Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 1 - April 1984 - BOOK REVIEW - Ideas, Faiths and Feelings Essays on American Intellectual and Religious History 1952-1982

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Ideas, Faiths and Feelings Essays on American
Intellectual and Religious History 1952-1982
By Henry F. May
New York, Oxford, 1983. 244 pp. $25.00.

By all accounts we are a society in trouble. As data mount about increased drug abuse, alcoholism, illegitimacy and abortion, wife-battering, teenage suicide, and street violence, we cluck our collective tongues and murmur about breakdown or, if we tend, toward the optimistic, about the inevitable pangs that accompany social change. Whether we are mordant or upbeat, we look for explanations and we grope for understanding. Henry F. May, a distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley, gives us several substantial straws to grasp at with this collection of essays in the history of ideas spanning some three decades. May is a modest man so he doesn't pretend to offer some grand Hegelian synthesis that will explicate all our woes and promise a higher unity in the dialectical by-and-by. But he does, in line with his view of the historic enterprise as an interpretive art rather than a dry science, present an angle of vision that flows from his attempt to immerse himself empathetically in the sources of the American past. He claims, and I wholeheartedly agree, that a style of clenched-jaw "neutrality" cannot get at the truth about "movements of thought and feeling." What thoughts and feelings does his particular angle of vision illumine?

First, May apprises us of the inherent difficulty involved in holding within a single frame the complexities of American history. His own case in point is the 1920s, and this collection begins with a series of essays on the 1920s and the epoch immediately preceding that decade. The essays are suggestive but nothing much gets going in some of them, partly because May is so overwhelmed by the difficulties of coming up with a complex overview of the many forces and tendencies at work. But this itself is instructive for it alerts us to the fact that periods of cultural change are also periods of doubt and fragmentation as an old consensus disintegrates, often resulting in as much despair as buoyancy. One key point that emerges from May's examination of "shifting perspectives on the 1920s" is the incredible optimism of the liberals of the period, most especially the social scientists. May traces the emergence of a sort of social science utopianism, a deep faith that we could solve "all social problems" through new knowledge of one sort or another. The implicit slogan was: nothing progresses like progress. Yet, in tandem with upbeat scientism, the 1920s era also exhibited, primarily in the art and literature of the avant garde, a powerful "alienation and self-doubt.

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May is intrigued by our particular fusion of optimistic progressivism with tragic conflict-something not new, he decides, to the twentieth century. After all, he writes, "The favorite popular hero is not the progressive and optimistic Jefferson, but the brooding, melancholy, and compassionate Lincoln, and it is exactly these elements in Lincoln that are emphasized in the popular tradition" (p. 59). From the great Jonathan Edwards on, certain characteristics or traits have appeared consistently as a kind of mirror image of our upbeat "Progressive Patriotic Protestantism," such as "agonized self-doubt, a deepsuspicion of material appearances, a positive hatred of blandness and complacency, and above all a most intense and even painful seriousness about oneself, one's country, and its mission" (p. 62). Like the child in Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, we Americans have a little shadow that goes in and out with us-the dark twin of our light-hearted (and, alas, often light-headed) progressivist certainties.

Second, May shines the interpretive spotlight on the fundamental and foundational importance of religion and religious history to an understanding of American history and politics in general. Even if one doesn't find the "recovery of religious history" intrinsically interesting, May argues that knowledge of history has become a necessity if one has any deep interest in American life. May documents the persistent denial by contemporary historians and social scientists of the importance of religion to the American past and present. He finds a definite class bias in the neglect of religion and theology, for often those who celebrate a kind of orderly rationalism are those whose lives more aptly fit a pattern of "orderliness." The majority of human beings, subject to the ravages of war or revolution and to upheavals of economic change, are seldom "tempted" to join hands with smug optimists.

There is a tendency for many intellectuals and enlightened progressives to think that all history "inevitably" leads to themselves (p. 125). Missing the feelings, tones, textures, and images of our collective life, they move in lock step order from "orthodoxy to natural religion to deism to pragmatic secularism." There are enormous deficiencies in this view. May argues that the "religion" of the intellectual class of America bears two main deficiencies: "it makes it impossible to explain American nineteenth century culture, and it leaves out most of the people in all periods" (p. 135). Intellectual historians, dealing "mainly with an educated elite," omit "many kinds of people on many levels of articulatedness and education" (p. 132). Although religion "has ceased to have a place in the established culture of the intellectuals," concrete religious allegiance as exemplified by regular churchgoing and professions of belief attract at least sixty percent of the current American population. May notes, then, a very complicated relation between "American intellectuals and the masses." I wish he had said more on this, for the picture he sketches but does not satisfactorily fill in is one of an elite group defining itself in large measure with reference to what it is not-the believing, hence benighted, masses-yet claiming, if one looks

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at the radical portions of this elite, to speak on behalf of "the people." May isn't alone in noting this disjuncture but he adds fresh fuel to the intellectual fire.

Third, May asks a vital question: "What has been the national religion of America?" He identifies it as the "Progressive Patriotic Protestantism" noted above and goes on to provide a phenomenology of the beliefs and practices of those who located themselves inside our civic religion even as he reminds us that many were on the outside, most importantly, Catholics. He is candid about the cultural hegemony and force of American Protestantism, seeing great strengths and weaknesses in this potent tradition. My major criticism of May's discourse on the continued importance and vitality of religion is that he has not taken serious account of the broad evidence of disaffection from religious tradition that may, perhaps not even paradoxically, go hand-in-hand with continued church attendance and professions of general articles of faith. Our Protestant civic religion so overassimilated itself to the Enlightenment dogma of secular progress that it could not emerge unscathed from the slow unraveling and derailment of that project in our own time. This disintegration of the liberal consensus is noted by May in his discussion of the New Left and the youth revolt of the 1960s when he writes: "Causes to which liberals had given their energies and devotion for a generation seemed a failure.... This university [the reference point is Berkeley], a triumph of organization of competitive effort, of

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upward mobility, of productivity, this great concentration of specialized excellence, represented the epitome of American culture of 1950s at its best; and it was exactly that culture that had lost the confidence of the young" (p. 103). The link of the dominant Protestant faith(s) with the general trends young people revolted against is worth more consideration than it has thus far received from May or others.

May concludes his collection with several reviews of books by Reinhold Niebuhr and Philip Greven-both exemplary in their condensed cogency, exhibiting those qualities of spirit and intellect that make this volume worthwhile for specialist and interested layperson alike.

Jean Bethke Elshtain
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts