culture-war stances are not helpful alternatives. Rather, all sides need to recognize that they should be searching for ways to build a more fully inclusive pluralism.

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been greatly improved through the help of others. I am particularly grateful to my friends James Bratt, John Haas, Richard Mouw, William Svelmoe, Leonard Vander Zee, and Grant Wacker for reading all or parts of versions of this work and providing insightful comments. I am also thankful to be working once again with Lara Heimert, previously my principal editor for Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press). She has been especially helpful in bringing this book into focus. Roger Labrie helped immensely in carrying through on the details of that enterprise. He combined impressive editorial skills with a fine knowledge of the historical era. The careful copyediting of Katherine Streckfus provided many improvements. Katy O’Donnell offered editorial assistance at various points in the process. Rachel King as project editor kept things running efficiently.

  My greatest gratitude is, as always, to my wife, Lucie. I am all the more appreciative of her love and support during the years when this book was being written, a time when we each went through serious illness that helped us to reckon with our mortality and to appreciate the gifts of each day together.

  Notes

  Generally, the works by a single author pertaining to a given passage within a chapter are cited at the end of the passage, with page numbers appearing in the order cited.

  Introduction

  1. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 110, 265–267, 271.

  2. Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012); Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998).

  3. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949 and was first published by Viking Press the same year. Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, was published in 1951 by Little, Brown. The other quotations in this passage are references to David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961 [1950]); Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1965 [1955]); William Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957 [1956]); and Vance Packard, The Status Seekers (New York: Pocket Books, 1961 [1959]).

  4. Ideally, analysis such as this should do more to place American thought in its European contexts and also involve more comparative analysis. Those valuable features would make for a considerably longer and more technical book.

  5. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950), ix. I also have avoided the “conservative” versus “liberal” debates of the time, largely because I am interested in the dominant moderate-liberal consensus outlook, and conservatism (aside from populist militant anticommunism) seemed much more a minority opinion then than it does today.

  6. The debates among historians and philosophers about the meanings of “the enlightenment” are far too complex to enter into here. One simply has to recognize that the term can be used in many different ways and then define the way in which one is using it. Nonetheless, “the enlightenment” is still a useful shorthand for designating characteristic dominant patterns of eighteenth-century European thought, or, in the present case, eighteenth-century British-American thought, especially as manifested among the founders of the United States. Later postmodern critiques of “the enlightenment project” had roots at midcentury in the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorono, Jewish émigrés to the United States who published their seminal work in 1944 (in German). It was later translated into English as Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

  7. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), provides a valuable account of the merger of Protestant and enlightenment outlooks. Noll builds on Henry May’s classic, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), which provides an insightful account of the varieties of enlightenment thought.

  8. At a late stage in working on this project, I am very pleased to see David A. Hollinger’s “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted,” in his After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1–17, which puts emphasis parallel to my own on the interpretative importance of the enlightenment for understanding mid-twentieth-century culture and religion.

  9. The best systematic exploration of the collapse of the Protestant establishment remains Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

  10. St. Augustine, or Augustine of Hippo, lived from 356 to 430. His theology is widely admired by many Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant (such as my own Reformed or Calvinistic) circles. To be Augustinian means to share in a classic orthodox heritage of basic Christian understandings and commitments. It also involves views on the relationship of faith and reason, as explained in the Conclusion.

  Prologue: The National Purpose

  1. The original series appeared in Life weekly from May 23 through June 20, 1960. The quotations in this section are from the book version, John K. Jessup, ed., The National Purpose (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1960), as follows: Luce, v; Jessup, 17–18; Lippmann, 126–127, 130–131; Rossiter, 83; Gardner, 71–73; MacLeish, 37; Graham, 66–68, 62; Stevenson, 28; Wohlstetter, 95–102; Reston, 109. Life’s readership figure is stated in Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 34. The number is presumably based on the magazine typically being looked at by several family members. The magazine itself listed an “average circulation 6,700,000.”

  Chapter One: Mass Media and the National Character

  1. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Random House, 1993), 643–666, provides an engaging overview of this controversy to which I am much indebted.

  2. John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson, November 5, 1959, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (New York: Viking, 1975), 652; “Have We Gone Soft?” The New Republic, February 15, 1960, 11–15.

  3. “Television History—The First 75 Years: 1959 NYC Evening Program Schedule,” www.tvhistory.tv/1959-PrimeTime.jpg. Leonard Bernstein was also offering Young People’s Concerts on Saturday afternoons.

  4. Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” reprinted from Diogenes 1, no. 3 (1953): 1–17, in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 59–73.

  5. David Manning White, “Mass Culture in America: Another Point of View,” an expanded version of “What’s Happening to Mass Culture?” Saturday Review 39 (1956): 11–13, reprinted in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 13–21.

  6. Bernard Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 3–12.

  7. Hannah Arendt, “Society and Culture,” Daedalus 89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 284, 286.

  8. James Baldwin, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes,” Daedalus 89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 373–376.

  9. Edwards Shils, “Mass Society and Its Culture,” Daedalus 89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 290, 309, 314.

  10. Norman Jacobs, “Introduction to the Issue on ‘Mass Culture and Mass Media,’” Daedalus 89, no. 2, Mass Culture and Mass Media Issue (1960): 275.

  11. The most famous symposium was “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partis
an Review 19, no. 3 (1952). For an overview of the discussions during the era, see Seymour Lipset, “Comments on ‘American Intellectuals: Their Politics and Status,’” Daedalus 88, no. 3 (1959): 460–486. Other commentators on the topic in the same issue included Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Karl Deutsch, Talcott Parsons, and Daniel Bell (pp. 487–498).

  12. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934).

  13. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 7, 117, 145, 159; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955).

  14. That was the argument of Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

  Chapter Two: Freedom in the Lonely Crowd

  1. Bernard Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 9.

  2. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1965 [1941]. The list of Jewish émigrés is in Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 195–196. McClay’s book also provides valuable analysis and background to many of the themes in this chapter.