America from the beginning encouraged a broad and generic religiosity, yet allowed for the free practice of specific religions. Indeed, the historic creeds were implanted, took root, and flowered in America. This has created a certain tension, in which the religions risk losing their identity in favor of a vague national consensus.
Commentators have long noted the religiosity of Americans as compared with other nations in the modern West. Writing in the midst of what many perceived as a religious revival in the post-World War II era, the sociologist Will Herberg delineated the trends that led to religion being particularly important to Americans (meaning citizens of the United States—Canada has its own distinctive religious history) in his widely-read book Protestant – Catholic – Jew.
The key to Herberg’s analysis is that he saw American religion as intimately tied up with the experience of America’s immigrants. There was something unique about immigrant experience in America. The immigrant to America was expected to give up a number of things about his homeland in the process of assimilating into American society: language most notably, as well as social traditions that might clash with “the American way of life.” But one thing the immigrant was not expected to give up, blessedly, was his religion. It’s a crucial fact that America did not require immigrants to abandon their old religion and adopt some new “American” creed. America not only officially allowed for religious pluralism, it practically took it for granted and encouraged it (this in spite of the social antagonism that often flared up against dissenters or non-Protestants).
In America, the State would adopt a neutral stance toward religion, not adjudicating which one was true or best nor setting up a single state church but allowing the free practice of them all. There can be no doubt that America is the offspring of Western consciousness, formed by Judeo-Christian beliefs and background. Yet, to quote Professor Samuel Goldman, “while virtually all the founders were, in some sense, Christians, they also rejected the idea that any particular beliefs or affiliations were necessary to being an American.” The founders neither prescribed nor proscribed any religious belief or affiliation, but expressed in a general sense the importance of belief in a Providential God. This has been called American civil religion—the broad, central, civic religious consciousness of the country.
While nothing in the American system formally required immigrants to shed their religion, many immigrants nevertheless felt their religion to be unwanted “baggage” from the Old World. As Herberg tells it, plenty of immigrants struggled with maintaining their religious practices in the New World under social pressure to conform with the “American way of life.” Although religious institutions, such as those in the Catholic Church, grew up to minister to the spiritual needs of immigrants, it was often a battle to keep believers within the fold. Herberg chronicles that many members of the second generation, consisting of people born in America or brought here at a very young age, developed an even more ambivalent attitude toward the ancestral religion, often abandoning it altogether.
But then something remarkable happened with the third generation, the grandchildren of the immigrants. This generation tended to resume, revive and strengthen the ancestral religious identity; not only that, they began to see their religious affiliation as a prime marker of belonging as Americans. It was thus altogether common in America for the grandson to be more religious than the grandfather.
Most remarkably, this phenomenon belied the idea that modern civilization is on an inevitable course of secularization. Just as the secular philosophes of the Enlightenment could not have foreseen the revived interest in religion prompted by the Romantic movement, so the prospect of a religious revival in the mid-20th century would have flummoxed progressive philosophers at the turn of the century. Those thinkers had expected religion to evolve into ever more “liberal” and non-doctrinal forms or disappear entirely, to be replaced by science as the reigning worldview.
Yet many social observers saw the exact opposite happening in the America of the 1940s and 50s. Religious affiliation was not gradually weakened and abandoned, but on the contrary reinforced. Churches were full; new churches were rising up across the land; sales of Bibles flourished. Religious figures like Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham found a prominent place in the media landscape. Polls of college students and Americans at large in the early 1950s indicated stronger religious convictions and religious interest than had been the case even ten years before. Not only that, but being Protestant, Catholic or Jewish had become the principal way that Americans identified themselves as being something other than simply Americans. Religion became, in Herberg’s words, “a basic form of American belonging.”
Here Herberg put his finger on an American sociological phenomenon: As the immigrant generation recedes into the past, religion rather than ethnicity becomes the primary marker for belonging because religion, after all, is the only factor from the home country that truly survived. Ethnicity tended to become submerged with the passage of time and, especially, intermarriage with members of other ethnic groups that nevertheless shared the ancestral religion. An American of mixed Italian and French-Canadian descent no longer identified with those ethnic groups, but simply with Catholicism. The same thing happened with Jews who came from various national backgrounds (Russian, German, etc.) and with German and Scandinavian Lutherans; the ethnic distinctions tended to disappear, but the religion remained and indeed was strengthened since it created a common bond. In addition, American Jews came more and more to see themselves as a religious rather than an ethnic group, and a distinct religiosity replaced an earlier secularism and even agnosticism among some of the immigrant generation.
The growth of the non-Protestant population through immigration was exponential. By the middle of the 20th century, the United States was transitioning from a “Protestant country” to a “three-religion country”—those three faiths or communities being Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. (Protestantism, of course, has many denominations, but there was enough solidarity and mobility among them that Herberg could consider Protestantism as a unit. Eastern Orthodoxy does not really figure into Herberg’s scheme, presumably because it had only a small representation in the U.S. at that time.)
