FAITH AND THE AMERICAN EDEN
Handy, Robert T.
BOOKS FAITH AND THE AMERICAN EDEN ROBERT T. HANDY Dissent ~n American Religion EDWIN ScoTr GAUSTAD University o[ Chicago Press, $6.95 American Religious Thought: A History WILLIAM A....
...They point the way ahead...
...the author of Democracy in America developed the theme 140 years ago...
...Such a plan may well be essential to the rescue and preservation of the public schools...
...Fantini wants instead is what amounts to an internal voucher system--not private alternatives to the public schools but a wide variety of alternatives within the public schools system and even within individual schools...
...A certain bias against theology sometimes leads him into awkward extremes, as when in referring to Richard Niebuhrwho is presented as the summarizer of the legacy of American religion traced in this book--he observes that "In spite of his standing as a theologian leaning toward the European tradition, there are good reasons to construe him as a religious thinker and a summarily American one" (pp...
...Some, like the native Americans, have largely been destroyed...
...Fantini was driven to "the conclusion that something was wrong when he found the school authorities determined to bend his son's mind to fit the requirements of the fixed plan of operations rather than vice versa...
...Ridicule, patronization or sentimentalization has been the fate of other "misfits," such as Millennialists and Mennonites...
...Proposals have ranged from the use of public school funds to send the children off to non-public schools to not sending them to school at all...
...There have been many dissenters of greatly varying types in American religion...
...Fantini could offer expert proof that a more open, informal approach to his son would indeed produce better results, the system would not accommodate him, even though there were a substantial number of other parents who would have opted for such an alternative...
...Already in 1838, in contrast to the abolitionists, Lincoln was urging reverence for the Constitution and laws as a "political religion," and was holding together "in a vital synthesis the Revolutionary tradition of the Declaration of 1776, the Constitutional tradition of the Convention of 1787, and the tradition of American Christianity" (p...
...Fantini is ideologically far closer to the disenchanted critics of public education's monopolistic rigidities than he is to the public school establishment...
...He also saw the threat that slavery and race prejudice posed for the American way...
...Gaustad's treatment of the dissenters allows us to look at American religious history from an unfamiliar angle, and the look is revealing...
...Mr...
...Yet, he has lately delivered himself of Must We Educate?--a typical entry into the genre that says we must not, lest we impose the teachers', and society's, will on spirits that ought to remain free...
...The compact contributions of Gaustad and Clebsch are the first volumes in the new Chicago History o/ American Religion series, edited by Martin E. Marty...
...All of them suggest many topics for further study...
...Hence he does not deal, except in passing, with much of American religious thought...
...ROBERT PHILLIPS' fifth book, Moonstruck:: An Anthology ol Lunar Poetry, was published by Vanguard last February...
...This should be an attainable goal: It is neither radical nor utopian...
...persons who have read widely in Edwards and tried to do justice to him in the classroom will appreciate the artistic craftsmanship of this chapter...
...Gaustad's third category is broader and not as precise: "The Misfits: Sinners Against Society...
...Strout fills the gap but underestimates the positive emotional power of evangelical piety...
...198...
...Fantini offers, as an addendum to the book, a letter from Herbert Kohl, a more 17 May 1974:268...
...Fantini to be slightly more realistically critical of those alternatives he cites as examples and more realistic, too, concerning the obstacles he is sure to encounter...
...Fantini offers some sensible and workable ground rules for a system that would offer children real choice of educational patterns...
...Regrettably, this admirable theory has consistently run up against the administrator's credo---to seek and impose what Elwood Cubberley, the administrators' patron saint, established long ago as the fixed goal for generations of public school managers: "the one best way...
...Now that Ahlstrom has produced his magnum opus, that job will not have to be done again soon...
...Fight world hunger and poverty through a Christian Citizen Lobby Bread ior theWorld Unless your congressman and other decision-makers in Washington hear from you, the United States will continue to turn aside from the poor countries, while hunger and poverty increase...
...The boldness and brilliance of Edwards' effort to bring together in a consistent whole theology and religious experience is underlined and illustrated...
...Since the Civil War, secularization as an accommodation of religion to the world has been a conspicuous reality...
...We shall understand the religious past and present better for reading Gaustad's brief, wellwritten, helpful book...
...He had been, it should be recalled, one of the architects of New York City's school decentralization that originally so upset the oldtime religion of his fellow-professionals...
...125...
...Southern religion is not given sufficient attention in any one of them, and there is obvious need for deeper probing into the interrelations of Catholicism and civil religion...
...The interlude "From Emerson to James" is marred by an unfortunate interpretation of Horace Bushnell...
...What he could not have anticipated was the way successive floods of immigration were to alter the relatively homogeneous patterns of the America he knew...
...Unless this vote is reversed, Congress will be undermining a $4.5 billion international anti-hunger, self-help program for millions of rural families living in hunger and absolute poverty...
...serious readers of that theologian's major tomes could hardly conclude that he "believed the head unfit to comprehend religion...
...Were he to return today, the French writer would have to qualify his hopes that republican religion could keep democracy healthy...
...Something of the anguish and cost of the religious pluralism about which we speak so glibly is revealed...
...That is precisely why one wishes Mr...
...Urgently...
...Included here are those who have stood out against the pressures a society exerts toward religious conformity...
...In the last third of his book, Strout speaks to the puzzling problem of distinguishing and relating the secular and religious ideas of American reform movemenls in a time of increasing pluralism...
...In part because the book is cast as a commentary, it lacks a clear overall thesis, yet it does throw much light on the perennial problems of the relation of religious faith to political order...
...The author stresses the importance of Edwards' posthumously published The Nature o/ True Virtue with its shift of emphasis from duty to beauty, from ethics to esthetics, concluding that for Edwards "true religion is not to achieve moral goodness but to receive holy beauty" (p...
...Under the heading "The Schismatics: Sinners Against Love," Gaustad summarizes in swift-paced prose certain highlights in the history of church division...
...No solution-traditional or progressive--would be superimposed...
...We care but we are not making our concern known to appropriate government leaders...
...We can think of many other theologians in pluralistic America who were religious thinkers...
...New York...
...a real achievement of the author has been to bring a very wide range of highly individualistic persons and movements into a defensible three-fold categorization in the three main chapters of his book...
...The sound and attractive concept is theoretically not in conflict with what so many educators profess--that they are dedicated to the recognition of individual differences and committed to paying attention to those differences...
...Instead he focuses on the dissenters--those who have chosen not to work within the system but who have sought to reform religion...
...The latter solution was advertised as the "deschooling of society," the approximate equivalent of a promise to improve public health by means of de-doctoring society...
...There have been many reasons for and patterns of separation---quests for a purer piety, Iongings for greater liberty, desires for religion attuned to the needs of a particular section like the frontier, or of a particular ethnic or racial group...
...The often unwitting but sometimes deliberate sins of majorities are disclosed...
...Yet the chapter does quite well in describing it...
...In Lincoln, "republican religion" found its leading hero, the man who 17 May 1974:266 "created his own Scripture for an American civic religion" (p...
...The author uses this approach broadly, as an aid in discussing the political consequences of American religion...
...Tocqueville's historical sociology of American religion was too optimistic in its evaluations, but we knew even in 1831 that racial inequality, not religious diversity, was the most dangerous threat to republican union" (p...
...Could this book be a positive proposal...
...A most recent example is Carl Bereiter who, having contributed some admirable ideas and programs for the teaching of disadvantaged children, should know better...
...18If...
...they would be "a matter of choice for all participants--teachers, parents and students...
...195...
...The story of religious dissent is far from over, for its role "is to move a culture or a church or a university or a system back from its hardened, formula-bound, unseeing and unfeeling extreme toward the center once more" (p...
...These three efforts to illumine the whole scene by attention to particular themes have 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 REVIEWERS ROBERT T. HANDY iS ,a member of the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York City...
...344...
...The many sides of a complex thinker are probed...
...Can trade and monetary reforms undo such inequities...
...Gaustad has eschewed the approach of the consensus church historians who have centered largely on the major bodies, their convergences toward broad middle positions, and their role in society...
...some have threatened the survival of civilization, but in resisting a tyrannous majority others have been its restorers...
...Overall, this is a stimulating book...
...137...
...The answer is happily that it could, particularly since Mr...
...We are part of a "citizenship gap...
...Some have displayed pompous arrogance and others an heroic and sacrificial spirit...
...Some who have left out of the American dream have dramatized its shortcomings and aroused fear: Black Nationalists, Christian Marxists...
...Clebsch's American Religious Thought is another kind of book entirely...
...The second category concerns "The Heretics: Sinners Against Faith...
...Nor does Mr...
...This is somewhat forced...
...With disarming honesty, Mr...
...Dissent in American Religion seeks to see its subjects for what they have been without either idealization or denigration...
...propose something other than doing away with the public schools or declaring them bankrupt and up for litigation...
...Cost-of-tuition vouchers simply are not enough to finance the creation of new non-public alternatives...
...Your voice is needed...
...The three books under review here do tackle in fresh and readable ways timely themes that enrich and deepen our understanding of the complex past and present of religion in America...
...Join us in a new movement called Bread for the World, a Christian citizens' lobby on hunger and poverty...
...The movement was born in equal parts of legitimate dissatisfaction with the qualitative decline of over-bureaucraticized public schools and the romantic notion that anything that is compulsory must ipso facto be bad...
...Clearly, if we are to respond effectively to the love of Christ and to his hungry brothers and sisters, we must express our concern in a way that will change decisions made in Washington, D.C...
...Fantini knows--as the experience of the G.I...
...others, like Mormons and Jews, have had to go through some kind of exile in a wilderness or a ghetto...
...the author moves with a sure touch through mountains of primary and secondary materials...
...Each in his own characteristic way found the universe an eminently hospitable home for the human spirit...
...The treatment of Jonathan Edwards, "the truly compelling religious virtuoso of American Puritanism," is remarkably well-balanced...
...The exposition discusses Emerson's diagnostic theory of institutional religion, his analytic theories of the moral and the religious sentiments, and dwells on his constructive theory of true religious experience "as at once universal, profitable, and exalting...
...Though he has not hesitated to be critical, Tocqueville comes off rather well for his insights on the complex relationships between religion and democracy...
...The French observer did not sufficiently appreciate the role of religious revivals in American life...
...Almost every chapter begins with Tocqueville--for example, he had a perceptive thesis on the Puritan contribution to democracy long before Perry and others wrote on the topic...
...they merely allow a minimal shift of enrollment from public to private institutions by filling up the latter's empty spaces...
...the author may be too eager to prefer James's agnosticism to his theism...
...During 1974, poor countries, some on the brink of famine, will pay the United States several billion dollars extra because food and fertilizer prices have soared...
...Approached by means of this clue, James's writings reveal an original but imitable spirituality that they never really describe, much less systematize" (p...
...Out silence is mistaken for apathy, or even hostility, when policies are hammered out...
...Clebsch is clear that "Gospel truths comprised for Edwards a world that embraced heaven and earth and hell, time and eternity, mind and body, spirit and nature, head and heart, revelation and reason, God's Commonweal: 265 sovereignty and God's covenanting" (p...
...The title is misleading, for the author focuses on three thinkers who have "resisted the moralistic spirituality toward which America's chief religious heritage, Puritanism, almost inevitably trends" (Marty, p. xvi...
...Public schools with their traditions of experience," he writes, "are more likely to protect the next generation from these pitfalls than are the less accountable alternative private schools...
...Bill has shown--that vouchers do not create new alternatives...
...Clebsch is an able writer who uses short but powerful sentences with telling effect...
...To me this seems fortunate because it prevents vouchers from posing a real threat to public education---but it also means that those who tout vouchers as a panacea are only deceiving their followers...
...The sated and wary reviewer should therefore be forgiven for being tempted to greet Mario D. Fantini's Public Schools o[ Choice with skepticism or a stifled yawn...
...with his passion for wholes the precocious Puritan included moral goodness in holy beauty...
...In January the House voted 248 to 155 against funding the International Development Association...
...DR EUGFNE ( ARSON BLAKE Prcsident BISIIOP THOMAS J. GUMBI I!I()N Vice President r llllm UllU m Uilm ~ i i i l l l i IIImn I I nllllll IIllll I l l i Inll munro ll~ l want to become a [] Member at $10 a year J [] Contributor (individual or [ I church) at $100 a year [] Send more information I ~ME )DRESS TY ZIP I tONE )NORESSMAN I Bread for the World I 602 East Ninth Street...
...FRED M. HECHINGER is a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times...
...Fantini does not urge that the public schools be dismantled...
...Tocqueviile's recognition of the importance of the separation of church and state in allowing a people to be devoted both to religion and to freedom has been largely sustained by historical developments since his time...
...The book is impressively learned...
...Knowledgeable in history, religion, and literature, Strout moves in twenty chapters from "The Puritan Paradox" to "The New Secularism and the New Pluralism...
...most readers will find themselves battling with the three eponyms and with their interpreter...
...Public School of Choice: A Place for the Reform of American Education MARIO D. FANTINI Simon and Schuster, $8.95 FRED M. HECHINGER For the better part of a decade, proposals for the reform of public education have with dreary regularity been calling for the destruction of the public schools...
...Strout devotes four chapters to the slavery crisis and the Civil War...
...He illumines the contemporary scene through discussions of the social gospel, the Protestant ethic and its debasement, the efforts of the Supreme Court to settle school issues, the magic of Reinhold Niebuhr, and the voices of modern black prophets...
...In contrast to the by now familiar critical response to a deplorable situation, Mr...
...It produced little more than highly repetitive debate and even more repetitive literature...
...The final chapter offers comments on a few of the major religious thinkers since James--Rauschenbusch, Dewey, the Niebuhrs...
...Could it signify a break in the familiar trend of giving up on Benjamin Franklin and Horace Mann...
...Fantini have any taste for the saccharine child liberation that promises the freedom and happiness of illiteracy...
...Yet his work showed how many unanswered questions there are, and disclosed many areas for further work...
...His other books include fiction and criticism...
...His spirituality was often called unbelief by conventional religionists, but Clebsch's interpretation defends the Emersonian vision, though admitting that the sage of Concord "switched back and forth between the old language of grace or salvation and a new language of humanistic spirituality" (p...
...Even though Mr...
...for reason's sake or in pursuit of Romantic visions, others were seeking a scientifically verifiable or humanistic religion, while still others were in quest of inward peace and/or outward prosperity...
...It was, as so many other parents had long known, a case of take it because you can't leave it...
...Clebsch follows Barbara Cross' rather one-sided approach to Bushnell's li[e and minimizes Shelton Smith's analysis of his thought...
...149...
...What Mr...
...it has something of the excitement of Perry Miller's discussion without its distortions...
...10009 I | ~ l l i i i i l i r a I i i Illllll I I I I I i m l I I uimm i l i i Commonweal: 267 been fruitful, and provide both deepened insights and helpful models for the future...
...He does not invoke the magic cure-all prescribed by the radical reform movement--the voucher system that would allow parents to take their public education allowance and give it to the private schools...
...All three of these works make important contributions to a fuller understanding or religion in America...
...Although himself a professional-he is dean of education at the State University of New York at New Paltz --Mr...
...He locates a distinct American spirituality in Edwards, Emerson and James as three "exemplars" or "eponyms" of religious striving...
...The intense spiritual depression through which James passed and out of which he emerged largely through the power of will offers the key to this interpretation: "James's radically empirical insistence that experiences reflexively contain their own significance is thus the clue to his religious life and thought: religiously we are saintly when we pray, saved when we yearn for salvation, free when we choose, just as psychologically we are angry when we strike, sorrowful when we weep, and so on...
...He has cast the book as a commentary on the religion sections of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, in which there was much attention to the way religious life related to the grave problems of sustaining a liberal democratic order...
...One grasps at straws...
...BOOKS FAITH AND THE AMERICAN EDEN ROBERT T. HANDY Dissent ~n American Religion EDWIN ScoTr GAUSTAD University o[ Chicago Press, $6.95 American Religious Thought: A History WILLIAM A. CLEBSCH University o/Chicago Press, $10.95 The New Heavens and New Earth: Political Religion in America CUSHING STROUT Harper & Row, $12.50 Many reviewers of Sydney E. Ahlstrom's massive A Religious History o] the American People (1972) have observed that it is not so much a promise of things to come in American religious historiography as the ripe fruit of a significant genre--the one-volume overall survey...
...And yet, there was a glimmer of hope that this "plan for the reform of American education" might, as the title suggests...
...The chapter on "The Human Religiousness of William James" is most intriguing, presenting the author of The Varieties o/ Religious Experience as one who climbed on the shoulders of Emerson and of his father "to post the great American manifesto of religious pluralism in which every kind of religious experience was measured by its benefit to the soul and to mankind" (p...
...Some were heretics (from the majority viewpoint...
...Ralph Waldo Emerson is perceptively presented as a visual man, who wanted to impart rather than systematize his vision of American religiousness...
...Cushing Strout's The New Heavens and a New Earth: Political Religion in America ought to be required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the American civil religion...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 11
