God in the Public Square
GOLDMAN, ARI L.
God in the Public Square Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II By Mark Silk Simon and Schuster. 206 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Ari L. Goldman Religious affairs...
...deployed his brand of spiritual politics...
...In taking stock of the fundamentalists' political gains in the '80s, Silk finds that they have gotten "little but rhetorical encouragement" from the Reagan Administration on abortion, prayer in schools and other issues dear to them...
...A Protestant one...
...The events he asks us to consider include the election of John F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, the Six-Day War, the Vietnam War, and two phenomena we have cometo call "revolutions"—the Sexual Revolution and the Reagan Revolution...
...Roman Catholic bishops are attracting attention with bold statements against nuclear war and for more compassion toward the poor...
...Silk hasn' t quite enough to say about the '70s and '80s...
...A Harvard PhD in history who now works as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Silk is at his best hireviewing the spiritual agenda of the 1960s...
...In an egregious example of what one of my editors calls "alphabet soup," he writes: "Whithersoever they assembled, there would the ACCC go, compelling the FCC or NCC or WCC to issue warnings to press and public not to labor under any confusion about which was which and what was what...
...What I like most about Spiritual Politics is its dim view of the Christian Right's prospects...
...If you're under 40, as I am (barely), two missing words are probably shouting out at you much the way your best friend's mother usedtoifyou forgot to say "thank you" after she served you milk and cookies...
...A Jewish one...
...That is okay with me—as long as we keep "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance...
...Just who this God was, however, we were never told...
...He gives a moving account of JFK's agony over charges that as President he would be more loyal to the Vatican than to the American electorate, and reminds us how the issue was diffused...
...If his religion and his duty to the nation came into conflict, Kennedy promised, he would resign from office...
...The Communists were a godless, heathen threat to world freedom, while we Americans were upholding liberty with the imprimatur of none other than God, the Supreme Being, the King of Kings...
...As Silk observes, "though Americans may have decided to forgo a national religion, they do not lack a spiritual politics...
...But in that society an individual could belong to a variety of sects and cults without offending any one of them...
...Silk recalls the early enthusiasm the Judeo-Christian idea evoked among Christians who wished to give Judaism its due as the mother faith, and the subsequent warm endorsementsofthe concept by Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich...
...coins and paper currency bear the slogan "In God We Trust...
...After the war, Christians were often sharply critical of American Jews for their defense of what were seen as Israel's strong-arm tactics and expansionist activities—a complaint that resonates even louder today...
...Membership in the mainline Protestant churches has stabilized after years of decline...
...Was it a Catholic God...
...The author is also very effective in showing us the religious roots of the Civil Rights Movement and the artful way Martin Luther King Jr...
...He barely mentions feminism and gay rights activism, two important movements with religious overtones...
...But to tie revivalism and the emergence of figures like Billy Graham and the reactionary Jesuit Leonard Feeney to the threat of nuclear annihilation during that era is surely stretching a point...
...Silk's prose gets a bit confusing when discussing this decade, too...
...His thesis about the mutual influence of politics and religion is obviously borne out by the decision to augment the Pledge of Allegiance with a reference to the deity, and by another act of Congress in 1954 requiring that all U.S...
...He does agood job, though, charting the political rise of evangelical conservatism, and how it helped to put Ronald Reagan in the White House and sustain him there...
...Then, frustratingly, he revives the notion on the last page in a paragraph that begins, "And still...
...The Judeo-Christian synthesis suffered a great setback at the time of the Six-Day War...
...Thus Americans, in a stab at spiritual and cultural unanimity, created the Judeo-Christian ethic...
...His conclusion is that the Judeo-Christian tradition is simply too persistent a force to lay to rest...
...Elsewhere he expresses himself far more gracefully...
...He delivers what should have been the final blow to it on the penultimate page of his book, by underscoring its irrelevance in an age when there are a growing number of Moslems and adherents of Eastern religious traditions in the United States...
...He also reminds us of its early rejection by Catholics, even by that prophet of religious pluralism, John Courtney Murray...
...And Jews, despite the influence of the neoconservatives, continue to adhere to their traditional liberal politics...
...Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism, Murray wrote, were "radically different" styles of religious belief, and no one of them "is reducible, or perhaps even comparable, to any of the others...
...But, as Mark Silk reminds us in his enlightening Spiritual Politics, it wasn' t until 1954 that those two words were added to the Pledge by Congress and President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a religious and patriotic volley during the Cold War...
...All of these developments Silk sees as signs that religion in America is "slouching back to normalcy...
...Reviewed by Ari L. Goldman Religious affairs reporter, New York "Times" Repeat after me: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all...
...The evangelical thunder appeared to be receding" in the latter part of the decade, Silk tells us...
...Unfortunately, Silk does not seem able to make up his mind about the viability of the Judeo-Christian idea today...
...The fate of this "new national creed" is one of the themes running through Spiritual Politics...
...The only experiment in pluralism that came close to ours took place in the Roman Empire...
...In practical terms, the ambiguity hardly seems to matter...
...Jews were angry at Christians for their silence when Israel's very existence was being threatened by its Arab neighbors massing offensive forces along its borders...
...Jerry Falwell has put his Moral Majority on hold...
...In describing the aftermath of King's March on Washington, for instance, he observes: "Even with the success of the march, it took the death of one President and the full commitment of his more legislatively adroit successor to get a civil rights bill worthy of the name through the Congress of the United States...
...Yes, of course, ours is one nation "under God...
...Less impressive is Silk's handling of the '50s...
...Such syncretism isimpossibleinthe United States, a land primarily of Judaism and Christianity...
...Each of these, Silk notes, has been played out on an American religious stage that is unique in history...
...Indeed, this politics is "one of the principal means by which Americans conduct their cultural business...
...To prove his point, Silk turns our attention to some of the major episodes of the last four decades and shows us how a "religious dynamic" has been operating, often just beneath the surface, that "is bound with, and makes manifest, what the country is undergoing at any different time...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 9
