Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, June, 1988 by Bill McKibben

Why Journalists Can't Write About Religion

By my best count, Mark Silk's new history of religion and politics in postwar America(*), which mentions the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. by name 21 times, refers to the Reverend James Albert Pike, flaky Episcopal bishop of California, 30 times. This is a little like writing a 400-page cookbook and devoting 150 pages to recipes requiring potato chips. And it is symptomatic of the disease that infects Silk's book and much of what is written about religion. The meaning of religion is ignored. I am afraid that, like the liver man seeing a really good case of hepatitis, I'm more interested in the disease than the patient, which at any rate will soon die in the bookstores.

To return to our original example, Bishop Pike was ordained into the Episcopal Church in 1946 and hired as chaplain at Columbia in 1949. He gave jazzy sermons, hosted a Sunday morning TV show, and was elected Bishop of California, where he was fashionably liberal (building a cathedral with stained glass windows of Thurgood Marshall) and dabbled in mild heresy, "hint[ing] at doubts about the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and Salvation Through Christ Alone." He later participated in a televised seance and promoted parapsychology before dying in the desert of the Holy Land where he was wandering around in the sun looking for a spiritual breakthrough. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led a nonviolent "civil rights" campaign that won an end to segregation and voting rights for black people. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So why is Pike more prominent in Silk's book than King?

The first answer seems to be that Pike wrote for The Christian Century, one of a half-dozen or so publications that Silk, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, constantly cites. (The others include the Jesuit weekly, America, the Partisan Review, Politics, and the New Yorker.) And he showed up posthumously on the literati radar screen, thanks to an "eviscerating" essay by Joan Didion. This probably compensated for his never having been actually connected to Harvard University, though that would certainly have been even better. Father Leonard Feeney, a heretic priest who operated for several years from that university's unofficial Catholic student center is mentioned by name 43 times, and his followers, the Feeneyites, five times. Both Feeney and Pike are, in their limited way, interesting--were Silk to write a history of modern American heresy he would have two chapters in the bank. But the reason they have been included here, I think, is their attachment to and separation from the religious-intellectual establishment that is the organizing principle of Silk's book. He, like most academics and journalists, wants to write about Religion, not religion. We read in the papers detailed accounts about what the Pope has to say about Poland, but not what he has to say about Paul. This tendency, as we shall see, distorts our understanding. Silk carries it to extremes. (But, of course, this kind of writing is also easier; it's far simpler to cite journal articles than it is to wrestle with the meaning of Galatians.)

In Silk's eyes, faith in America is a phenomenon best understood through the records of the National Council of Churches and its predecessors and in the pages of elite journals. Developments unskilled outsiders might think important in and of themselves--the rise of Billy Graham, for instance--Silk chronicles through the eyes of this establishment. We learn that The Christian Century was "warily noncommittal" about Graham in 1951 during a large Seattle crusade and, by 1952, "cold" toward his performance in San Francisco, but by March 1954 had had a "change of heart" and regarded him as "extraordinarily teachable and humble." What had happened? Graham had entered the sanctum of establishment Protestantism (New York City's Union Theological Seminary), spoken for 45 minutes, and spent half an hour answering questions. He impressed them with his sincerity, even leading one theologian to say, in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, that he could probably "be used for highly constructive Christian purposes."

This theme is carried through to the bitter end. On the penultimate page, immediately after asking whether or not America might be in for a new Great Awakening, Silk pops the really hot question: Will Partisan Review spring to life with a symposium on a new, new, new failure of nerve? The reference is to two earlier Partisan Review symposiums about intellectuals and religion, but, believe me, you'd know what he was talking about if you had read the book.

The flaw in this method of historical research need hardly be described. It is a little like writing a history of American politics in the 1980s and restricting your research to the pages of The Washington Monthly and Human Events. The Washington Monthly and Human Events may well be fine publications, influential among their respective coteries, but it would probably be good, just as a backup, to talk to some actual politicians (or even voters) as well. Silk even proves that the religious Establishment swung little political weight. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, he reports, the former president of Union was "aghast at Israel's onslaught," The Christian Century said Christians would not "sign a blank check" in regard to the war, the National Council of Churches "struggled for neutrality"--and 346 of 438 senators and representatives agreed Israel should not withdraw its troops from the occupied territories without assurances of national security. Many of the congressmen donned "Dayan-like" eyepatches to show their support.