140 - No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste

No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste
By John Murray Cuddihy
New York, Seabury Press, 1978. 232 pp. $12.95.

Within the last decade, "civil religion" has had almost as many definitions as interpreters. John Murray Cuddihy, Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, defines it as the "religion of civility": a tolerant, generalized "niceness" that sprang in this country from unitarianized Calvinism and has been widely institutionalized in our culture. Civil religion is the taste of inoffensiveness. It is symbolized by what Philip Rieff called the "smile of sociability," which has nothing to do with fraternity and everything to do with surface politeness and the unremitting demand for reciprocity. Standing on the principle of toleration embedded in the First Amendment and drawing sustenance from the modern process of "structural differentiation" (which reduces religion to a merely private aspect of the total social system), the religion of civility tames the religious traditions. It blunts the sharp, intolerant, offensive edges of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism by turning them into three equally religious ways of maintaining civil "taste." Inoffensive civility makes it inappropriate for Jews publicly to proclaim their chosenness, for Catholics to confess aloud that "outside the Church there is no salvation," for Protestants to argue for the uniqueness of Christological revelation. "Good taste" allows such intolerant convictions to be held, if at all, in secret.

Cuddihy claims that twentieth-century liberal theologians have provided the legitimation for the effects worked on religions by civil taste. Reinhold Niebuhr is singled out as a Protestant legitimator. Eager to give "no offense" to his circle of Jewish and agnostic friends, Niebuhr called for Christians to end their attempts to convert Jews. Niebuhr held that because Christianity can only appear to Jews as oppressor, and because Christianity and Judaism have the same theological center, Jews should be encouraged to find God within their own heritage. Niebuhr thereby seriously compromised the uniqueness of Christianity's truth claim and grounded his tolerance on a henotheism. John Courtney Murray is selected as an exemplary Catholic legitimator. Hobnobbing with Henry Luce and Robert Hutchins, being "in" with a social set of wealthy Irish Catholics, Murray spoke for Catholics who, under pressures of the religion of civility, became less specifically Irish and more generally Catholic. In arguing that the constitutional provisions for religious toleration were articles of civic peace and the basis for civic discourse, but not articles of faith, Murray de-Romanized and de-Europeanized Catholic state-church theory. His theology reached for seemingly traditional distinctions that would "disembarrass" American Catholicism of its offensive state-church tradition. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Cuddihy's Jewish representative, has consistently viewed pluralism as a forced,

142 - No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste

pragmatic accommodation to American reality, has protested making Judaism (stripped of its ethnic identity) one "religion" among the tri-faiths of the culture, and has firmly maintained the centrality of the doctrine of election in Judaism. Nonetheless, Cuddihy believes that Hertzberg has legitimated a changed situation for Jews by focusing on the "metaphoricality of Jewish chosenness": chosen people now means the chosenness-specialness of Israel among the nations, a version of Jewish distinctiveness which the general American community has come to accept.

Cuddihy appends to his interpretation of American religion a parallel thesis regarding political and social ideologies. The two-party system has tamed radical, revolutionary politics, and the cross pressures of modern roles and interests have cut across and destroyed Marxist class lines. In a surprising conclusion, Cuddihy discovers the deepest roots of modern religious and social civility in "the Gospel story of the passion and death of Jesus." Taking cues from the works of Erich Auerbach, Cuddihy suggests that the gospel stories' joining of the high and low, the sacred and the secular, yields an "interim esthetic," a "decorum of imperfection," a celebration of coarseness and lowness as high taste. Such an esthetic bans ostentation, fanaticism, and triumphalism until the end time and interprets the sin of pride as the unseemly and the offensive. Versions of this esthetic informed the Puritan postponement of the perfect community until the eschaton, and it is at the base of contemporary, secular repudiations of religious and ideological fanaticism.

A number of highly questionable historical perspectives and sociological assumptions under gird Cuddihy's thesis. Except for appeal to theories of social differentiation and a few cursory references to the impact of the Enlightenment, Cuddihy never explains why or how the modern taste of civility grew out of a unitarianized Calvinism. Lack of attention to complex historical developments also accounts for the jarring paradox of Cuddihy's sardonic commentary on modern standards of civility, in the early sections of the book, and his sympathetic treatment of the "interim esthetic," in the conclusion. Indeed, because historical gaps are never filled, I remain unconvinced that there are even remote connections between the plainness of the gospels (and of Puritanism) and the inoffensiveness of contemporary American society. Furthermore, the assumption that theology is by definition legitimation and, as a corollary assumption, that any changes in theology mark a compromise of "truth," strike me as reductionistic. Niebuhr's view of the relation between Christianity and Judaism can then only be interpreted as an accommodation of religious truth to social change, not as something emerging from Niebuhr's developing ethic of love and justice or from his growing appreciation for the dialectical interplay between religious truth and historical relativities. The same assumptions obscure the subtleties of Murray's attempt to correlate ancient ideas of civitas with Catholic notions of church and

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revelation. Religious "truth" for Cuddihy is apparently available in pristine, unambiguous form, with ambiguity and relativity always denoting compromise. Why else would he write, at the conclusion of his analysis of Murray, "But suppose, in the constant conflict of truth (candor) and civility (love), love wins? In the end, then, there may be faith, hope, and charity, but if-as the apostle says-the greatest of these is charity, charity will end by devouring truth."

Despite these reservations, I find Cuddihy's book to be the sharpest commentary on the relation between traditional religion and contemporary American culture to appear since Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew. In many ways, in fact, it is an updating of Herberg's chapters on the "civic faith." Cuddihy sees clearly and illustrates amply the loss of the specificity and particularity of Christian and Jewish identities as they have been baptized in a font of American politeness and emerged as religious "aspects" of the larger culture. He writes with both humor and sympathy of the conflicts within religious Americans who attempt to appear tolerant and yet feel they must adhere to the uniqueness of their religious traditions. This is a book, therefore, which should be recommended to those undergraduates who are prone to defend toleration as "letting everyone believe as he pleases, since any one (private) religion is as good as another," but who will taunt street evangelists or grow anxious about the People's Temple suicides. It is a book which also will bring into clear focus for teachers and clergy the compromises and conflicts between religion and American culture. In aggressively confronting the consequences of American inoffensive taste, Cuddihy has driven out of the shadows issues that bedevil contemporary American religiosity.

C. Conrad Cherry
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania