by Bruce Bawer
One turns to the book's essay on religion, which is entitled "Kitsch Religion" and was written by a Jewish intellectual named David Klinghoffer, expecting to see this argument made at length. Instead Kling-hoffer takes precisely the opposite line. In his view, the success of legalistic Protestant churches, as exemplified by the burgeoning megachurches, is a good thing and reflects those churches' seriousness about religion; meanwhile the empty pews of many "liberal" churches reflect the fact that, "from a strict marketing perspective," their lack of seriousness (as he describes it) just doesn't pay off. For Klinghoffer, who was raised as a liberal Jew, seriousness about religion comes down to one thing: doctrinal orthodoxy. "Liberal religion upholds general principles of kindness and sympathy," he writes, "but particular demands of the type familiar to previous generations have largely been booted out the temple, or church, door." He rails against liberal Christians' acceptance of homosexuals, maintaining that if one reads the Bible, "there can be no . . . quibbling about God's views on gay sex." He plainly doesn't understand how Christians read the Bible.
Klinghoffer's essay centers on a distinction borrowed from the art critic Clement Greenberg. Citing the contrast drawn by Greenberg between real art, which can be challenging but "offers an enormous payoff, in the form of an aesthetic experience," and kitsch, which "makes things easy for us" by providing "a simulation of aesthetic experience right off the bat," Klinghoffer dismisses nonlegalistic religion as "synthetic religion, kitsch religion." In explaining this judgment, he displays the same confusion about what is and isn't essential and traditional about Christian belief that one observes in many other non-Christian commentators:
In a religious system centered on an orthodoxy, the system asks the believer to subscribe to a set of faith principles, deriving what it asserts as the Truth about God and the universe, from which also follow definite standards of conduct. After the believer has accepted these principles and sought to order his life by them, he gets the payoff: the experience of God and His transcendence.
This vulgar description of spiritual experience as a "payoff" will be familiar to many legalistic Christian readers, who have been taught to think of salvation not as an act of love but as a transaction. What is even more striking here than the vulgarity, however, is Klinghoffer's peculiar understanding of religious experience as involving a kind of dogmatic alchemy: Only if you give yourself over heart and mind and soul to a rigorous set of prefabricated precepts do you get to experience "God and His transcendence." To Klinghoffer, in other words, spiritual experience is something that emerges only in a context where an individual has agreed to submit entirely to an orthodox set of theological statements and to the dictates of someone else who claims absolute authority. By this standard, of course, Jesus had no real spiritual experience, and neither did Saint Francis. Plainly, Klinghoffer's understanding of the relation of spirituality to orthodoxy and hierarchy is quite in line with the Church of Law's understanding of how religion works—and utterly at odds with the core message of Jesus.
Klinghoffer speaks up for all the key ingredients of the Church of Law: law, dogma, institutional authority. Real religion, he says, centers on truth that is found in scripture, and in order to discern that truth, "an institution is needed." He explains that in real religion, rabbis and priests base their biblical interpretations "on the authority of ancient traditions" such as the papacy. Yet things have changed, he complains: "Now, say the liberal denominations, let the people decide! In place of these hallowed traditions, kitsch religion substitutes the prevailing opinions of the secular world. . . . The Protestant mainline churches increasingly reject the authority of their own traditions, allowing men and women to believe what they wish about virtue, sin, and salvation." Klinghoffer seems utterly unaware that Protestantism was founded on a belief in the supremacy of individual conscience and a repudiation of the intermediary role of religious institutions; he seems not to know about Anglicans' and Baptists' historic emphasis on individual conscience. He has, in fact, got his American religious history exactly backward: If he is looking for the supreme contemporary example of betrayal of religious tradition, he should look not to the "liberal" mainline churches but to the legalists in the Southern Baptist Convention who have renounced the traditional Baptist doctrine of the priesthood of the believer and replaced it with an increasingly rigorous—and un-Protestant—doctrinal orthodoxy. If there is one thing that left- and right-wing intellectuals have in common, it would appear to be an uncanny ability to get American religion wrong.
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15
DID LUCY CONVERT?
At both ends of the ideological spectrum, then, American intellectual discourse has offered up highly distorted images of the nation's religious life. While liberal intellectuals have accustomed upscale Americans to the bogus idea that we live in "secular times," conservative intellectuals have fostered the equally false notion that legalistic Christianity is, in some sense, the "real thing" and that nonlegalistic Christianity is a secularized, watered-down version of it.
As intellectual culture has given a warped picture of American religion, so, in its own way, has popular culture. Over the course of the twentieth century, the entertainment media came to define mainstream American culture far more than religion did, and these media, by largely omitting religion from the picture they painted of American life, encouraged the notion, at whatever level of the popular consciousness, that faith was not a proper subject for public discourse. It was almost as if sex and religion had switched places: Sex, which had earlier gone virtually unmentioned in public or in print, became a routine subject of magazine articles and TV talk-show discussions; religion, which had been a much-discussed topic as well as a universally recognized foundation of American culture, disappeared behind closed doors. In the 1920s the New York Times covered the sermons delivered in the city's major churches as fully and responsibly as it covered major-league baseball games; by the second half of the century, the Times's religious coverage (which was still far better than that in most American newspapers) had been essentially reduced to a brief weekly column in the back pages of the Saturday paper. In the 1920s, developments in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy routinely made front-page headlines; in the decades after World War II, few religion stories were seen as meriting more than a small item on the inside pages.
From the beginning of the century until the advent of television, movies were the quintessence of American popular culture and the chief means by which foreigners came to shape their understanding of the United States. The era of American talkies began in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, a movie about a young Jewish man (Al Jolson) who alienates his father, a cantor, by rejecting the older man's profession to become a jazz singer. (One could view the film today as an allegory about how entertainment, in the early decades of the century, essentially replaced religion at the heart of mainstream American culture.) This age of talkies has coincided almost exactly with the period of secular hegemony over the nation's culture; to examine how American film has dealt with religion during this period is to be reminded how aggressively secular the mainstream American culture became in this century and how removed it continues to be, for the most part, from the realm of the spiritual.
Religion, of course, is scarcely the only topic that Hollywood has treated with slickness, crudity, and lack of depth. Yet no subject matter has more dramatically underscored the superficiality of American popular film—and, by extension, the shallow, horizontal nature of mainstream American culture in the twentieth century. In Hollywood movies, characters are rarely shown to be regular churchgoers, except when the intention is to telegraph their wholesomeness, primitiveness, or hypocrisy; houses of worship tend to appear only in the context of weddings or funerals. On the infrequent occasion when a church service is depicted, the order of service and vestments are almost invariably wrong, suggesting either that nobody involved knew better or that they assumed no one in the audience would be able to tell the difference. To be sure, mov
ies made by American whites about blacks, such as The Color Purple (1985), often include church scenes, perhaps because for many white filmmakers religion is part of what makes black life exotic. (When, in the 1994 movie Forrest Gump, the white hero enters a church to pray, it's a black church.) Friendly Persuasion (1956) and Witness (1985) feature main characters with faith-centered lives, but in these films their Quaker and Amish ways of life, respectively, function principally as atmosphere and as plot devices accounting for their isolation from mainstream society and its concerns. In general, religion is seen as something that may be a part of some people's lives in a conventional, ceremonial sense but that attains significance for them only in times of crisis, as in Mrs. Miniver (1942), which, set in the early days of World War II, closes in a bombed-out Anglican church with a stirring sermon by a vicar who does not otherwise figure significantly in the film.
One problem here is that Hollywood has always had its unwritten dictates about human behavior, and they aren't highly consistent with the precepts that some Christians, at least, believe they are supposed to live by. If a man is bullied, Jesus says he should turn the other cheek; Hollywood says he's a sissy if he doesn't eventually beat the bully up. More broadly, Hollywood rules instruct that men—when they're movie heroes, anyway—have to be men, according to the prevailing standards of certain middle-class American communities. And while Americans are far more likely to be churchgoers and to consider themselves religious than people in other developed countries, many are also likely to have narrow, un-Christlike convictions about gender-appropriate behavior that leave them uncertain how to think about clergymen. (Forget about clergywomen: I, for one, still haven't seen any in American movies.) So it was that while the 1940s saw some earnest (if dullish) stories about creditable, and more or less credible, clerical careers—Fredric March as a small-town minister in One Foot in Heaven (1941), Gregory Peck as a Scots missionary priest in nineteenth-century China in The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)—the decade also saw several conspicuous attempts to show clerics as Regular Guys, a process that got firmly under way with Bing Crosby as Father O'Malley in Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of Saint Mary's (1945). Much the same sort of thinking was plainly behind the casting of Frank Sinatra as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells (1948). Though men of God, these priests knew their way around the block; they could talk sports as well as theology, and were at least as familiar with the Hit Parade as with their hymnody. Enabling audience members to feel comfortable with these collared characters, moreover, was their knowledge that the actors themselves were, in real life, far from priestly. This approach to clerical protagonists—underlying which would seem to be a combination of reflexive respect for the ministerial vocation and a profound discomfort with the spiritual aspects of their lives—may have reached its apotheosis in 1968 with The Shoes of the Fisherman, in which the central figure, a Russian pope, was played by Anthony Quinn, who as Zorba the Greek four years earlier had etched himself forever in moviegoers' minds as an exuberant lover of wine, women, and song: the quintessential Regular Guy.
Though 1940s movie priests were Regular Guys, 1940s movie nuns were hardly Regular Gals. If they spent considerable time trying to raise money—Ingrid Bergman to endow a church in The Bells of Saint Mary's, Loretta Young to build a hospital in Come to the Stable (1949)— it was because the filmmakers, by showing them clumsily (yet charmingly) engaged in such endeavors, were able to underline how sweetly naive they were about the secular, materialistic "real world" of twentieth-century America. During the 1950s, furthermore, such varied films as The African Queen (1951), Guys and Dolls (1953), and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) demonstrated filmmakers' fondness for romantic pairings of ingenuous women of God—whether Catholic nuns or Protestant evangelists or missionaries—with worldly (if not downright earthy) men. In later years, both The Singing Nun (1966) and Sister Act (1992) showed that a nun's career was generally thought interesting by Hollywood only if she went into show business. The Nun's Story (1959), a sensitive and intelligent portrait, proved a rare exception to this rule.
Among the weirder documents in the history of American popular culture's deracination of Christianity is The Next Voice You Hear (1950), in which a stolid middle-class couple (the wife played by the future Nancy Reagan) listen with bland respectfulness to messages from God on the radio. Most religious movies in the decade or so after the Second World War, however, looked to the example of such silent-era Cecil B. DeMille spectacles as The Ten Commandments (1923, remade 1956) and King of Kings (1927, remade 1961). In that period of advances in wide-screen technology, popular novels about early Christians became splashy celluloid epics. Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953), and Ben-Hur (1959) were uniformly marked by outrageously anachronistic music, costumes, and decor (all of which tended to erase the vast cultural differences between first-century Palestine and 1950s America) as well as by garish pageantry, solemn performances, and statuelike posture (all of which created a huge, artificial distance between 1950s moviegoers and the spiritual experience of early Christians). The end of the decade saw a remarkable exception to this trend in the form of Richard Brooks's 1960 adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's 1927 novel Elmer Gantry, a frank examination of a revivalist con man and of the combination of slick hucksterism and genuine spiritual hunger that frequently characterize big-scale evangelical movements.
It should not be forgotten that the most popular American movie since Gone with the Wind was the story of a novice nun. Of course had Maria, in The Sound of Music (1965), stayed in the convent, there would never have been a movie. But Maria doesn't fit in with the other sisters. Why? Not because she's insufficiently holy, but because she enjoys life and nature and music too much—the implicit message being that a high-spirited life is incompatible with a life of the spirit. When Maria is undecided as to whether to marry Captain von Trapp, the reverend mother sings "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," whose lyric is hardly Christian: "follow every rainbow till you find your dream." Every rainbow? In The Culture of Disbelief, Stephen L. Carter notes how in real life, at this point in the story, Maria requested the reverend mother's permission to wed Captain von Trapp, and the nun prayed over the matter, after which she told Maria that it was the Holy Spirit's will that she marry. "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," with its bland affirmation of perseverance, optimism, and the power of positive thinking, is the closest that secular American show business can easily come to such blatantly religious happenings.
The Sound of Music spawned other movies about nuns, including The Trouble with Angels (1966), a lightweight teen comedy set at a convent school that did a better job than most American pictures of portraying nuns as human and of taking their calling seriously. The even lighter sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968), shows how much American society had changed in two years: While giving a nod to older nuns' wisdom, it affirmed the "relevant" if shallow political involvements of a young sister. The Aquarian-age urge toward hipness also eventuated in Godspell and Jesus Christ, Superstar (both 1973), which for all their indelicacy at least sought to engage in some way the nature of the relationship between the human and the divine; meanwhile, Rosemary's Baby (1968) and such subsequent thrillers as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) exploited Christian motifs—and, in particular, the legalistic Christian belief in the personal reality of Satan—with increasing coarseness and cynicism.
The last two decades of American movies have seen precious little in the way of serious religious content. While an Australian director (Bruce Beresford) and Canadian writer (Brian Moore) have given us an account of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries (Black Robe, 1991), and Italy has given us a Tolstoy-inspired tale of a young priest's sexual and spiritual conflicts (Black Sun, 1990), and Britain has given us biographies of Gandhi (1981) and C. S. Lewis (Shadowlands, 1993) as well as a story of eighteenth-century Jesuits in South America (The Mission, 1986), the American movie industry has presented us with a generally shallow, glossy, and monolithic vision of the world, a vision that is nominally Jud
eo-Christian but effectively secular, materialistic, and bicoastal. The handful of movies centering on nuns and preachers and the like, such as Wise Blood (1979) and Agnes of God (1985), have been adapted from other media; perhaps the only noted American director to engage religious ideas on a regular basis is Woody Allen, a secular Jew who does so humorously and in passing, and who for all his wit has never grown beyond a solipsistic preoccupation with his own mortality. The single most remarkable thing in Whit Stillman's 1994 comedy Barcelona is that one of the Yuppie protagonists actually reads the Bible and considers himself a Christian. With few exceptions, the closest that post-Vietnam American movies have come to examining religious experience is in portraying encounters with extraterrestrials. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982), salvation, meaning, and transcendence come down from the heavens in a spaceship; in Allen's Ingmar Bergman—inspired Stardust Memories (1980), metaphysical inquiries take the form of a question-and-answer session with imaginary aliens. The obsession of the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters with meeting creatures from outer space, and his eagerness to return with them to their home planet, comes across—intentionally or not—as a sad, rather puerile transference of the deep spiritual longing and confusion that are rampant in America today and that are satisfied neither by our multitudinous temporal pleasures nor by the insipid legalism that passes for Christianity in our time. Given what American film is, alas, perhaps it can't come much closer than this to a serious treatment of spiritual reality.