“This is an intelligent, compelling, and beautifully-written book about the place of belief in contemporary American literature and culture. The eclectic mix of authors is gratifying, and each one is exhaustively researched.”–Christopher Douglas, University of Victoria

“Hungerford bravely takes on one of the great unanswered questions of contemporary literary criticism: what are we to do with the sacred? Her readings of literary texts are persuasive and powerful, and she pursues her case with subtlety, tenacity and elegance. This strong book is contrarian to its core–I really know nothing like it out there.”–Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan

Amy Hungerford is professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification.

POSTMODERN BELIEF

American Literature and Religion since 1960By Amy Hungerford

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14575-4

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION Belief in Meaninglessness………………………………………………………………..xiiiONE Believing in Literature Eisenhower, Salinger, St. Jacques Derrida……………………………………1TWO Supernatural Formalism in the Sixties Ginsberg, Chant, Glossolalia…………………………………..28THREE The Latin Mass of Language Vatican II, Catholic Media, Don DeLillo…………………………………52FOUR The Bible and Illiterature Bible Criticism, McCarthy and Morrison, Illiterate Readers…………………76FIVE The Literary Practice of Belief Lived Religion, Marilynne Robinson, Left Behind………………………107CONCLUSION The End of The Road, Devil on the Rise………………………………………………………132Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………141Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………..175Index………………………………………………………………………………………………187

Chapter One

Believing in Literature

Faith in Faith in the Fifties

Leading the 1953 inaugural parade for President Eisenhower was a float known to its builders as “God’s Float.” Added to the parade lineup at the last moment, when a parade official noticed that the event might fail to represent the idea that “this was a nation whose people believed in God,” the float was constructed to make that abstract point concrete. It was built around a “central edifice denoting a place of worship” with “side aprons” carrying “greatly enlarged photographs of churches and other scenes of worship. In Gothic script on the sides and ends of the float [appeared] the legends, ‘Freedom of Worship’ and ‘In God We Trust.'” The journalist William Lee Miller, observing the inauguration in a 1954 essay for The Reporter titled “Piety along the Potomac,” suggested that “the object of devotion for this float is ‘religion.’ The faith is not in God but in faith; we worship our own worshipping.” The Episcopal Churchnews shared this view of the float, adding an aesthetic critique as well: “Standing for all religions, it had the symbols of none, and it looked like nothing whatsoever in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath, except possibly an oversized model of a deformed molar”: A tooth for a toothless religion.

This feature of contemporary religion was widely observed in the fifties. A year later in his now-classic study of American religion, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955), Will Herberg reflected on the same phenomenon in more academic fashion. Examining the upsurge of religious activity in 1950s America, Herberg found little evidence of specific, deeply held religious belief in the survey data he collected, data covering church membership, attendance at services, beliefs about God, and general knowledge of religion. It seemed to Herberg, putting it in the same words Miller chose, that Americans had “faith in faith,” that they believed in the virtue of belief, regardless of the content of that belief. What Herberg did find among his survey data was a specific faith in what he called “The American Way of Life,” a system of beliefs that enfolded such values as consumerism, optimism, self-confidence, and individualism. As the immigrant generations moved farther from the ways of their parents, rooted in the Old World of their origins, people identified with religion—their status as Protestant, Catholic, or Jew—as a way of finding both social belonging and social distinction within what Herberg thought of as America’s “triple melting pot.” It was this social function of religion, for Herberg, that explained how intense religious activity could combine in America with a disregard for the basic beliefs of its three major religions. A version of this argument persists in recent work that reads religious practice as the equivalent of ethnic identity.

President Eisenhower’s discourse and practice of religion became the most prominent example of the faith-in-faith phenomenon. President Eisenhower, as Miller trenchantly put it, “like many Americans, is a very fervent believer in a very vague religion.” “Like Ike, Americans remember with reverence a pious heritage, the form and spirit but not the content of which they want to preserve.” Indeed, Eisenhower has often been credited with a famous line encapsulating such a position: “Our government makes no sense,” Eisenhower is said to have said, “unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” What is interesting about the quotation is that it has been reproduced, both at the time and subsequently by historians of religion, in an erroneous form that makes Eisenhower’s notion of religion sound more vacuous than it was, even as he uttered something close to these words. What he actually said was: “In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.” What Eisenhower actually said locates general religious faith, as it applies to America, in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, though he implies that democracy might find its grounding in any religious tradition so long as it shared that characteristic of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

