Perishable Good: Left Turn in the American Religious World
Rabbins, Richard
FALLING INTO DECADES—it is a modest version of the archaic practice in European elementary schools of dividing great epochs into convenient categories: the Middle Ages came to an end and...
...Yet it is clear that moral revulsion against the war has cut deeply into the traditional religious groups' posture of "going along" with the state...
...Why, then, play into the hands of illegitimate authority by quietly inviting arrest and certain conviction...
...ed., 1960...
...The real conflict has to do with women's objection to an overwhelmingly "masculine" dominance in the theology and structure of the Judeo-Christian system, a dominance in no way contraverted by emphasis on the special place of Mary in Catholic doctrine or the special role of women in the Jewish family...
...Insistent but not absolutist because religion is no longer, if it ever was, at war with secular society...
...however, it has in no sense vanished...
...ed., New York: Macmillan...
...And in spite of the opportunism and intramural conflict in the religious civil rights movement of the sixties, there was that effort to direct conscience into the social arena which is the test of commitment...
...on the black, consolidation of political power, community organization, cul LEFT TURN IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS WORLD tural expression...
...In Roman Catholicism, to take a clear example, such matters as priestly celibacy, the doctrine of the pope's infallibility, the justification for birth control or abortion, the question of collegiality in the definition of the hierarchical system, the accommodation of Christianity to Marxism— such matters are bound to be resolved as much by social conflict within the Church as by the "correctness" of doctrine...
...Yet these characteristics are, at maximum, preconditions for turning the secular society around...
...To so conclude in no way diminishes either the liberal religious peace movement or the heroism of the Berrigans...
...For the Catholic situationin America see, e.g., Michael Novak, The Open Church (New York: Macmillan, 1962...
...It has a central place but not a dominant role in the contemporary world...
...God's law prevails symbolically while human law is not denied in the specific event...
...Clergy and Laymen Concerned About over a radical critique of Catholic theology...
...He now argues thatthe political radicals and the neomystics are equallyvaluable, but I think he was right the first time out...
...This secularism of a religious people, this religiousness in a secularist framework," could scarcely provide a motive force for the social conscience of the churches...
...Great numbers of Catholic women defy the ban, and they are supported by younger priests...
...And the social crisis, toSee Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus, Winter 1967...
...It is enough to say that the piling-up of social troubles, especially the war in Vietnam, brought large numbers of clerics into the social arena to denounce, march, organize...
...and, finally, a rising "spirituality" (for want of a better word) in the American working class and lower-middle class, stemming from a sense of loss, of alienation from traditional secular institutions which no longer seem to sustain traditional values...
...At this point in our history, the organized churches, for all their soul-searching and self-criticism, do not yet appear to be the form through which so inchoate if deeply felt a malaise can find expression...
...Its social end is a powerful strengthening of community, achieved broadly with agnostics and atheists, which then may be directed from general-theological to specific-political strategies...
...Abortion is more complex and troubling...
...The bishops must continue to mediate between Rome and the local parish, responding to those in the new movement who are angry over failure to denounce publicly the My Lai atrocity or cope more fully with racism within the Church itself, responding to those in the parish who see in this ferment the very faith undermined...
...9 The conservative Protestant denominations hold fast to a view of abortion as another index of sexual license...
...On the last point, Margaret Mead is right to argue that the emptiness of the suburban religious revival of the fifties is no reason automatically to LEFT TURN IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS WORLD delight in the antistructure religious revival of the children of the fifties...
...Perhaps we have to do here with the commonplace about the intensification of the search for security and simplicity, the greater the unsettling problems in the secular world...
...It is no longer necessary, for example, for Catholics to tug and haul at "just war" doctrine to express their witness against the war in Vietnam: the war is immoral and un-Christian, and broad theological warrant exists for saying it...
...There is in fact a correspondence between general theological restlessness and specific social movements...
...True enough...
...Probably, at the minimum, it will come to whites not intervening in the rising self-assertion of the black community but rather by intervening much more strongly in public conflicts over employment, housing, corporate, and trade union policy...
...Further, the development of a "situational ethics" and a "new morality" by the religious intellectuals, though largely unknown to the regular parishioners, has had a liberating effect on a whole range of social and sexual norms...
...FALLING INTO DECADES—it is a modest version of the archaic practice in European elementary schools of dividing great epochs into convenient categories: the Middle Ages came to an end and then began the Renaissance...
...See, e.g., Sydney E. Ahlstrom's synoptic essay "The RadicalTurn in Theology and Ethics," in J. Gustafson, ed., "The Sixties: Radical Change in American Religion," The Annals, January 1970...
...Thus it has sometimes been a perishable good...
...If the religious commitment is vital to, it can never be a full expression of the political i See Edward A. Marciniak, "Catholic Social Action: Where Do We Go From Here...
...A striking number of the Catholic liberals and radicals who have pressed for change in other areas draw the line at abortion, or at least argue for a more complex approach than "total freedom of the woman to do whatever she wishes with her own body...
...National priests' associations of varying degree of militancy are contesting the dogmatic authority of local bishops who preside over archaic archdioceses...
...6 CLCAV, although a comparatively small organization, has made religious antiwar protest normative and respectable...
...A counterpart illusion in the black radical camp is that the mainstream churches can be compelled to pay hundreds of millions of dollars into black community projects as "reparations" for 300 years of repression...
...Ivan Illich in Mexico, Dom Helder Camara in Brazil, are perhaps the two most prominent Catholic critics holding this view...
...Religious liberalism and radicalism have much "leaning" to do, and it is likely to be done...
...More broadly, Jewish religious life can absorb any "new theology" of the kind proposed by Rabbi Richard Rubenstein and other counterparts of the Protestant God-is-dead school.l" I do not mean to present a picture of Jewish complacency and middle-class fatigue, although these elements are there...
...The Church of the immigrant era, of the hidebound bureaucracy, of the conservative establishment and narrow diocesan outlook is giving way, often to the shock and dismay of large numbers of workingclass and lower-middle-class Catholics...
...Of Perishable Good and Tenacious Evil THERE IS A REVIVAL OF RELIGION in America that is very different from its shallow predecessor in the fifties...
...Remarkably, the way has been cleared for religious groups to denounce, and even defy, their own government's engagement in war, not just the enemy's...
...the things that are Caesar's and the things that are God's...
...The revolt of the young against their middle-class parents in the suburbs is, as usual, more intense among Jews than gentiles...
...The new leader is Jesse Jackson...
...I have mentioned the intervention of the Catholic bishops in behalf of Chicano grape RICHARD ROBBINS workers...
...A much broader analysis, beyond my competence, is needed to establish the dimensions of this stage in the transit of American society...
...They argue that because of the crimes perpetrated by civil government against the Vietnamese abroad and the poor and blacks at home, legitimacy has been forfeited...
...In this I 6 Jeffrey K. Hadden, The Gathering Storm in the Churches (New York: Doubleday, 1969...
...For the seventies, however, the prognosis is rather optimistic...
...As this continues in the seventies we may also expect a "moral backlash" from millions of conservative Christians...
...But that is probably a temporary stage...
...The symbolic point of departure, John Kennedy's election as the first Catholic president, was an appropriate coda to Herberg's theme...
...It is painful but necessary to assert, in the face of Father Berrigan's courage, that this RICHARD ROBBINS form of religious protest does not work, does not advance the antiwar movement, and simply shifts public attention from the principle of civil disobedience to the story of the chase: when would Father Berrigan be caught...
...the willingness of some religious groups to resist at least their own secular states on the issue of war and peace, with strategy ranging from limited institutionalized "leaning" to massive nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, and a religious nonviolent "underground revolution...
...on commitment to the awakening minorities...
...so did the World Council...
...LEFT TURN IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS WORLD be ordained in 1972...
...Once acknowledged, however, this conservative constant should be viewed as a screen against which the smaller, but much more articulate change-groups carry on their work...
...Many of the changes are largely symbolic—the informal dress, the new liturgy, the effort to bring the laity more closely into parish and diocesan decisionmaking...
...The gravity of the racial crisis, the despair about the ghettos, and the conviction that the U.S...
...More of the changes cut deep...
...It is the Catholic radical pacifists in the antiwar movement, clerical and lay men and women, who have most eloquently stood conscience for the rest of us in this way— the Catonsville Nine, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the Chicago Fifteen...
...A return to social action, a renewal of the Social Gospel, can be helpful in this dilemma, but only in a limited way...
...but the weight of evidence seems on the other side...
...Secular "Jewish liberalism" is on the defensive for the time being in the cities...
...I find its expression, e.g., in Gunnar Myrdal's now classicwork on the moral ambivalence of white Americans, committed to the values of equality of opportunity and at the same time tenaciously de fending a system of devastating racial discrimination...
...But Hadden notes another gap, between theology and liberal religious social activism...
...James Forman, previously a leader in SNCC, introduced this strategy toward the end of the sixties with the celebrated disruption of a Sunday service at Riverside Church in New York City...
...The courage and spiritual grace of Father Daniel Berrigan can only command admiration...
...His willingness to suffer further pain does not change the fact that individual religious witness can be translated into an effective social movement only if the secular political order is so overwhelmingly repressive that an organized "underground society" must be developed...
...a more direct commitment to the struggle against the linked problems of racial injustice and poverty, though again it is inconceivable that the religious impulse can be decisive in this area, however powerful the role of the Catholic bishops in helping sustain the strike of the grape workers in California...
...All in all, however, it is not an exaggeration to say that the aggiornamento, at home and abroad in the Catholic world, is perhaps the most significant development in Western religious life in the twentieth century...
...The transition is readily measured in the religious accommodation to divorce, family planning, and birth control...
...It calls for civil disobedience, in the name of a "higher law" invoked as a last resort...
...On the other hand, contrary to the dream of the Social Gospel reformers, religiously based social movements are not prime movers...
...For the coming decade there would appear to be at least six central issues, likely even to be with us by 1980...
...Everything—from theology, liturgy, professional training within the churches, to the secular institutions—would have to be reexamined...
...Its documentation of systematic and deliberate atrocities long preceded the My Lai revelations...
...It seems to me inconceivable that they engaged, as charged, in the further step of a "conpiracy" to plot violent destruction...
...The Christianity represented by those two remarkable secular-religious socialists, A. J. Muste and Norman Thomas, is eloquent evidence of what I mean...
...As a result they may rush, ad hoc, from one social commitment to another...
...Gordon Zahn, whose important work on the failure of the Catholic church to confront the Nazi evil in Germany provided part of the intellectual capital on which the Berrigansdrew directly, has expressed these and other reservations in "The Berrigans: A Catholic Pacifist's View," DissENT, June 1971 (reprinted from the Catholic World...
...Through the late sixties, however, the civil rights crisis compelled a stronger social activism...
...The religiously oriented pacifist groups, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the Catholic peace associations, were as voices in the wilderness...
...An expansion of religious conscientious objection, in the tradition of the Quakers, does not strike it as sufficient either...
...for Jews solidification of the bond with the state of Israel and remembrance of the Holocaust dead...
...The great tugging and hauling is summarized in an avalanche of books, in the pages of the National Catholic Reporter (which is to Our Sunday Visitor as night to day or vice versa...
...IN THE SIXTIES that canopy cracked open...
...Put more positively, ethical engagement and prophetic judgment have nothing taken away from them when they are worked into complex and flexible strategies to shake loose new public policies...
...Cesar Chavez's Catholicism is as integral to the primary secular work of trade union organization as was Martin Luther King's Christian doctrine of nonviolent action to his assault on secular racism...
...And the parallel between racial and sexual discrimination has a special relevance for the churches and synagogues...
...For a generally sympathetic and understanding view, but with some criticism, seethe symposium "The Burden of the Berrigans," Holy Cross Quarterly, January 1971...
...War, the Peace Movement, and the Churches AS NOTHING ELSE, the war in Vietnam has brought together the leadership of the liberal denominations in opposition...
...a It is not surprising that Latin America should show us the priority of a radical critique of an exploitative society and a rigid church hierarchy For the first time, theology is part of a social ferment instead of a remote, unchanging guardian of eternal truth...
...The radical and pacifist religious minority finds CLCAV inadequate...
...And there are signs of a new pride in Jewish ness among the urban young...
...Initial steps have been taken to change the training of seminarians, to make more open the sisters' orders—indeed in Los Angeles an entire order simply broke away from the Cardinal's authoritarian control and reorganized on its own...
...Yet those clergymen, black and white, who fought the battle in the rural South and the urban North, were not simply establishing their credentials ("I was at Selma...
...There were limits then, there are limits now.1 Moral integrity, passion for justice, bearing witness, these count enormously...
...America, December 12, 1970...
...With a few outstanding exceptions, the churches abdicated on the McCarthy threat to civil liberties...
...The familiar lines of strategy unfolded...
...See Peter Schrag, "Ivan Illich: The Christian as Rebel," Saturday Review, July 19, 1969...
...These are: • the continuation of a heightened interest in "radical theology," not so much as abstract argument but as a challenge to theology to speak more directly to the human condition and to enter into philosophical combat with church authority over received theological wisdom...
...Theology is thereby drawn into the day-to-day process of change initiated by Vatican II...
...In the wake of such other confrontations, a number of national denominations established funds to channel to black communities...
...To seek to fit human action too tightly to the measure of transcendent values is to court that very moral absolutism against which one protests so vehemently in the secular world...
...Not all of them, to be sure...
...But the new exuberant commitment, the flood of proposals, programs, and sometimes simply cries of anguish, the "bearing witness" on religion and social activism requires sober analysis even at the risk of being considered morally insensitive...
...In the main, young believing Jews (the Orthodox excepted) will prefer a separation of elements: synagogue worship on the Sabbath, a strong Jewish-oriented social activism in the secular system, and modernization of traditional synagogal structure hold a relatively low priority...
...more insistent reform of church structure itself, especially in Roman Catholicism...
...Most Catholic liberal and radical social activists fully supportbearing witness at Catonsville but are troubled byovertones of moralism and a refusal to communicate with the community, an imperfect communityof imperfect men...
...With the wisdom of hindsight, it is now commonplace to fault nonviolent direct action as outmoded, a sop to Christian conscience rather than a meaningful strategy against institutional racism...
...In the short run, with politics under RICHARD ROBBINS Nixon and Billy Graham conducting services in the White House, some of the mainstream Protestant groups will slip back into the traditional "neutrality" of acquiescence...
...In this tradition a man must break an unjust law, the military draft system, because he can do no other...
...One of the surprises of the sixties was the great gain of people in the more traditional faiths, some of them fundamentalist...
...1966), esp...
...Or gets itself coopted by a political leadership ready to invoke the cant of "moral leadership" and "spiritual values" whenever convenient...
...5 see previously how a new theology and the urban crisis could be got together...
...on theProtestants in American society, see Martin Marty, The Second Chance for American Protestants (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), and HarveyCox, The Secular City (rev...
...If optional celibacy remains unlikely for now, it is likely in the future, notwithstanding the opposition of Pope Paul...
...It is not, I hope, presumptuous to stress finally that in the secular society, religious social activism is vulnerable: it lacks coherent power, it is often forced to fall back on moral exhortation, it has great difficulty in coming to grips with a human situation where falling-short and second-best decisions are the norm...
...I would "Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966...
...LEFT TURN IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS WORLD Vietnam (CLCAV), formed in 1965, remains the organizational focus of the liberal antiwar effort, constantly prodding both the government and the more cautious groups within its own constituency...
...It is on these grounds that Father Berrigan delayed his inevitable imprisonment by going underground after his conviction...
...On the whole, the liberal and mainstream denominations have moved further away from the conservative groups, especially in the field of social activism...
...Important work can be done here by the Women's Liberation movement once its worst enemies, its own splinter groups, have been left behind...
...A small group of Jewish radicals has permitted itself to be foolishly boxed into a polemical denunciation of "Zionist imperialism," but such New Left ideology has no real entry into American Jewish life...
...Further, the sense in the congregations that "eternal truths" are being reconsidered reinforces a general conviction that anything is subject to drastic change...
...But this essentially decent an temporized endlessly on racial desegregation of the schools until finally his hand was forced at Little Rock...
...In such cases where a religious social consensus is not developing rapidly enough, the issue is likely to be resolved pragmatically in the secular society, through liberalization of restrictive laws in state legislatures...
...If the new activism is indeed durable and fairly deep, there ought to occur a falling-off of interest in religious fads so intriguing to the mass media: the folk-rock mass, the "new breed" of "swinging" young clerics, the priests who leave the Church to marry and "tell their story," the little communes with their patchwork religions—part borrowed Eastern mysticism, part return-to-the-land, part spirit of Woodstock...
...But in the latter, the money raised is altogether insufficient to initiate any significant economic change in the black community, and demands for much larger amounts succeed principally in producing bitter conflict between national church headquarters and local denominations...
...On the Frenchdevelopment, there is a useful, if uneven book: Jean-Marie Domenach and Robert de Montvalon, The Catholic Avant Garde: French Catholicism Since World War 11 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967...
...see Jose de Broucker, The Violence of a Peacemaker: Dom Helder Camara (New York: Orbis, 1970...
...Its achievement is especially impressive in the light of extensive research showing that local Protestant clergymen involved in protest movements are likely to encounter strong resistance in their own congregations...
...This "radical turn" in theology matters to our discussion of religious social protest insofar as it comes to bear directly on social structure...
...Religion was not completely walled off...
...On the white side, then, support, and where possible coalition...
...Race, Class, Poverty: The Religious Commitment THE RIGID SEGREGATIONISM of the Southern Baptists apart, the major faiths had declared themselves forcefully in the fifties against racism as a direct contradiction of the JudeoChristian ethic...
...7 The most eloquent case for the opposite view, that the burning of the children in Vietnam, the real crime, makes imperative the creation of an underground community of "spiritual criminals," has been stated by Father Berrigan himself...
...Here it need only be noted...
...Pope Paul to the contrary, it must simply be a matter of time before Catholic doctrine will find a theologically adequate sanction for artificial contraception...
...This change, modest as it may be, is unprecedented in our recent history...
...So, too, with other problems...
...Here, I think, is an example of religious conscience misdirected...
...the true crime is committed in Vietnam...
...Of course, no social structure turns inside out overnight...
...She sees the fringe youth groups of the counter culture creating a "mishmash religion...
...it is no transient thing...
...But that is only the tip of the iceberg...
...But the seventies will be different...
...I am oversimplifying an extremely complex issue, but it seems incontestable that the consequences of the new theology in Roman Catholicism are favorable to a more wide-ranging, liberalized Catholic social action...
...Under the spur of Vatican II and its own restless, often angry younger religious, the Catholic church in America is making a historic transition...
...See An American Dilemma (New York: Harper, 1944...
...The civil rights movement, organized by young black ministers and black and white students, brought just that moral "leaning" against the racist legal and political structure which enabled the courts and Congress finally to act...
...Early Marxism grossly misunderstood the "opiate of the people" by identifying too closely the religious impulse with the power structure of churches...
...This radical change in American religious life constitutes a far more significant event than the "revival of religion" in the fifties...
...It spoke directly to the American social conscience...
...The real "lean" of the churches on secular economic institutions lies in the relationship of the organized churches to the big corporations, not in the pressure of the protest groups on the religious congregations...
...When the secular institutions falter, religious conscience gets blocked off...
...4 Jews have had * There is an extensive literature, variable in depthand in applicability to social action...
...for Catholics study of the repercussions of Vatican II...
...Herberg did not have in mind what Robert Bellah would later term "the civil religion," the broadly ethical character of the American historical experience, with all its virtues and dangers.$ His intent was to pronounce religion fit and prospering under the canopy of the American Way of Life, whatever reservations one might have about the foolishness of "the power of positive thinking" or the amiable nonsense of Dial-a-Prayer...
...The Catholic Interracial Councils and the Jewish human relations organizations in particular had worked to translate ethic into action...
...348 gether with the impetus of Vatican II and Pope John, produced a storm of criticism against the church structures themselves...
...Once the "conscience money" is granted, confusion and uncertainty ensue...
...Power is not so central here...
...To chart the proximate future of our religious social conscience as the seventies unfold, we need to understand that "the will to enter the social arena in force," as Daniel Callahan calls it, the religious impulse to lean more directly on secular institutions in pursuit of social justice and a decent society was in retreat during the fifties and came to full, if chaotic, expression during the sixties...
...Nor will it be muted in the seventies...
...ministers become active in a cause without trying to work out a consistent yet flexible ethical position about society...
...The principal themes remain what they have been—peace, racial justice, the reduction of poverty, the break-out from wornout bureaucratic structures (churches included...
...It seems likely, as the seventies proceed, that white radical romanticism among the younger religious people will give way to more solidly grounded white-black cooperation within a structure loose enough to assure black solidarity and pride...
...A striking number of younger white ministers and priests have chosen to live in central city neighborhoods, only loosely attached to official church bureaucracies and devoting their principal energies to community action groups in the poverty neighborhoods...
...Yet it is roughly true that the new engagement of American religion with pressing political, economic, and social issues stems from developments that happened to move to a time frame of every-ten-years...
...sexual matters, sex education—on these mat ters the liberal and moderate church groups are saying that it is the relationship which counts ethically, and thus traditional judg ments must be set aside...
...Once again, the resources for an actual war on poverty can be located only in secular society, in the federal government...
...fail to see any moral arrogance or selfrighteousness...
...Part of the price will be an excess of anger and a paucity of skill among the younger ministers concerned to overturn policy at once and inclined to substitute zealous moralism for political realism...
...Yet—in the area of religious social action, as in its secular counterpart, we have been caught in an excessive preoccupation with the immediate and novel...
...We owe a debt, even now, to those Catholic critics of that time—Monsignor John Ryan, Dorothy Day, Bishop Sheil, John LaFarge, Paul Furfey, the editors of Commonweal, whose views ranged from New Deal liberalism to communitarianpacifist socialism...
...The most important sign was Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which forged the strategy of nonviolent direct action against racial oppression in the South...
...But we know that in some way a kind of spiritual crisis is affecting us and that, at the least, the institutionalized religions used to be the appropriate form for its expression...
...The plea to the judge is that there may be a narrow "guilt" but that these men and women are in the deepest sense innocent...
...However, in the work of Abraham Heschel, Eugene Borowitz, Emil Fackenheim, and others, there is a much deeper awareness of the need to advance "beyond secularism...
...the Lutherans have already done so, the Episcopalians are on the threshold, the first woman rabbi (Reform) will 9 The most thoughtful Catholic analysis, favorable to liberalization of abortion law but with careful attention to the need for ethical safeguards, is Daniel Callahan's Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1970...
...In the former, churches can exert pressure on governing policy, on corporate investment in South Africa, for example, through the use of blocks of shares...
...In the religious sphere a dual effort will continue...
...Hans Kung, The Church (Sheed & Ward, 1967) . Kung's effort to challenge papal infallibility, Infallible: An Inquiry (New York: Doubleday, 1971), is a classic instance of the new interplaybetween theology and the demand for structuralchange in the Church...
...For unless the society, whatever its grievous faults, is on the threshold of totalitarianism—and it is not— civil disobedience must function on the premise of the legitimacy of the social order, however unjust the draft law or the war...
...Involved here is not the worship of the American way of life, but "an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality...
...Illich expresses this when he advocates resistance to Church authoritarianism (he has relinquished priestly duties) and advances a program of many-sided social changes (at his CIDOC center in Mexico) but, at the same time, warns against a too-easy invocation of God in man's community: "N'employez pas son nom...
...In the black community a new tough-minded approach of younger clergy, better adapted to the conditions of northern urban life, is taking hold...
...In reality, history moves in uneven waves, not by the clock...
...It is new...
...That does not mean, however, that politically he is right...
...RICHARD ROBBINS achievement of a religious pluralism from the assimilation of the "new" and mainly Catholic and Jewish immigrants—would open the way to social mobility and an erosion of religious bigotry, Herberg was on firm ground...
...In effect, the jury, even in the face of the admitted fact, could find them "not guilty...
...For Protestants this meant interpretation of radical theology in Europe...
...But not for reasons of political or social conservatism...
...As James Finn remarks, "Those who once were tempted to theologize all life are now, apparently, tempted to politicize all life...
...This trend is likely to continue quietly, while the call for drastic innovation receives most of the publicity...
...For the theologians find themselves compelled to rework their ideas in order to provide a religious rationale for proposed social changes such as might come about anyway for strictly historical reasons...
...On the white side, young ministers and priests, excluded from an interracial movement by black separatism and burdened with "white guilt," have tended also to lose critical judgment about what is central and what peripheral in secular society...
...The depth of our social crisis, the feeling of loss, of "alienation" if you like, only underlines the need for a new and as yet unspecified spiritual quest...
...Gandhi, Thoreau, and Christian forbearance were joined to militant tactics of civil disobedience capable of attracting the religious and the secular alike...
...That time is not now, or rather not yet, in American society, and so religious civil disobedience must remain an act of individual witness, a just act still subject to unjust law...
...The same kind of radical humanism informs the work of Bishop Camara of Recife...
...See also Karl Rahner, Theology for Renewal: Bishops, Priests, Laity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965...
...In contrast, "death of God" theology aroused brief, intense debate yet never really left a social imprint...
...Andrew Greeley is the most prominent among a number of Catholic sociologists who think we may be overemphasizing the upheaval and underestimating the continuity...
...While many Protestant clergymen support abortion reform, the religious community is split...
...seek to constrain power but do not take power...
...Only traumatic events, in Israel or in the relationship of Jewish to black community, could conceivably shake them...
...if the verdict were guilty, the judge could then set them free, and the President pardon them as they would pardon him...
...Why not, instead, work to create a nonviolent "revolutionary" underground capable of a real defiance of civil authority gone mad...
...The black religious community will share with the secular a pride and solidarity in black life, a refusal to acquiesce in paternalistic white direction...
...They have also inched along toward a series of structural mergers that will make for a more cohesive, if still pluralistic, Protestant system...
...only argue realistically that no other formal religion in America has yielded up, with good reason, so much of its force as an agent of social activism to secular society...
...The new black community movement invites illusions on both sides...
...For the alternative--an uncritical blessing of the present religious ferment as good because it is godly or right because it is activist--can mean a repetition of many of the frustrations that eventually undermined the achievements of the predecessor movement of the thirties and forties, the Social Gospel of the Protestants, the Social Action coalitions among Catholics, the Jewish liberalism of the synagogues and secular councils...
...Economic pressures apart, parochial education from grade school to Jesuit universities has lost a good deal of its "ghetto" character and tries to compete more evenly with the public sector...
...government will not listen—these have led some younger blacks to place too much faith in militant splinter groups that claim to speak for the entire black community...
...but for a brief time, a new Social Gospel changed us all...
...it should flourish in the seventies, insistent but not absolutist...
...Racism in the Mormon church is echoed by the sexism in the Catholic church, as Mary Daly, Sally Cunneen, Sidney Callahan, and other Catholic women writers have made clear.10 A first step is full ordainment of women clergy...
...Only some conservative subgroups among Catholics and the Protestant fundamentalists support the war explicitly...
...LEFT TURN IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS WORLD and social order...
...All this becomes apparent in a glance at the past twenty years...
...a much firmer consensus on the need for liberalization of laws and practices where "morality" is entwined with familysocial relationships...
...Not surprisingly the book for the times was Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew.2 As far as he advanced the sociological thesis that "the triple melting pot"—the 2 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, rev...
...Because the antipoverty question applies to more whites than blacks (although nonwhite minorities are disproportionately represented), we shall see an intensified participation of religious activists in local and regional programs...
...In any case, the principal lines of conflict and accommodation are more likely to occur within denominations, an oncoming generation of clergy and laity against a presiding establishment...
...The intellectual roots are largely European—the mystical and social thought among the French thinkers as diverse as Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar, and Francois Mauriac...
...But in the last analysis, in the absence of a national program of guaranteed employment and income maintenance, the funding of relatively modest projects in urban neighborhoods is about all that religious groups can do in respect to poverty...
...No one should suppose antiwar declarations in religious national publications are a precise index of sentiment in the congregations...
...Indeed, moral stance on social issues gains from the association with the "tainted" world...
...The moderately liberal National Council of Churches beat off incessant attacks from the Right...
...black caucuses seeking more than token representation in the major denominations, and the growth of both traditional Negro denominations and new separatist black religious groups...
...President Eisenhower said it did not matter what faith you had as long as you had one...
...The same mistake is not likely to be made again...
...Thereafter came the American Disarray of Life, the successive deepening of conflicts in our secular society...
...Premarital sexuality, sexual deviance, freedom of information in 8 See Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966...
...the liberal religious establishment worked with secular interest groups in political strategy, which produced the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, while the more militant blacks and whites, especially the young, joined the Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns...
...Instead, religious critics were more inclined to preoccupy themselves with problems of the middle class—"identity," "anxiety," "mass culture"—which cast a troubling shadow over the successful American Way of Life...
...How the liberal religious groups, left groping after the decline of the civil rights coalition, will be fitted into the new political and economic coalitions necessary to a more insistent attack on racial justice, I do not know...
...See Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970...
...Young people want to build a new religious movement but they lack the liturgy, poetry, imagery of the historical church...
...Opportunity, mobility, social activism, commitment to arts and letters, all were and are expressions of secular Jewish life...
...It is a small price to pay, however, for the renewal of social relevance in American Protestantism...
...Nevertheless, theological ratification is required, whatever the outcome of the clash between "conservatives" and "liberals" within Church structure...
...Family-Social Relationships and the "New Morality" CONTROVERSY OVER FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS, sexual patterns, the position of women, the life-style of the young, comes directly within the province of the churches as moral guardians...
...But at best the religious conscience can only play an auxiliary role in the organization of a secular antiwar coalition, a role profoundly important but not decisive...
...But in this instance the religious auxiliary role can be maintained more forcefully...
...This slackness in national purpose was echoed in the religious milieu, a muddled religiosity at the top, an ambiguous "revival of religion" out in the growing suburbs...
...See Thomas J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1966), the most thorough of a score of books on this subject...
...The gap is between conservative laity and liberal clergy...
...Situational ethics" are not so easy to apply to the question of when the fetus becomes "life...
...His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, a force in the Episcopal church, applied a general religiosity to foreign affairs, as if "the crusade against Communism," a chain of military pacts around the world, could shore up the faithful against godless evil overseas...
...American Protestantism is so diverse that generalizations about modernization are risky...
...Yet much remained lip service, not simply because "eleven o'clock on Sunday was still the most segregated hour in America," but because the institutional churches drew back from directly challenging the secular system on such matters as discrimination in housing...
...To be sure, it is possible for an Ivan Illich to be a theological conservative and a proponent of radical social change, but now that matters less than one might suppose, since the Church would be concerned more with his challenge to its authority structure than with his precise religious beliefs...
...Perhaps so...
...A more militant black community will be less concerned with the idea of civil rights and integration, more with the practice of community power and white commitment to support black organized movements...
...In the fifties, the American celebration ignored urgent problems pushed aside by World War II, most notably racial discrimination and the failure to extend equality to millions below the poverty line...
...Yet we must remember to acknowledge that from the fifties down to the present time a very large segment, perhaps a majority of the regular churchgoers, have been relatively indifferent to and in some cases (mainly Southern Baptists and fundamentalists) actively hostile to "religious liberals...
...Sally S. Cunneen, Sex: Female, Religion: Catholic (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1968...
...Sidney Callahan, Exiled to Eden: The Christian Experience of Sex (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969...
...We may expect a resurgence of the Social Gospel, directed toward domestic issues once the government is compelled to undertake complete withdrawal from Vietnam...
...It is rather that the lines for social action have been established some time...
...The invasion of draft offices, the destruction of federal property, the public burning of draft files—all this does not equate with violence...
...Father Berrigan, Howard Zinn, and others do not agree...
...Whatever the validity of the argument, that upheaval is bound to be followed by quietism...
...the new Protestant theology centering on a "secular interpretation" and "demythologizing" of religion, which owes a great deal to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and is in some respects transported to America in the work of Harvey Cox and a number of our "death of God" theologians...
...Modernization and Reform To PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE, to close on the problems of war, race, family life, in spite of the centrality of secular power, the religious denominations in America will have to make striking internal changes...
...By the end of the sixties the civil rights coalition had come apart...
...But taken in its own terms, apart from the outrage of the government's attempt to use charges of "conspiracy" for political repression, there is a point beyond which religious civil disobedience can become selfdefeating...
...The Catholic church's official position is implacable opposition to "human barbarism...
...In the European Protestantcontext, see Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1967), which has had more direct bearing on social actionthan the works of Barth Bultman, and others whose theology is radical in the technical sense...
...morality is prevented from turning into moralizing righteousness...
...In any event, The Secular City was of great importance to general readers who were not able to RICHARD ROBBINS less reason to be involved, for the "secularizing" of Judaism or redefining the tradition has been going on for a long time...
...So conceived, religious conscience is expressed, witness is borne, prison accepted...
...But when he fashioned the doctrine that the American Way of Life represented the faith of all the people, he only succeeded in creating a thin theological cover for the American celebration...
...Yet, flat as the fifties may now seem, there were also signs and portents—falling into decades will not quite work...
...Abortion reform is but one aspect of the general revolt of women, protesting secondclass citizenship...
...it is "symbolic speech," for napalm is used to light the fire and, then, one calmly awaits arrest and trial...
...5 and 6. Cox now concedes that he may have overestimated the commitment of urban-age man tosecular-religious social change and may have underestimated the much deeper spiritual longing fora joyous celebration of life...
...10 Mary Daly, Church and the Second Sex (Harper and Row, 1968...
...The Theological Firmament WHAT WE SEE in all three faiths, especially in Catholicism, is a generalized theological skepticism...
...The result is a romanticism about black power among the white religious radicals, a disposition to endorse the Black Panthers, for example, as if they were the black community instead of one, somewhat unstable element within it...
...The most well-known Catholic leaders in the movement, Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, were sentenced with others to prison in 1970 for their part in the burning of the draft files at Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968...
...Moreover, the renewal of socially relevant religion was accompanied by a new interest in the relationship of the American religious community to comparable institutions abroad...
...Jewish life and Judaic religion are the least likely to take a dramatic turn...
...Still, on balance, the reappearance of Social Gospel and Social Action, in new and more radical form, is more than welcome...
...the arresting theological argument of a "German school" of Catholics, perhaps best represented by Hans Kung and Karl Rahner...
...The religious groups speak to power...
...I foresee more of the same intense social involvement of religious groups during the seventies...
...and passed a point of no return...
...Among the UnitarianUniversalists, in fact, two rival groups, one integrated and one all-black, battled to an impasse for control of the appropriated halfmillion dollars...
...The powerful Southern Baptists remain officially neutral but their silence is significant, for ordinarily any war calls out from this largest Protestant group a patriotic reflex...
...on moral support for the nuclear disarmament campaigns...
...chaps...
...Even a new "black theology" is taking shape...
...7 In any case, the involvement of both liberal clergy and radical, principally Catholic, pacifists in the antiwar movement, points up two somewhat contradictory consequences for the peace movement...
Vol. 18 • August 1971 • No. 4
