Before the Culture War

Combatants in civil wars are usually relatives, fighting over something both sides wish to share. George Marsden without addressing it directly attempts to trace back the roots of the present culture war to the time when cousins were allies fighting common foes.

When Americans chart the times of the second half of the twentieth century the calendar is less than helpful. The 50s lasted 20 years, from 1945 to 1965, or World War II to Vietnam, and the 60s from 1965 to 1975. Of the two the “60s” get all of the attention. Protests, hippies, drugs, war, fighting the man, finding yourself. Marsden wants to pause the lefty Boomer nostalgia trip or the religious right grudge match to ponder how the 60s got started, for a historian in the 50s of course.

According to Marsden the seeming utopia of the 50s was not as settled as Happy Days remembers it. It was an age of imagined continuity with America’s Enlightenment founders.

My argument is that the mainstream thinkers of the 1950s can be better understood if we see them as standing in far more continuity with the cultural assumptions of the founders than would be true of most mainstream thinkers today. At the same time, the discontinuities between their assumptions and those of the founders were formidable. Consequently, their hopes for providing a common ground for a cultural consensus could not be long sustained.

They took for granted as self-evident many of the founders’ assumptions regarding human freedom, self-determination, and equality of rights. In fact, their hopes for strengthening the American “consensus” were built around the faith that America could be united on the basis of these evolving shared ideals. They also shared with eighteenth-century leaders a confidence that rational and scientific understandings were essentially objective and therefore should be normative. Most of them believed that applying natural scientific methods and empirically based rationality to understanding society was one of the best ways to promote human flourishing.

Marsden, George (2014-02-11). The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief . Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The public intellectuals, mostly WASP or Jewish, were anxious about the consensus that seemed so solid. These anxieties would germinate and seed the social upheaval of the 60s.

When the consensus culture collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s, taking with it all but the vestiges of the old Protestant establishment, that collapse initiated, among other things, a religious crisis. 9 Formal recognition of Christianity, as in public school prayers and observances, declined at the same time. There were tumultuous changes in mores and a questioning of the shared patriotism that had characterized the 1940s and 1950s. This combination led at first to a cultural backlash, and then, by the later 1970s, to the rise of the religious right and the initiation of the culture wars. Although I do not attempt a full account of these developments here, I do offer an overview to illustrate how they may be illuminated by viewing them in the context of the demise of the consensus culture of the 1950s and the rise of the idea of taking back America by restoring a lost “Christian consensus.”

Marsden, George (2014-02-11). The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief . Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Marsden’s Narrative

While the above was interesting enough to get me to buy the book, where Marsden goes with it is more interesting still. I’ll try to briefly outline his narrative.

• Most post WWII cultural leaders saw themselves in continuity with the Enlightenment fathers who founded the nation.
• There was among the mostly WASP and Jewish leaders a consensus about “the good”, and it was assumed that this consensus could be built on and incrementally broadened to be more inclusive as in the 50s American began to awaken to its native “outsiders”.
• This consensus, however, was naively assumed, supported by a secularization narrative that asserted that pre-enlightenment sectarian religion would continue to fade away. They also naively assumed that an incremental approach towards racial reconciliation and gender liberation would progress slowly and “naturally”. In other words, they were not prepared for the 60s.
• Just as this consensus was blindsided by the civil rights struggles so was it by the resurgence of vigorous religious faith and pluralism as it roared into the public square in the form of the Religious Right.
• The Religious Right too, however, had implicitly embraced parts of the older consensus in its nostalgic and naive look backwards into the 50s in their attempt to seize power in the 80s.
• While American did a lot of work to create space for pluralism in race, class and gender neither the old establishment of the 50s and their heirs nor the new Religious Right had any real idea what to do with the realities of religious pluralism
• Marsden will conclude the book by offering an approach to religious pluralism as he sees in Abraham Kuyper.

How Could Mark Driscoll Emerge in Seattle?

Marsden displays his gift for summary as he grapples with these broad movements that many of us lived through. I often found his description and analysis fair, clear and insightful. Like all historians he writes about the past in the middle of the same storms that all of us are seated within today. The narratives in play today have their roots in our recent history and Marsden is very clear, fair and illuminating on these. As a culture we quickly glide past the question of “what is the good” and demand “how can we get it now!” If you want to see how this works out, just look around.

