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

Washington Monthly, June, 1988 by Bill McKibben

Junior high health class

So why does Silk care so much about this establishment in a book theoretically devoted to "religion and politics?" It's the deeply ingrained desire, I think, to avoid embarrassing discussions of belief and faith. Dogma shows up here a few times--Mr. Feeney's loony, single-minded devotion to the proposition extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the church no salvation) and the Reverend Bailey Smith's 1980 announcement that God didn't hear the prayers of Jews. (The Reverend Smith is referred to 25 times by name.) These two excursions into "theology" are interesting to Silk because they represent rips in the institutional fabric of the Judeo-Christian establishment, papered over with meetings of the Anti-Defamation League and interfaith committees and by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston taking tea at Harvard's Lowell House. But this fabric has little to do with the tapestry of American religion. The real issues--the ones that have broken into the political sphere repeatedly--have to do with content, with what the Gospels and the Scriptures say. This often makes scholars and journalists unhappy, for questions of faith remain largely taboo in their circles, but it's impossible to write a useful book on this topic that (to play our numerical game one last time) mentions The Christian Century on 20 pages and the Bible on four. It is like a junior high school health class about sex--you come away barely understanding the mechanics, much less the import. Religion concerns death and what happens in its wake, sin, forgiveness, reconciliation, the right life, selflessness, topics that are personal, political, and usually both.

Rethink their duties

The case of Martin Luther King makes this point. To Silk, a piece King wrote for The Christian Century's "How My Mind Has Changed" series is of prime importance. According to Silk, King wrote that he had begun his career as a thoroughgoing liberal but that reading Reinhold Niebuhr had tempered his optimism, though he had never succumbed to an "all-out acceptance of neo-orthodoxy," and indeed found himself in basic agreement with the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, which he proposed to put into action with a "Gandhian satyagraha." King's remarks may well have been, as Silk says, "carefully calculated" for his clerical audience, but they do not get at the heart of his struggle. That movement was embedded in a theological notion--that we are all God's children. The struggle took as its motif a scriptural episode, the Exodus from oppression of the Jews. And though its methods were developed in large measure by Gandhi, there was no doubt about the Mahatma's principal source--the Sermon on the Mount. These are the fundamental reasons Martin Luther King's campaign worked. To a country steeped in these images, he was recognizable as Moses, and his life and death were an imitation of Christ's. "Turning the other cheek" resonated in our culture. He had a lever to move the conscience of the American majority. King's vast accomplishment lay not in ridding the readers of The Christian Century of "neo-orthodox misgivings" about his "neo-Social gospel." He changed the hearts of half the country.