In Herberg’s analysis, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism were the primary communities of America, the primary groups of belonging. Indeed, perhaps in no other country did religion have the personal and group importance it did in the U.S. In this, America was going in the opposite direction from Europe, where secularization was increasing and religious practice was in decline.
As a sociologist, Herberg looked at religion as a social phenomenon first and foremost. Indeed, his discussion includes in its heart the conflict between the demands of God and the demands of society and the world. This is certainly inherent in many immigrants’ decision to abandon their faith so as more easily to “get ahead” in American society. But in time it also became part of the story of the growth of religion itself. There began to be felt a conflict between the requirements of theological truth and the need to get along in society and life—between religion as salvific truth and religion as a social custom and social activity.
Yet even taking religion solely in a social sense, many of Herberg’s observations seem positively quaint in light of todays’ world. “Religion,” the author declares, “has become part of the ethos of American life to such a degree that overt anti-religion is all but inconceivable”; and again, “The old-time village atheist is a thing of the past.” (Suffice to say that he is a thing of the present once again.) Herberg saw the revival as a manifestation of a “return to private life, reflecting the attempt to find meaning and security in what is basic and unchanging, rather than in the fluctuating fortunes of social or political activity.” Can we say the same in the aggressively politicized climate of today? In our culturally polarized and fragmented world, can we say that religion is any longer the primary source of personal and group identity?
The reason why Herberg’s book now seems such a period piece can be traced to undercurrents in the religious revival itself—undercurrents that the author detected and elucidated in the latter portion of his book.
As mentioned, America’s broad civic religious consciousness enshrined a belief in God as the foundation of democratic order. Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed this view when he stated that “recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism.” However, alongside its undeniable good, such a civic religiosity carries a risk. Since religious affiliation and practice become the primary expression of being an American, the danger is that religion loses its theological content and becomes merely social fellowship, tribal affiliation, humanitarianism, or a conduit for “American values.” Herberg recognized this and devoted the last chapters of his book to critiquing specifically theological aspects of religion in the U.S. Up until now, the author had been considering religious affiliation and activity without considering the content of belief. But sooner or later, one has to get down to substance.
Herberg found that while Americans are religious, what they believe in is not always their religious tradition in its most orthodox and rigorous form. The author treads carefully here, recognizing that there are many exceptions to this—many orthodox Catholics, Protestants, and Jews who maintain the serious older traditions. But for broad swaths of religious believers, what was apparently being worshiped was not the God of the Bible but religion or faith itself, a sort of feel-good approach that invests value in the mere experience of “faith” or “religion.” In many cases religion was being watered down by a therapeutic attitude toward life and society. Popular books by the likes of Norman Vincent Peale preached religion as spiritual uplift, removed from the concepts of sin and repentance.
Thus, from one vantage point it would appear that the “religious revival” was a bit superficial—a religious veneer over a thoroughly secular outlook. This is religion as a way to perpetuate group or national identity, not the worship of a transcendent God. Religion thus becomes accommodation to the world and the present life, the opposite of what it should be in the light of biblical wisdom.
The secularization of society and culture was indeed coming to pass, just as predicted; but it was coming under the guise of religion itself. It was altogether possible that religion would secularize itself out of existence. Other cultural and social forces contributed to this trend as time wore on. For example, many theologians and religious leaders began ignoring the supernatural aspect of religion in favor of “this-worldly” concerns.
The author was not aware of such later developments when he wrote his book; but he does hint at a remedy for the state of affairs he was familiar with. The first component of this would be to reinforce the standards and beliefs of the historic faiths, even if they conflict with each other. The American Catholic, for example, would have every right to insist on the principle that his is the one true church; likewise, Protestants would be free to insist on their interpretations, and Jews to assert their own legitimacy in the religious scheme. This is healthy debate and back-and-forth. The tensions that would arise would, it is hoped, be creative and not destructive tensions; and tension in the interest of truth is surely better than a complacent indifferentism. Secondly, it is necessary to return to a biblical-prophetic outlook, which urges dissatisfaction with the world and the present life. Distinctness, not dilution, would preserve religious identity.
America from the beginning encouraged a broad and generic religiosity, yet allowed for the free practice of specific religions. Indeed, the historic creeds were implanted, took root, and flowered in America. This has created a certain tension, in which the religions risk losing their identity in favor of a vague national consensus. Nevertheless, they have done a remarkably good job of not entirely succumbing to that tendency, of maintaining their distinctness, helped along by the motivating force of preserving ethnic identity and belonging. American civic religious consciousness proved to be a strong base to build on and a continual point of reference. It gave the founding an undefinably religious aura that no amount of secularization can dim.
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The featured image is “Pilgrims Going To Church” (1867) by George Henry Boughton, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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