Under God

The learned have their superstitions, prominent among them a belief that superstition is evaporating. Since science has explained the world in secular terms, there is no more need for religion, which will wither away. Granted, it has been slow to die in America. Even Marx noticed that, in the 1850s. But he explained it by the raw state of this country: "The feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world." The funeral, he was sure, had been delayed, not canceled. Yet when Communist regimes were given their own sudden funeral in 1989, an American preacher (Andrew Young) remarked, "When they come out from behind the iron curtain, they are singing We Shall Overcome, a Georgia Baptist hymn." And he did not mean the Soviet Georgia.

In a time of reviving fundamentalisms around the world, some Americans have rediscovered our native fundamentalists (a recurring, rather than cumulative, experience for the learned). It seems careless for scholars to keep misplacing such a large body of people. Nonetheless, every time religiosity catches the attention of intellectuals, it is as if a shooting star appears in the sky. One could hardly guess that nothing has been more stable in our history, nothing less budgeable, than religious belief and practice. Religion does not shift or waver; the attention of its observers does. Public notice, like a restless spotlight, returns at intervals to believers' goings on, finds them still going on and, with expressions of astonishment or dread, declares that religion is undergoing a boom or revival. But as Seymour Martin Lipset observed, available statistics tell the story of "a continuous 'boom' in American religious adherence and belief." Revivalism does not need to be revived. Revival is, like respiration, a condition of life. Apparent fluctuations in the 19th Century had more to do with inchoate reporting methods than with oscillations in things reported on.

Technology, urbanization, social mobility, universal education, high living standards—all were supposed to eat away at religion, in a wash of overlapping acids. But each has crested over America, proving itself a solvent or a catalyst in other areas but showing little power to diminish religion. The figures are staggering. Survey after survey confirms them, including the following results of a Gallup Poll:

• Nine Americans in ten say they have never doubted the existence of God.

• Eight Americans in ten say they believe they will be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for their sins.

• Eight Americans in ten believe God still works miracles.

• Seven Americans in ten believe in life after death.

When Cardinal John O'Connor of New York mentioned exorcisms in his diocese, he was widely ridiculed in the press. Yet 37 percent of Americans believe in the Devil. Fifty percent believe in angels—as opposed to the 15 percent who believe in astrology. Cardinal O'Connor is joined in his views by well over twice the numbers that join Nancy Reagan in consulting astral charts.

Practice conforms to profession. About 40 percent of the American population attends church in a typical week (as opposed to 14 percent in Great Britain and 12 percent in France). More people go to church, in any week, than to all professional sports events combined. More than 90 percent of Americans say they pray. Internationally, "Americans rank at the top in rating the importance of God in their lives. On a scale of one to ten, with ten the highest, Americans averaged a rating of 8.21, behind only tiny Malta (9.58)."

One would expect that something so important to Americans would affect their behavior as voters. And, as a matter of fact, no non-Christian has ever been elected President of the United States. No non-Protestant was elected until 1960, when some took the acceptance of John F Kennedy to mean that religion would thenceforth matter less to voters. But if that is true, why did a majority of Americans say in 1987 that they would not vote for an atheist as President? Some may have exaggerated their own tolerance when a majority said they would vote for a Jew; but educated people probably under reported their resistance to an atheist. What emerges from this and similar questions is that the electorate wants a President who observes his (or, eventually, her) religion. President Dwight Eisenhower was, as usual, close to his constituents' instinct when he said that people should practice their faith, "and I don't care what it is."

Candidates have intuited enough of these truths to put in church time during their campaigns; even the secular Michael Dukakis resumed his exiguous ties to the Greek Orthodox church. Yet his coolness in this area was in striking contrast to the easy religiosity of Ronald Reagan—a contrast that no doubt had something to do with their differing successes at election time. People seem to trust the person who shares their moral values. In fact, Paul Kleppner, in a sophisticated study of polling data, found religious styles more indicative of voting patterns in the populist era than were the normal data studied (economic, class, regional, etc.). George Gallup, Jr., and Jim Castelli claim that the same thing would prove true today if analysts framed the right hypotheses: "Religious affiliation remains one of the most accurate, and least appreciated, political indicators available."

But most political commentators show acute discomfort when faced with the expression of religious values in the political arena. That was demonstrated when Gary Hart's adultery became an issue during the 1988 campaign. It is obvious that religion influences one's view of adultery—77 percent of Protestants think "extramarital sex is always wrong," as opposed to 71 percent of Catholics and 46 percent of Jews. But when there was a reaction against Hart, analysts had to legitimate this hostility on anything but the obvious grounds. As a New Republic editorialist put it, "The revelation of salacious details [was] justified on the basis of news value or competitive pressures [among networks and publications] or insight into 'character'—in short, on any remotely plausible basis except disapproval of adultery itself (which violates an elite social taboo against moralism)." Voters are now allowed to like or dislike a candidate for the way he looks or for his television skills but not for his recognition of the dominant moral attitudes of his society.

President Reagan was constantly praised as a great communicator without giving enough emphasis to what he was communicating. He communicated religious attitudes (despite his absences from church on Sunday); he communicated appreciation of the conventional family (despite his own family's messy interrelationships). He would pray at the drop of a hat—as when he prayed for a soap-opera character's deliverance from the indignities imposed on her by the show's writers.

The right wing regularly deplores liberal bias in the media, trying to count how many Democrats there are in the working press as opposed to the percentage in the electorate at large. They could make a more interesting case on the ratio of churchgoers in the national press compared with those in the general public or on the uneasy way journalists talk about religion as opposed to the frequency of reference among ordinary people. Some of the glibbest persons in the nation are oddly tongue-tied when the Bible is brought up. And editors seem to prefer inarticulacy on the subject. Major papers and networks encourage reporters to acquire expertise in the law or economics, but I have not heard of an editor asking reporters to brush up on their theology. Religious writers at most papers are kept in their Saturday-edition ghettos. I do not remember seeing a single religious writer on any campaign plane of the six Presidential campaigns I have covered—not even on Pat Robertson's in 1988, and certainly not on Jesse Jackson's in 1984 or 1988. (James M. Wall, the editor of The Christian Century, was on Jimmy Carter's campaign plane in 1976, but as an aide to the candidate, not as a journalist.)

Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is out of bounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with the remark that I was the only "religious nut"—his term for a believer—in his stable of regular reviewers. At an Operation Rescue rally, a journalist joined a group of other reporters with the breathless announcement that anti-abortionist Randall Terry was telling bloodthirsty stories about murder and dismemberment to avenge a rape. She did not know, though Terry had named the passage (Judges 19), that he was telling a Bible story—the tale of the Levite's concubine.

One reason editors tend to shy at political coverage of religion is their fear that this will somehow breach the wall of separation between church and state. Since the Constitution mandates this division, journalists and others seem to think voters should maintain their own hermetic seal between religion and politics—and if they do not, it is better not to know about something so shameful. Because schools are not allowed to sponsor prayers, it is somehow an enlightened act to turn the other way when candidates pray aloud (as they always do).

If religion intrudes too obviously, as in the case of Robertson's campaign, it is treated as an anomaly. It is given (continued on page 198)Under God(continued from page 80) special coverage by an outsider. "Call Martin Marty" is the editor's easiest recourse for the special case. (Where narrowly Catholic or Jewish views are at issue, the call to Marty may be alternated with calls to Richard McBrien or Arthur Hertzberg.)

The severest test to this self-restraint in the coverage of religion at campaign time was Jimmy Carter's candidacy. He was the nominee of a major party—and, in 1976, the winning contender. Yet he disconcerted many liberals by using "backward" language. It seemed vaguely Dogpatchish for him to say he was "born again"—though all baptized Christians are, in some sense, born again, according to Scripture passages such as John 3:3–7:

Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.... Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.... Marvel not that I said unto thee. Ye must be born again.

It is true that evangelicals stress the concept of rebirth, using it to describe the psychological experience of being saved—and that, too, was considered an oddity in Carter, though evangelicals make up the largest number of Christians in America, and 40 percent of the population called itself born again in response to a 1989 survey.

How did such a sizable part of the population escape for so long the notice of journalists and political analysts? Partly, this was the result of elitism. Evangelical believers are, as a whole, less educated and affluent than members of the significantly named "mainline" churches. Many people accepted mainline as a term indicating the predominant, if not quite the mainstream, churches. But the word was appropriately borrowed from Philadelphia's term for the artery extending into the city's established suburbs. The mainstream of American religion has always been evangelical. George Marsden, the best student of the subject, says that evangelical Protestantism was "the dominant force in American life" during the 19th Century, when it made up the "unofficial religious establishment" of our politics.

Nathan O. Hatch has traced the role experiential religion played in the democratization of America. The revival has been the distinctively American religious experience. To the extent that other religions take on an American character, they tend toward revivalism. That explains why a Quaker family such as the Nixons could attend one of the evangelist Paul Rader's revivals, where the young Richard was saved, making him later in life more clearly the disciple of Billy Graham than of George Fox. The Catholic scholar Jay P. Dolan has noticed the way his Church acquired revivalistic touches in the preaching of parish "missions," leading up by way of hell-fire sermons (often delivered by the Passionist Fathers, a revivalistic religious order) to long lines at the confessionals, replicating the files of sinners making their "decisions for Christ" at the end of a Billy Graham rally.

The evangelical Graham has been, over the years, the most admired man in America. He is always high on the list of people given that title in surveys, and he stays there as other leaders come and go. He has been in the top ten uninterruptedly for 35 years. During the Eighties, he averaged third on the list, flanked by Pope John Paul II and Jesse Jackson. In fact, religious leaders made up a majority of the top ten, since the two American Presidents named (Reagan and Carter) were known for their religiosity, as was the Catholic leader in Poland, Lech Walesa.

Although Graham represents the broad stream of religious experience in America—something politicians have recognized and tried to use over the years—commentators continue to neglect or dismiss the elements of that experience: revivalism. Biblical literalism, millennial hope (for the Second Coming of Christ). Yet these have profoundly influenced our politics, right down to the shape given to political rallies and national conventions. When, as always happens, new millennial sects proclaim that the end of time is near, these are not seen as the latest manifestations of a central theme in our history—the apocalyptic spirit that drove American settlers to grapple with the Devil's instrument in the wilderness. The religious rhetoric of the millennium was more useful to orators of the American Revolution than were maxims of the Enlightenment. The millennium proved just as serviceable in the Civil War, whether to fill with apocalyptic smoke Julia Ward Howe's The Baltic hymn of the Republic or to steer war toward a "peaceable kingdom" in Abraham Lincoln's writings. So, when the followers of Elizabeth Clare Prophet gathered in 1990 to go underground at the world's rending, they were as American as apple pie—or violence.

Yet there is a reluctance to explore the America that can produce a Mrs. Prophet as frequently as a Dr. King. I remember when, in the Sixties, journalists were trying to report on black militants. In attempts to understand the movement from the inside, works supposed to be revelatory were studied with intensity—Frantz Fanon's Black Shin, While Masks or The Autobiography of Malcolm X. With Fanon, people were willing to follow recondite musings on negritude, and with Malcolm, to juggle complex African and Islamic loyalties. But it seems too much to ask journalists to read the Bible (of all things) in order to understand a Pat Robertson or a Jesse Jackson—or even a Dr. King. I know from experience that it is considered a little kookie for a journalist to know what premillennial dispensationalism is—though that is the most important concept in modern fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are not so numerous as evangelicals, but they are a sizable part of the larger evangelical family and have many ties to other members of that family. And no group making up a fifth of the population can safely be ignored by anyone trying to understand America.

People who knew nothing of the intricacies of evangelical eschatology were reporting, in the Sixties, on the "death of God" fad that titillated elite divinity schools. That notion actually led some to think there was a falling off from religion in the Sixties, though religious profession and observance generally held steady. There has been a decline in main-line religions over the past three decades or so—but that affected the less populous denominations (e.g., Episcopalians, who make up only two percent of the nation, or Presbyterians, three percent). The big evangelical churches (such as the Baptists, 20 percent of the nation) are growing.

An evaporation of belief toward the top of the socioeconomic scale occurs regularly in America. Doctrine thins out there—as among Unitarians early in the 19th Century or theological liberals early in the 20th. This is seen as a betrayal of belief by those lower in the scale, who often compensate with a renewal of their own fervor—as the fundamentalists did in responding to theological liberals. Part of the evangelical "resurgence" of the Seventies was a matter of new voices being heard as the elite denominations fell silent on religion, learning to speak in more secular terms. The religious vote has been, increasingly, an evangelical vote, which helps explain the fact that recent Presidents—Ford. Carter. Reagan, Bush—have proclaimed themselves born again.

The need to know something about American religion—if only to understand one's enemies—will be especially pressing as the 20th Century comes to an end. The turning of such a hinge in the world's history always prompts apocalyptic dreams of fiery conclusions or rose-tinted beginnings. The end of the millennium reminds millennialists of what their own name means.

Cults of all sorts will make this a time of ecumenical forebodings: the deepest musings will be Christian, since the end of time is a concept so deep and omnipresent in Christian theology. Just as orthodox Christians consider themselves born again, so all believers profess to be living, in some measure, through the "end time." At a minimum, the Christian Scriptures say that Jesus brought the final dispensation to history. There will come no later prophet or lawgiver to establish a different relationship between God and man. The final covenant was sealed in Christ's blood. Religious history has, in that sense, nowhere to go beyond the New Testament. As far as Christians are concerned, Cardinal Newman described the orthodox view:

But when once the Christ had come, as the son over his own house, and with his perfect Gospel, nothing remained but to gather in his saints. No higher priest could come, no truer doctrine. The light and life of men had appeared, and had suffered, and risen again; and nothing more was left to do. Earth had had its most solemn event, and seen its most august sight; and therefore it was the last time. And hence, though time intervene between Christ's first and Second Coming, it is not recognized (as one may say) in the Gospel scheme, but is, as it were, an accident. For so it was, that up to Christ's coming in the flesh, the course of things ran straight toward that end, nearing it by every step; but now, under the Gospel, that course has (if I may so speak) altered its direction, as regards his Second Coming, and runs, not toward the end, but along it, and on the brink of it; and is at all times equally near that great event, which, did it run toward, it would at once run into. Christ, then, is ever at our doors; as near 1800 years ago as now, and not nearer now than then; and not nearer when he comes than now. When he says that he will come soon, "soon" is not a word of time, but of natural order. This present state of things, "the present distress" as Saint Paul calls it, is ever close upon the next world, and resolves itself into it. As when a man is given over, he may die any moment, yet lingers, as an implement of war may any moment explode, and must at some time; as we listen for a clock to strike, and at length it surprises us; as a crumbling arch hangs, we know not how, and is not safe to pass under, so creeps on this feeble weary world, and one day, before we know where we are, it will end.

All Christian theology has been permeated by this theological version of "the end of history." The Lord's Prayer is an eschatological prayer. Early Christians thought not only that they were living in the last age but that this age would end soon. Much of the fear and exaltation of the earliest Christian letters centered on this expectation. Believers wrote about it in a kind of frantic code; from that language, some of the most bizarre aspects of American religion have taken their rise. It is a forbidding subject in a secular age; yet no one can understand evangelicals' emotional temperature without addressing it. When the Quayle family's interest in a fundamentalist preacher (Colonel Robert Thieme) came into the news during the 1988 campaign, odds and ends of his preaching were printed, with no real attempt to see how they were structured or how closely they were related to the whole fundamentalist endeavor.

The hope of new life in a new century will almost certainly stimulate mystical aspirations of the sort now fostered by New Age movements. Some evangelicals see in this "false religion" itself a sign of the apocalypse. History will culminate in the forging of a "world rule" under a diabolic "angel of light." In any chain book-store, one can find dozens of titles in the New Age section—and, sure enough, there are three dozen or so titles to be found now in evangelical bookstores exposing the dangers of New Age religion. Even the threat of peace breaking out after the Cold War tends to frighten millennialists, who denounce one-worldism, whether it is represented by the "godless" UN or the "apostate" World Council of Churches. A European community containing ex-Soviet elements is the kind of "false peace" against which the religious right is always well armed. Indeed, New Age eschatology unites a number of the fundamentalists' old villains—evolution, through the alleged influence of Teilhard de Chardin in New Age thought; the "mind control" of psychiatry and "Deweyite" education; and papal Rome, through the ecumenical work of Catholics with Easterners.

But the century's end may be more marked by domestic than by international conflict. The makings of a cultural war are present in religious attacks on pornography, homosexuality, abortion and the eroticism of rock music and television. We hear again the myth that the Roman Empire was sluiced to its ruin in a slither of lubricity—as opposed to the economic conditions modern scholarship finds underlying the Roman decline.

The dying of an era promotes an obsession with decadence—with ideas of decline, decay and the feeble stylishness called dandyism. When these are not denounced, they are celebrated, as in Camille Paglia's giant new celebration of the decadent, Sexual Personae. The millennial malaise of the 1890s/1980s, the fin-de-siècle failure of nerve, will intensify speculation about our own ends—end of history, end of empire, end of the Cold War—playing against the recurrent Christian expectation of the world's end. The Bible will not be at the center of all these developments, but it will be of more importance than Frantz Fanon's work was to the modern role of blacks. We neglect it at our own peril.