The difference between the common version of Eisenhower’s quotation and the accurate one points up the complexity of faith in faith. The difference reveals the specific content of the faith Eisenhower invokes—the “Judeo-Christian” tradition—while also showing how even that content reflects the faith-in-faith ethos. In his influential 1967 essay, Robert Bellah noted Eisenhower’s quotation as a prelude to his own effort to describe what he called “American civil religion” as a substantial, and truly religious, tradition of shared belief in certain basic assumptions—prime among them, that there is a God, and that American leaders are obligated to that higher authority in addition to—and in crisis, above—the authority of the people. The Judeo-Christian tradition is itself a notion that mediates between pluralism and doctrinal specificity. It is the product of postwar religious thinking, popular (as we can see in Eisenhower’s usage) as a way of naming the distinction between Western democracy and Soviet communism. The star theologians of the day, including Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, developed the idea of the Judeo-Christian tradition in intellectually substantial detail. (Niebuhr’s celebrity was such that he was chosen to grace the cover of Time magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary issue in 1948.) Jewish writers such as Herberg and the novelist Waldo Frank embraced the term as well, Herberg invoking it at the conclusion of Protestant, Catholic, Jew as the religion that must be called upon to renew the “inner character of American religion.” As the historian Mark Silk puts it, the notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition had become “the true emblem” of America’s faith in faith. Writers looking at religion in the fifties and the historians following them—including the eminent Sydney Ahlstrom—have found the bowdlerized version of Eisenhower’s remark an even fitter emblem for American religion of the postwar period, demonstrating how even delimited vagueness came to be displaced by something even vaguer in the late-century conception of American religion.

What faith in faith represents—a version of religious thinking that minimizes the specificity of religious doctrine in service to usually nationalistic goals of civil connection—stands in contrast to the version of religion that stresses doctrinal content, a kind that in 1950s America most prominently includes the multiple versions of Christianity, from committed mainline Protestantism and Catholicism to the more evangelical strains. During the fifties and sixties, minority and working-class churches— Holiness and Pentecostal churches, in particular, with their intense and particular religious expressions—thrived largely out of sight of the faith-in-faith mainstream, while Billy Graham, fully in view of that mainstream, drew the masses to his revivals and had the ear of presidents. This is the window on American religion that James Baldwin gives us in his 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, showing us the ecstatic worship at Harlem’s storefront churches that he both admires and criticizes years later, from a secular point of view, in The Fire Next Time (1963). These doctrinally focused religions can be usefully described as religions of “conversion,” which emphasize the abandonment of erroneous beliefs and the habits that go with them and the adoption of right ones along with a righteous life. While faith in faith has been the favored way of understanding American religion in the mid-twentieth century—a tendency evident in the ways Eisenhower’s speech has been misquoted—doctrinal or conversional religions were nevertheless important within American culture in the postwar period. Their presence beside the blander and more dominant versions of fifties faith reveals a dual track in American religion in the postwar period: not simply the coexistence of doctrinal and nondoctrinal faith, but, I will argue, the mutual dependence of one upon the other.

Unsurprisingly, that mutual dependence sometimes took the form of reaction: some doctrinal assertions were inspired precisely by the phenomenon of faith in faith. In 1959, for example, the minister and theologian Martin Marty gave an impassioned analysis of sectarian weakness, calling for the renewal and intensification of sectarian difference in the face of religion’s erosion by the American proclivity for vagueness. More often, doctrinal assertion in the period is not pleaded for, but is simply evident, and evident in ways that reveal how specificity and vagueness feed one another. The year 1949, for instance, saw two signal moments for the Catholic presence in American culture: on the one hand, the publication of Paul Blanshard’s virulently anti-Catholic American Freedom and Catholic Power, which aligned the Roman Catholic Church with communist totalitarianism, and on the other, the ecclesiastical prosecution of Jesuit Leonard Feeney in the Boston Heresy Case. Blanshard’s book went through eleven printings in eleven months, and a second, updated edition was published in 1960, suggesting a broad concern about specifically Catholic forms of exclusivity and authority. But Feeney’s crime against that very Church was to argue, in packed public meetings across the street from Harvard, that there was no salvation outside the Church. The Church rewarded him with its strongest doctrinal sanction: he was excommunicated.

Some read Feeney’s excommunication as the Church’s attempt to accommodate to an overwhelmingly Protestant American culture, but the picture is again more complicated than that. Feeney’s position and that of his prosecutors both had support in Catholic tradition, and Feeney’s beliefs may have been closer to lay Catholic belief than those of the liberal Richard J. Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston, who was largely responsible for Feeney’s downfall. Feeney’s prosecution in fact demonstrated the Church’s insistence on a theological difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Whereas it is not uncommon in Protestant tradition to suggest that the salvation held out by one’s own denomination is the only salvation to be had, Catholic thought on salvation outside the Church has not, in the last century, been that clear-cut. And so doctrinal insistence in this case meant the insistence that doctrine is not the ultimate arbiter of one’s eternal fate. (I will have more to say about the Protestant–Catholic contrast in the final section of this chapter.)

Similarly, Eisenhower’s faith itself can be seen as emblematic of both kinds of religion—faith in faith and specific doctrinal conviction. Eisenhower’s religion first took center stage when he surprised the crowd at his inauguration in 1953 with “a little prayer of my own” at the start of his inaugural address. It read:

Almighty God, as we stand here at this moment my future associates in the executive branch of government join me in beseeching that Thou will make full and complete our dedication to the service of the people in this throng, and their fellow citizens everywhere.

Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby, and by the laws of this land. Especially we pray that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race, or calling.

May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who, under the concepts of our Constitution, hold to differing political faiths; so that all may work for the good of our beloved country and Thy glory. Amen.

Eisenhower’s prayer was one of four officially offered that day, the other three of which decorously enfolded Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish cohorts. Nevertheless, some in the Washington establishment were taken aback by the president’s decision to read a prayer he wrote himself, and not because of what it said. Its religious statement was bland in the extreme. The one whiff of differences among faiths—of disagreements over what one believes and what one does in response to belief—is explicitly displaced from religion to politics, where those united by their loyalty to the Constitution might yet “hold to differing political faiths.” The prayer was surprising not so much because it outlined a set of religious beliefs but because it seemed to indicate that Eisenhower actually believed in some set of religious claims. Unlike the formal prayers offered at the ceremony, it constituted a personal rather than an official, and civil, religious statement.

Precisely because of this, Eisenhower’s prayer has had a double afterlife. In addition to being cited by those interested in church–state issues and presidential history or rhetoric, in Christian circles it is held up as an inspiring example of presidential faith. It entered that double afterlife in 1956 at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, when the movie star Irene Dunne recited it on stage, to the accompaniment of violins playing “America the Beautiful,” in the light of the Pacific sunset, all broadcast to millions on their new TVs. The prayer’s assumption into the heart of political rhetoric—via the political theater made possible by the new mass medium of television—elevated what looked like a personal expression of faith into something more like civil religion. The prayer in this way drew closer to the formal prayers next to which it looked so uncomfortably distinct when first uttered. But that assumption did not ultimately disperse the scent of conviction that surrounds personal prayer. Thus the very emptiness of “faith in faith” through which the public culture of the postwar years represented America to itself was in many ways true to the predominant sociological facts of American religion—the sociological facts upon which Herberg and others drew in their analyses. But both the Feeney case and Eisenhower’s own example reveal how such faith in faith could become entwined with fervent and specific conviction.

Though Blanshard’s anti-Catholic success was not far, historically speaking, from John F. Kennedy’s campaign success, those two poles seem to represent an evolution in American religious thinking, an evolution away from doctrinally specific belief and prejudice and toward the firm establishment of faith in faith as American’s civil religion. Kennedy, of course, secured his victory in part at a Dallas ministers’ convention on 12 September 1960, where he laid out his own Catholic philosophy: that religion was a private matter, one that should have no bearing on the public decisions of a public figure, this despite the fact that mobilization of Christian principle had already proven powerful in the Civil Rights movement. In the latter case, religious belief was not what one subtracted from one’s thinking upon entering the realm of public policy, but the very springboard from which one launched that entrance. Prejudice against Catholics certainly accounted for some of the difference between the embrace of the largely Protestant religious presence in the Civil Rights movement and the dismissal of Kennedy’s Catholicism, though already in the early 1960s sectarian issues were not the defining ones (as Martin Marty’s 1959 call to sectarianism reveals). More importantly, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other Civil Rights groups were advancing a version of Christian morality that echoed the tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition as Eisenhower imagined it—in particular, the notion that all men were created equal. The year 1961, then, saw both Kennedy’s inauguration and, the following summer, the Freedom Rides that prompted Kennedy to bar segregation in interstate transportation and that vaulted the Civil Rights movement into the national consciousness. Together these two events suggest the waning power of any religion of difference and the strengthening of civil religion, where even faith in faith was replaced by a more straightforwardly secular moral and humanist argument.

Sociologists and historians of religion observing the developments of the postwar years read them just this way, as the triumph of secularity. Peter Berger, in his 1966 analysis of American religion, The Sacred Canopy, argued that Judaism and Christianity had been digging their mutual grave since the prophets, echoing Weber’s analysis in suggesting that Western religion’s “disenchantment of the world” began well before the Protestant Reformation. By confining the sacred into one gigantically transcendent God (this was the prophets’ contribution), by progressively denying Him mediating beings like angels and saints, by scrapping sacrament and religious art (these accomplished by the Reformation), the Judeo-Christian tradition drove the sacred right out of ordinary life. The effect, according to Berger, was to make God less and less plausible as a force within the realm that the Old Testament always did reserve for God’s appearance, the realm of historical event. If God was so transcendent that He was never palpable in one’s ordinary life (so Berger’s argument went), it was hard to believe that He was busy making history. It was hard to believe in Him at all.

(Continues…)

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