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America in Search of Its Soul
By Gibson Winter

During the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the media reminded us of the optimism of the postwar period. The American people anticipated a promising new era. De­spite the terrible human cost of the war, there was the conviction that we could move forward into a time of peace and prosperity for all our people. We had proved that we could come together and meet a challenge to our very survival as a nation. Now we could draw upon that spiritual capital and build a prosperous, democratic society.

This confident spirit also informed the life of the mainline churches. The city became increasingly a melting pot of many peoples and races. African Americans returning from the military were impatient with Jim Crow in the South and the ghettos of the North. Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s charismatic leadership, the civil rights movement broke through many discriminatory practices. The women's struggle for libera­tion, the oldest revolution, was beginning to gain new momentum.

Harvey Cox's book, The Secular City, gave voice to this optimistic spirit.' He celebrated a city that would open the way to a free, creative life for individuals and anticipated a secular rather than religious future. This optimism, if not the secular dream, was widely shared. Below the surface of religious conformity, however, Cox recognized that secularism was becoming the dominant mode of life. In Will Herberg's classic expression, "The religion of Americans was Americanism." Several other theologians wrote of the "death of God" in which a new spirituality would prosper,, without invoking deity. This hopeful, secular spirit was widely shared by

Gibson Winter is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Christianity and Society Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of numerous books, including Community and Spiritual Transformation: Religion and Politics in a Communal Age (1989).
¹Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

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many of us working in the churches. All of us, including Harvey Cox, revised our judgments in the decades that followed.

Mainline churches were reaching out to the poor in their sectors of the city. Integrated congregations began to emerge. Urban training centers and special projects of urban ministry developed. At the same time, a dark cloud was forming over the cities. A countermovement was giving a new shape to the cities and its churches. More and more middle-class and prosperous working-class people began moving into the rapidly growing suburban areas. The "exploding metropolis" became a suburban explo­sion. "The suburban proportion [of the urban population] expanded during every decade, beginning at 5.8 percent in 1900, quadrupling to 23.3 percent by 1950 and doubling to 46.2 percent by 1990."²

The national highway system along with tax advantages opened the way for the suburbs to become the preferred residence of the middle- and upper-working groups. Jobs soon followed the people to the suburbs. Work became less and less available to inner-city people. The African American middle class began moving to the suburbs as well. Much of the white and black leadership of the cities departed. The inner cities became centers of business and government surrounded by impoverished sectors of the metropolis. During this migration to the suburbs, urban congrega­tions of all faiths struggled to survive with diminishing resources.

"The inner dynamic of America's epidemic of violence is the pathological expression of a spiritual search for self- identity, a reaching out for community life and meaning.”

The deterioration of the cities accelerated from 1980 to 1992 during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Funds for health, housing, education, and other services were slashed. Homelessness became endemic, especially with the dumping of many mentally troubled people on the streets without community centers for their treatment. Urban churches were soon swamped with the basic task of feeding the hungry and destitute. Thanks to the many fine ministries of these churches, some human care continued to reach those who had been abandoned. (A similar process of impoverishment can also be traced in the rural areas of America, although our immediate attention is focused on the urban scene.) The optimism of the postwar era had given way to a desperate struggle' to preserve an urban ministry.

On the surface, it would seem that the postwar optimism was justified. Things are, after all, prospering in the society at large, even though the cities for the moment are having difficulties. However, this would be a superficial judgment. It might seem tenable were it not for the rapid

² Sam Roberts, Who We Are: A Portrait of America (New York: Random House, 1993), p.123.

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increase in pathologies throughout the society. Homicides have reached epidemic proportions in the cities. Violent crime oscillates up and down but continues as a serious threat to security. Given the problems of poverty and unemployment in the inner-city areas, the concentration of violence in these sectors is quite understandable. Homicide, however, is not limited to these sectors; in fact, violence and threats of violence are present in all parts of America. The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, the spread of militias, the increase in abuse of women and children, the escalating numbers of rapes, the constant threats against government agents who try to enforce rules on misuse of national forests, terrorist bombings of family-planning clinics-all of these events reflect a deep crisis of violence in American life.

Moreover, gangs and violence are by no means confined to urban areas. They are part of the daily life of the suburbs, smaller cities, and towns. A youth in Brooklyn kills a deliveryman in order to get money for new sneakers. Several youths in Davenport, Iowa take a girlfriend in their car and shoot her, because she would not lend them her car for a robbery.³

Many conditions contribute to such violence. Drugs, easy availability of weapons, unemployment, problems at home, high consumer expectations-all of these factors and others exacerbate the situation. We deny -the seriousness of this escalating violence if we assume that it is a temporary phenomenon that will soon pass.

To be sure, there have been other periods of violence in American life. In fact, we have a long history of violence in our land. We enslaved African peoples for centuries. We drove the Indian nations from their lands, making and breaking treaties at will. Our industrial expansion took place on the backs of factory workers and in sweatshops. This spirit of violence, moreover, was celebrated in the tales of the gunslingers of the West. We have, however, gradually tried to bring a modicum of order into American life. After all, civilization is about achieving a reasonable level of order and civility.

THE PERNICIOUS EFFECTS OF THE MARKET ECONOMY

The inner dynamic of America's epidemic of violence is the pathologi­cal expression of a spiritual search for self-identity, a reaching out for community life and meaning. This statement certainly sounds paradoxi­cal. However, the fabric of our communal life has been torn and almost destroyed by the economic market system. The capitalistic market is one of the most brilliant of human inventions. It also has serious faults.

The market system, for all its strengths, is primarily useful for produc­ing quantities of goods, capital accumulation, and expansive develop­ment. Its strength is that it operates without central planning or control, depending upon the decisions of agents in the market system. On the other hand, it is inefficient for producing a high quality of life. In fact, it

³Gibson Winter, "America's Soul at Risk," Anglican Theological Review, 76 (Fall, 1994), pp.413-431.

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undermines quality of life. The ruling principle of the market is profit rather than human values. Environmental concerns, the conditions of workers, the stability of the communities impacted by corporate decisions-all of these matters are peripheral to the market. They are externalities to be cared for by the taxpayers and citizenry.⁴

Moreover, the market system tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of those who have. It is based on a principle of equal access and exchange but cannot escape the imbalance of power in all human dealings. This imbalance has become even more pronounced in America in recent years. "In 1979, the top 1% of households held less than 20% of the nation's net worth.... Ten years later, the share of net worth held by the top 1% had nearly doubled, to 36% ."⁵ As homelessness and poverty have increased, the rich in America have become richer.

Economic dislocations have, in recent years, produced increasing poverty and dependency on welfare. These poor people have now become a target of attack for conservatives who entered the Congress after signing a "Contract with America." Their contract included plans to take from the poor even that which they do not have .⁶ Their attack on the poor reveals the fear of failure that besets this market world. This anger

"The disintegration of neighborhood solidarity becomes even more serious when both parents in a family have to work in order to maintain a reasonable standard of life. Family values become a victim of the market.”

against the poor also gained support from middle- and working-class people whose incomes remained static or declined because of industrial dislocation. Through the displacement of industries into cheaper Third World areas, the American labor force was thrown into low-paying service jobs. The poor and homeless became the scapegoats for the anger that this market adjustment generated.

The destructive impact of the market system on communal life is, to some degree, unavoidable. Workers are pulled away from their homes. When there is a strong ethnic or local community, as was the case a generation or two ago, the pressures of separation and long working hours can be balanced by neighborhood and family support. As mobility of workers increases in the search for scarcer opportunities, especially as foreign competition tightens the profit margins and companies begin to downsize, these communities erode, Apart from major migrations, for

⁴For a thorough discussion of these issues, see Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
⁵Roberts, Who We Are, p. 174.
⁶Contract with America, edited by Ed Gillespie and Bob Schellhas (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 65ff.

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example, from the South during the two World Wars, one-fifth of Americans, on average, move each year. These movements increase rapidly with decreasing economic opportunity. "Fully two-thirds of the people-who lived in the nation's metropolitan areas were born there (and only half of all metropolites were living in the same house for more than five years."⁷ Some of this movement reflects a desire for change or improvement in economic condition, but much of it is simply a conse­quence of the search for work.

The disintegration of neighborhood solidarity becomes even more serious when both parents in a family have to work in order to maintain a reasonable standard of life. Family values become a victim of the market. Personal sense of self becomes fragmented. Self-identity, as Anthony Giddens designates it, falls into crisis. More and more families, who once lived on fairly good, industrial wages, now struggle, with both parents working, on the edge of poverty. The service sector increases, incomes remain level at best, and, in most cases, disappointment replaces hope for the future.⁸

How does this fragmenting of personal identity bear on violence and, particularly, on the spiritual character of violence? The issue here is what it means to be a person, to be a human being. Many of us have grown up with-the idea that persons are born as separate individuals who have to negotiate their relationships with families and the larger community. This individualistic view of the person is a basic principle governing the operation of the market system. Each individual presumably makes choices, sells his or her labor, and creates demand so far as income is available.

From an abstract point of view, in the economics of the market, such a notion of the human being is a useful fiction. It can be used to calculate supply and demand in the market. In reality, however, human beings are socially constituted, formed and developed through interpersonal relationships. Persons grow to maturity through the care of others, whether parents or surrogates. In personal interaction, they learn the language of their people and the mores that govern life. They become mature, responsible individuals with the capacity for choice through nurture by others.

The culturing of the young is always more than the care of parents and relatives. It is the work of the neighborhoods, schools, and peer groups. To mature as a person is to grow with a sense of meaning for one's life, the promise of a future that is possible and enduring. Where this promise decays, as it has for those in impoverished areas, as well as for many middle-class people, the sense of esteem for oneself as a person dimin-

⁷Roberts, Who We Are, p. 138.
⁸For two rather different perspectives on this crisis of community and self-identity, see Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); and Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modem Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

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ishes. The support groups that constitute a world of belonging disintegrate, and one's self-respect and self-identity erode.

For a century and more, Americans have believed that the future could be better than the past. They worked with the conviction that progress was built into the order of American life. This has sometimes been called the American Dream. The erosion of community life has coincided with a basic crisis in this American Dream. The openings in industrial work that welcomed new workers are diminishing rapidly. The jobs that are open require a good deal of education and skill. More and more people feel out of place in this new economy of computers and high technology. The reality is that the American Dream of progress and improvement of life is dying for all but the well-educated.⁹ The market has failed the workers even as it undermined the communities that had always sustained them.

The erosion of community life and the loss of a sense of a promising future have brought personal being into crisis. To be a person is to have some sense of belonging to the human community, some grasp of a possible future, however limited. Self-identity in this profound sense is coming to terms with one's own being, one's mortality, and one's hope for fulfillment in life. The capacity to love, to work, and to choose one's way in life are all dependent upon that spiritual maturation that comes with communal nurture and a sense that one's life has meaning beyond immediate needs.¹⁰ Where these qualities are missing, confidence and hope evaporate. Anger replaces love. Destructive actions become substi­tutes for work. One finds oneself drawn into antisocial actions that make little sense in retrospect.

Lamont Cherry, a fifteen-year-old at the time, joined with three other boys in beating, raping, and almost killing an immigrant housecleaner. He said in court that it was not supposed to happen like that. He was embarrassed and sickened by what he and the others had done.¹¹ This was just one more instance of impulsive, senseless brutality like most of the homicides that fill our news broadcasts every night. Nor is spiritual impoverishment and violence toward oneself or others confined to depressed, inner-city areas. A study of Bergenfield, New Jersey, a middle-class community, tells a similar story of lost souls in search of some sense of belonging.¹² Teenage suicide was the path out for some of them.

Spiritual impoverishment is at the root of the violence in America. Various conditions set the stage for one or another kind of spiritual pathology. Hunger for communal support and hope for the future fuel this violence. Attempts to rehabilitate youthful offenders caught in this pathology require the building of substitute communities. In every case of successful healing of delinquents, some kind of family, group, or commu-

⁹Edward N. Luttwak, The Endangered American Dream (New York: Touchstone, 1993).
¹⁰For a fuller discussion of this subject, see Gibson Winter, Community and Spiritual Transformation: Religion and Politics in a Communal Age (New York: Crossroad, 1989).
¹¹The New York Times, May 14, 1995, p. 1.
¹²Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids (New York: Pantheon, 1990).

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nal rebuilding is necessary. Punishment-even incarceration-may be required, but it will not heal the pathology. The gang is a substitute community that promises security and belonging, but even gang members know that death is at the end of their road.

THE SEARCH FOR A NEW SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality is certainly not limited to religions in any formal sense. Spirit is the centering of life in meaning, hope, and promise. It refers to meaning in the sense of ultimacy, as Paul Tillich put it, for ultimacy embraces all of life, including its defeats as well as victories, its pains as well as joys. Spirit dwells in the aura of the sacred, that which includes and yet reaches beyond the everyday. Religions embody this quality to varying degrees. They relive the stories and practices that express the whole of life, a cosmic whole that no idea or concept can embrace. These stories are mythic and yet true, spiritual and yet earthly. If we use the term religious in this most general sense, we can say that the crisis of meaning and self-identity has sparked a religious revival.

Religion and the spiritual quality of life depend upon the vitality of human communities, because spirit is mediated through other persons, through love and nurture, through honest confrontation and helpful support. Spirit is the lifeblood of community. Community is the bearer of spirit. Certainly, communities are fallible, caught up in their own power struggles and violence. They are neither sacred nor ultimate. They are mediators of the sacral life in what the Scripture calls earthen vessels. They are as much in need of criticism as any human enterprise.

There are various movements outside any formal religion that are searching for a spiritual quality of life. Some are New Age movements. Some are groups seeking a richer, more personal life in the barren wasteland of the consumer world. Some are men's groups seeking to discover their identity as men. Some are women's groups becoming more conscious of their struggles in a sexist world. Some are pathological groups such as skinheads and white separatists.

Even the religious life of America is far from simple. It is multicultural and multifaith. Practically all of the major religious movements of the world are now practiced in America. For the immediate purpose of considering urban ministries, I will confine this discussion to major trends in the Christian bodies. This is obviously a loss, since some of the most promising developments may well be in other religious bodies or outside any religious movement.

Fundamentalism is a religious movement that continues to be a force in American religion. It challenged the scientific view of the world in the nineteenth century, particularly around the issue of evolution. Fundamentalism has been a strange phenomenon in the West. It adopted the criterion of modern science that truth is scientific and factual, but it applied this criterion to an infallible revelation. Fundamentalists claimed that the Bible had to be literally true, like any other scientific phenomenon, or it was simply false. After the Scopes trial of 1925, the fundamen-

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talist movement lost much of its prestige, although it has gained new vitality in recent years as part of the religious revival. There are still many attempts in America to have the creation myth taught as a science in the schools.

American fundamentalism is not numerically great, possibly numbering around four million. However, it is important in several respects to the broader picture of religion in America today. As a movement of born-again Christians, it blends into many of the other religious movements. It stresses biblical authority, which is very important in the much larger evangelical movement.

More significantly, fundamentalism took the threat of modern science seriously as a challenge to its view of the world. However, it failed to criticize science itself as the sole arbiter of truth. It missed the point that later critiques of science, by scientists and others, have shown, that all knowledge is to some degree constructed and can only be tested within those constructions. Perhaps, they realized that this applies to religious knowledge as well. This postmodern interpretation opens the way to appreciate various kinds of knowledge, including mythic and poetic understanding as well as scientific knowledge. At the same time, it denies any claims to absolute truth. This is not the much feared relativism that is challenged by absolutists. It is simply recognizing what great religions have always taught-the finitude of human beings.

The full import of this challenge to science has yet to penetrate the heart of the major faiths. The market system and the economic theories that rationalize it assume that science, including their science, is the sole criterion of truth. On this basis, they convince the public that any damage to urban communities, human beings, or the poor is justifiable if it furthers economic growth and progress. A serious religious revival will ultimately have to deal with this scientific fiction.

The evangelical movement, by contrast, has gained in numbers and strength in recent decades and is present both in fundamentalism and in many of the mainline denominations. Its major thrust is toward the salvation of individual sinners. This may well be the source of its broad appeal today. It would be fair to say, perhaps, that church, congregation, or community as such is peripheral to the evangelical movement, whose distinctive criterion is individual rebirth. This address to the crisis of personal self-identity may well be the source of its enormous growth and the lesson it can teach any religious movement.

The individualism of the evangelical movement is its strength and its danger. Given its authoritarian structure and the erosion of any communal base outside its own framework, the movement is vulnerable to manipulation. This is precisely what has happened through the slick media efforts of Pat Robertson in building the Christian Coalition. Under the leadership of Ralph Reed, this coalition is now attempting to control the Republican party and claims responsibility for the success of Republi­cans in the 1994 national election. The problem here is building a manipulative power structure that can control its constituency through

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modern media techniques. Uprooted individuals in a market society are vulnerable to collective movements; in fact, these are the conditions that invite fascist movements.

This vulnerability to manipulation is also a problem for the Pentecostal movement, which has had such remarkable growth since its rebirth in the warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906-07.¹³ In the course of this century, it has spread throughout the world. Pentecostalism is actually a counter-modernity. It centers in the experience of being filled

"American society needs a new paradigm of community life. America needs to learn to use the strengths of the market without being destroyed by it.”

with the Spirit, an ecstatic sense of union with the divine. Over against the calculating rationality of the market and the impersonal character of life in America, this movement nurtures the life of feeling. It invites the silenced, everyday people to speak with tongues and to find hope in a hopeless world situation. Unlike most religious movements, it makes room for women to speak and bear witness in the congregation. It has also opened the door to interracial worship from time to time.

As Harvey Cox notes, Pentecostalism, for all its vitality, can become vulnerable to the right-wing manipulation that is now gaining strength in the evangelical movement. However, the promise of this movement is a matter to take seriously in contemplating any religious future for our time. Feeling, dance, drama, the whole range of expressive life that is so discredited in the market, all of this belongs to any human future.

The megachurches that are emerging on the periphery of large urban areas seem to be integrating many of these trends within substantial congregations. Some of these churches now number in the tens of thousands. They draw churched and unchurched people from the middle classes for the most part. They are total religious organizations of worship, teaching, support groups, publishing-possibly a new form of the denomination. Many are community churches; some are spin-offs from mainline denominations. Their strength is the open appeal to an uprooted middle class. Their ultimate weakness is that they can become simply another mail, another form of the consumer market. Rather than challenge the market's depersonalization of American life, they may simply be reinforcing it.

Urban churches have struggled for many years with broken communi­ties and loss of self-esteem by oppressed peoples. They have lived with the death of the American Dream. The crisis of self-identity has sur-

"For a fine account of the growth of this movement in America and worldwide, see Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

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rounded them for decades. The African American churches have carried this burden from the days of slavery and continue to bear it.

Urban pastors have learned over the years to work with church-based community organizations to build leadership and gain some political influence for their constituencies. However, they now face declining resources and deepening despair on the part of the urban poor. These churches and their communities are the true models of the spiritual life of the future, for they have already entered into the darkness that is now casting its shadow over the land. They are bearers of the spiritual future. They may learn from the evangelical success in attending to the crisis of personal self-identity. If they have not already done so, they may learn from the Pentecostal release of feeling in worship and celebration. However, they have a much larger task on behalf of the society at large-a task that, perhaps, they alone can fulfill,

American society needs a new paradigm of community life. America needs to learn to use the strengths of the market without being destroyed by it. The churches are the logical institution to foster this new way of life. Community is the very essence of their life and worship. Urban ministry will have to challenge the idolatry of the market. This means building communities that have an economic base, mutual support, and an ecological program.¹⁴ Such communities are in process of formation in parts of Chicago and other cities. They embody a holistic spirituality that lends support to families and individuals, to the poor and homeless, to all who are willing to band together against the forces that threaten life today. This is a serious response to the crisis of meaning and self-identity that has given birth to the religious revival. The promise of urban ministry is to offer our society a paradigm of its possible future as a people.

This may seem a quixotic hope in light of the decline of urban vitality and optimism we have experienced since World War 11. The resurgence of spiritual life in the movements we have mentioned, however, reminds us that people in America and throughout the world are seeking a way into the future. This search for the soul of our people needs models of personal and communal solidarity. The American Dream, our pseudo-faith, will not die easily. There may well be difficult times to come. Perhaps, with the death of the dream we will experience a rebirth of the American soul. This is what is meant by the soul of a people. It is the heart, the quality of its very being as a people, responsible for its future and for the well-being of all of its members. There is no way of knowing, at this point, what form or forms this holistic spirituality will take. We only know its promise.

¹⁴Alvin Pitcher, Listen to the Crying of the Earth: Cultivating Creation Communities(Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1993).