THE RELIGION OF CIVILITY
Novak, Michael
BOOKS THE RELIGION OF CIVILITY No Otte~e: CivU iteli~m wsd P~testamt faste JOHN MURRAY CUDDIHY Seabury, $11.95 (224 pp.] This is a stimulating book; where it is not on target, it errs in a...
...The "WASP reference group which looks on as a status audience" has been taught more by Lord Chesterfield than by Calvin or Wesley...
...it was an offense against civility...
...The materials he writes about are obvious everywhere, but seldom noticed...
...Daniel Bell has recently quoted Ernest Barker's comment that "the gentleman is the one who maintains the tradition of civility," and R. H. Tawney's comment that the English do not have a State (like the Germans: an abstraction, an efficient bureaucracy), but a government (gentlemen who know one another and conduct affairs in a civil manner...
...About the thesis of each of Cuddihy's chapters, I would like to raise counter-examples and make counterarguments...
...A British-inspired upper class does not "rule" (like a Napoleon or a Fiihrer or a Duce), nor does it "make deals" (like a Mayor Daley...
...But some of it would surely represent the dirty little secret of social climbing, the "ass kissing" (Cuddihy's words, of course) of the guardians of civility, the learning of how and when to feel embarrassed...
...For both, although in different ways, religion is a far more public, communal, social, and even ethndc faot...
...Cuddiby's "religion of civility" is not quite the "civil religion" Robert Bellah and others have w~itten of...
...A Catholic does not "h~ppen" to be a Catholic...
...The civil religion stronger than and normative for all p~rt~cular religions (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish) he calls "the religion of civility...
...Those who follow Cuddihy will have to disentangle these and other socially alive meanings of the term...
...here the pains of a thousand put-downs seem to shine through...
...He is not certain where he stands with respect to it...
...Cuddihy deCommonweal: 471 fines and unfolds this argument through an i~roduction, eight chapters, and a very brief conclusion...
...A Je~v does not "just happen" to be Jewish...
...He has not fully clarified his subject in his own mind...
...But can one worship a God who is a creature of one's choice...
...He relies chiefly on June Bin.gham's rather weak biography...
...All three paradigmatic figures are shown adapting to the disci.pLines of the religion of civility...
...But it is plain that Cuddihy does not mean Hamilton Jordan's taste, or Anita Bryant's esthetic...
...Cuddihy confuses here the revolt of the "Bohemiaus" against the bourgeoisie, and of immigrants against niceness...
...This is the code Cuddihy's ancestors experienced at the hands of their cultural "superiors" in Ireland and in New York...
...The only serious rival his ethnoclass faces in the domain of culture, the pacesetter of his ambition, the rival that _9 him, are Jews...
...and it is also a matter of confirmed choice: an inescapable and yet also freely chosen destiny...
...Still, there is no doubt---Cuddihy himself amasses evidence--that there is a "religion of civility" deeper and stronger than any of our particular religions...
...Cuddihy's sub-title speaks of "Protestant Taste," and chapter seven considers "the Protestant esthetic...
...more properly, of culture and class, affected by religion...
...In fact, one can detect in his text at least four different meanipgs for civility...
...He speaks of the religion of civility, at times, with an undertone of loathing and contempt and resentment, as if it were an instrument of repression and diminishment...
...The journals of liberal Catholicism would be prime sources, Cuddihy hints, for such a 21 July 1978:472 study...
...Two chapters introduce these three case studies...
...Thus, "the Protestant esthetic" of homely virtue, gawky grace, and halting eloquence forms a new pattern of civility...
...He has a sharp, novelist's eye...
...In the life of high culture, "sophistication" requires a long tutoring .in what may be said or thought, so as not to give offense...
...Cuddihy is absolutely fascinated by Jews and Jewish experience...
...I don't just "happen to be . . . . " I was born a Catholic, and I consider _9 that a primary .fact of enormous value, pregnanr with inner conflict...
...The reality he points to is one of class at least as much as of religion...
...It is also so for Protestants, under deep disguises...
...He shows little effort about the Protestant experience, especially that of lower-class l~rotestants or those of low culCural status...
...Perhaps further research by Cuddihy or others will map the whole path of dishonesties, evasions, bluffs, and rationalizations by which, in actual experience, millions of American Catholics have become "Americanized" and "liberalized...
...There is a touch of madness in his vision, an alluring wildness which leads a wise reader to suspend judgment while willingly trying out a new way of seeing...
...But again, is it really Protestant...
...On the very day Chat I was reading this book, for example, a handsome and successful Irish Catholic professional in the corporate world was telling a dinner party how embarrassed he had often been by pre-Vatican II Catholicism...
...He recalled how his wife's parents had cut her brother out of his (smaU) inheritance because he married "outside the church...
...The scandal of partioularity, the stubbornness of difference, ,is not really easy for the religion of civility to grant...
...The subjects he takes up can never be regarded in quite the same way again...
...Cuddihy is leading the sociology of religion into a study of culture--,the lived world of daily life, precisely the terrain most central to human life and least understood, deep and sweeping in its effects and subtle in its workings...
...A common circumlocution masks the cognitive dissonance Catholics and Jews feel .in America: "I happen to be a Catholic...
...Another ,is thar the sphere of the voluntary is inherently private, so that to speak of it publicly becomes embarrassing...
...Bellah ,is thinking of the institutions of civil society---documents, holidays, formal liturgies~while Cuddihy is thinking of behaviors of deference, internal censorship, deeply ~nculcatted attitudes, the esthetics of good taste, and the calculus of respectability which singles out which ideas are r he taken seriously and which should cause embarrassment at any given time...
...The heart of the book (chapters 3-5) consists of three case studies of a Protestant (Reinhold Niebuhr), two Catholics (John Courtney Murray, S.J., as studied by contrast with Leonard Feeney, S.J...
...Neither George Wallace nor Lyndon Johnson, neither Carrie Nation nor Father Divine, sinned by excessive civility...
...There are disturbing intimations in the early part of Cuddihy's argument, which he too easily glosses over by the end...
...Cuddihy catches well the lies we tell ourselves, and the secret adjustments we make, especially when we begin to do in experience what our inherited theories forbid us to do --and unconsciously erode our theories...
...shrewd observations and nifty Curns of insight occur on many pages...
...In some seasons, "offensive" protests against the avar might give no offense, whereas defense of the war would carry shock and outrage...
...The attitude Cuddihy is trying to point to is not specifically "Protestant...
...Neither Catholics nor Jews naturally understand religion in this Protestant way...
...an intellectual tradition larger than any individual or society, aimed at that prudential axis where lofty and humane ideals inform public instRutions...
...Exactly such embarrassments are the theme of Cuddihy's book...
...His is a delicious book to argue with...
...He is especially good on the "class struggle" between lower-class "ghetto Catholics" like Father Francis X. Connell and Monsignor Joseph Fenton of Catholic University and "aristocrats" like Murray and Feeney...
...Not only was his last book (The Ordeal o/ Civility) exclusively about Jews, but the most vital pages of this book are as well, and his next book (he hints) will be on the Holocaust...
...Believers in traditional religions have vivid experiences of the religion of ci.~ility, and in his concrete observation of these actual experiences Cuddihy is at his best...
...21 July 1978:474...
...One of these assumptions is that religion is a matter of individual, atomic, voluntaristic choice...
...all can learn from him...
...The carriers of the religion of civility are not, primarily, Protestants...
...Cuddihy represents the child of Darkness, alive to ugly secreis, and ambiguities...
...He notes how the language of the Bible was an affront to classicists like St...
...A gentleman is bound to the decorum of the amateur, would be ashamed to seem too expert at anything, would think it unsporting to practice before playing the game...
...and a Jew (Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg...
...the covenant of the Constitution owes more to the coolCommonweal: 473 ness of gentlemen than to the heat of Puritan' divines...
...In Germany in recent memory, no ma~ter what the voluntary consciousness of the incHvidual, Jewishness was ascribed by others...
...If Andrew Greeley rqpresents in sociology the child of Light, bright with numbers and happy thoughts...
...His eye, however, is unsteady...
...Everyone presen~ found the memory excruciating...
...Then he shows how our civility is shaped by this Christian lowliness, so that civility has changed its character...
...Some of this pilgrimage, to be sure, may be judged to represent creative advance, progressive inquiry into the gospels, genuine "developmenl of doctrine," etc...
...Still, America is such a deeply Protestant culture, Cuddihy s.hows, that certain Protestant assumptions frame the whole contex~ within which CaCholios and Jews think...
...Cuddihy argues that the overarching horizon ~vithin which Americans live out their lives is a "*way of }ire" (religion), which instructs us how not to give offense, about what to feel embarrassed, and how to meet the daily disciplines of decency and "civility...
...and ~hree d.raw corollaries from them...
...In his last chapter, "Homely Protestant: A Decorum of Imperfection," Cuddihy describes beautifully how the lowly language and humble story of Jesus came to shape the sensibility of Europe, and to make it a sign of good taste to avoid both ostentation and the vulgarity of slick perfection...
...that, I think, explains the energy of his ~ttentions...
...I) Civility is a corrupter of Christianity, a censorious discipline of bourgeois politeness settin~ itself up above Chrisr and treating genuine Christianity as a source of embarrassment and scandal...
...Augustine...
...He means by "l%otestant" the Cabots, the Lodges, the Rockefellers, Cyrus Vance...
...Rewards are found on almost every page...
...Space forbids...
...As H. L. Mencken observed, the progress of peaceful civilized life in America, beginning at Harvard, depended upon throwing the Puritans out and replacing them with gentlemen...
...In the present book, however, in its tone and voice, Cuddihy is remarkably ambivalent...
...I happen to be a Jew...
...Upper-class Irish Catholics of the East (~Fathers Murray and Feeney are apt symbols of his ir~terest) excite his imagination, too...
...2) Civility is a form of high Protestant "bad faith," a kind of cultural imperialism, through which under false pretenses Catholics and Jews are obliged to pass as Protestants in order to acquire status as "partners in the dialogue" (i.e., to have surrendered before the conversation opens...
...John Murray Cuddihy is a humanistic sociologist, in the double sense that he is absorbed with problems of culture as it is lived and experienced, and that by design he permits who he is to affect what he sees...
...One winces when one says this...
...Even the pattern of not notioing them-being /orbidden r notice themmis fascinating...
...The cult of plainness gives rise to an art of anti-art, a heroism of the anti-hero, a preference for the unvarnished, plain bricks and wooden beams of the newly renovated brownstone, a delight in jeans which show their seams...
...A still more radical objection is that Cuddihy errs in thinking of civility as primarily "Protestant," and relating it to "the Protestant aesthetic...
...it springs rather from the code of the English gentleman...
...even his treatment of Niebuhr, while astute, is cursory...
...where it is not on target, it errs in a creative and valuable way...
...it governs through intimate circles of acquaintances...
...So strong is it, in fact, that "true" religion may not be possible here...
...Because he has the courage of his acute intelligence, he sees things sharply that others miss entirely...
...4) Civility is a concrete institutionalization of charity, the working out of a genuine Christian humility, respect for others, and unwillingness to cause pain, in social manners and institutions...
...they are, primarily, gentlemen...
...Cuddihy's project, therefore, is important...
...We are accustomed to lauding America for granting "freedom" to worship as we choose...
...3) Civility is the property of an aristocratic mind, working at a high, subtle, and imposing level...
...He speaks of it, at other times, with clear words of approval...
Vol. 105 • July 1978 • No. 14
