Shattered Dream: America's Search for Its Soul. - book reviews

Christian Century, April 19, 1995 by Clifton F. Guthrie

By Water T. Davis Jr. Trinity, 206 pp., $16.00.

What is the most important contribution that vets can make to American life?" Walter Davis asked a group of Vietnam veterans. The response was immediate: "Tell it like it was." "Don't pull any punches." "Speak the truth." Since estimates are that more soldiers committed suicide after returning from Vietnam than were killed in action and that some 800,000 suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder, their truths will not be pleasant to hear.

Davis, professor of the sociology of religion and director of advanced pastoral studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary, has listened carefully to the stories told in rap groups, war fiction and films. He aims to provide an interpretive guide into the most profound experiences of these veterans, so that by learning from them, religious communities and others can contribute more creatively to the search for a new national identity and purpose.

Drawing on Joseph Conrad, Julia Kristeva, St. John of the Cross and Walter Brueggemann, Davis develops an understanding of the war as a rite of passage. By descending into the soul's dark night, the veterans emerged as prophets and "secular theologians." Like the suffering servant of Isaiah, "willingly or unwillingly, they paid the price for our national hubris, a hubris embedded in our narratives of national identity." Davis hopes that "by attending to their stories ... we may discover the idolatrous character of our collective story."

Davis focuses on the experiences of white men not because theirs is the only or most important story but because they are the "primary carriers of the dominant American national narrative" and because their shattering experience necessarily entails a shattering of our collective story. Hearing them may help us overcome our national "vision gridlock"--if we too are willing to become suffering servants: "Their healing now requires our wounding and our joint cooperation in revising the American story."

In exploring exactly how our collective story should be remade the book becomes less surefooted. As the subtitle implies, Davis's rhetoric broadens dramatically when he assesses the cultural or theological trends he finds inadequate, and methodological issues tend to get in his way. At its best, however, Shattered Dream is a striking example of good narrative theology. The stories themselves undo and remake us.