That often subtle message— that it was better to trust yourself than to follow subcommunities or their traditions —was symptomatic of the way that midcentury mainstream consensus-minded culture most often dealt with diversity and pluralism. A chorus of voices, including the more progressive mainline Protestant leadership, affirmed a flexible, inclusive pluralism as one of the great virtues of mainstream American life. At midcentury, American society still had a long way to go before it was truly inclusive, but the ideal was at least in place that openness and tolerance were essential to a healthy, thriving society . To be truly “pluralistic” meant to be open-minded rather than sectarian and dogmatic.

Marsden, George (2014-02-11). The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (pp. 152-153). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Marsden exposes the fact that this is naive. What if the community has significant differences concerning what “the good” really is? This of course is the reality of religious pluralism.

Want an illustration? Find a boomer woman who was sufficiently liberated in the 70s and introduce her to a young woman who converted to Christianity into a “complementarian” church or even to Islam. The boomer woman has no category for contemplating this choice. Surely the young convert must be under the spell of some unenlightened bigoted man. How could a woman CHOOSE to embrace a religious tradition that violates the great narrative of progress?

Marsden is dead on right that the American Enlightenment assumed these were problems it would never have to face or simply wait out. No rational woman would choose to freely embrace a community that demanded she submit to a man. “Didn’t we resolve this?” they exclaim!

But The Right is Just as Naive

Marsden is just as fair with the right as he is with the left.

When the religious right emerged as an organized political movement in the late 1970s, it, too, as has been recounted, lacked attention to the question of how to ensure equity for widely diverse voices in the public domain. Even though militantly conservative Christians had not been part of the liberal Protestant establishment of the 1950s, their instinct was to propose a return to something that would look a lot like it, but with conservatives such as themselves in charge of defining the cultural consensus . The religious right could encompass some internal religious diversity, since it included culturally conservative Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and others. Yet what it glaringly lacked, especially in the popular Protestant zeal to return America to its alleged Christian roots, were accounts of how such a proposed restoration would deal with greater diversity, either religious or secular. Militantly conservative Protestants, just getting over their belligerent anti-Catholicism, did not have a heritage of thinking about such issues beyond the Baptist principle of separation of church and state. They now spoke of “secular humanists” as though they were the enemy to be excluded in a Christianized America. Conservative Roman Catholics had a religious heritage in which, until recently, it had been held that, ideally, Catholicism should be the state religion. That meant that Catholics were only just beginning to address questions of how to deal equitably with religious and cultural diversity . Some serious conservative theorists, both Catholic and Protestant, did indeed provide some valuable engagement with those issues. But in the more popular manifestations of the religious right, their nuanced voices were often drowned out by strident and simplistic calls for a return to America’s original Christian consensus.

Marsden, George (2014-02-11). The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (p. 161). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

What this means is that neither the right nor the left have any idea what to do with religious pluralism in America. The left wants to shut their eyes, hunker down and hope their secularization narrative will sweep it away. The right, now from its position of cultural weakness, takes up the new flag of liberal religious inclusivism, but mostly just for itself (Christian clubs at public universities, financial aid for Christian colleges, Hobby Lobby, etc.) and for acceptable allies (Mormons, African American churches, conservative Jews, Roman Catholics) but not so much for others (Muslims, Buddhists, New Agers). If the culture is looking for broader inclusivism who has any confidence that the heirs of the religious right will find the way forward?

But Marsden Then Goes Back to the 50s Too

Marsden’s solution is Abraham Kuyper. Many outside the CRC might find this to be a new and startling idea. “Who is this Abraham Kuyper and what new light can he offer?” Marsden will recommend the Center for Public Justice and the writings of Richard Mouw.

OK, I’m sympathetic to all of this, but I’m part of this tribe. I grew up watching my father read the Reformed Journal and tell stories about Henry Stob.

Last night as I was pondering another blog project I thumbed my way through the Best of the Reformed Journal.  Maybe I’ll share some of those thoughts later. In any case lobbing Abraham Kuyper into the fray is pretty much the move of what James Bratt calls the “Journalists” meaning the tribe of the CRC Left whose golden age is expressed in the “RJ”.

I want to be a tribal loyalist but I think we’re going to have to produce something more compelling than we have. I don’t see the CRC seriously making progress or having amazing new answers to the challenge of religious pluralism.

In some ways Marsden I think falls back with the evangelicals in looking back to the 50s, to the writings of Stob and Smedes and Daane for light, but that light has hardly grown brighter over the last 20 years. Calvin College is now reliant on the broader evangelical community for its attendance but the CRC has yet to really resolve its own internal struggles or show any signs of “leading the way” on any of these issues.

I was very much looking forward to hearing what Marsden would put forward but in the end I was disappointed. I love the work of my tribe but we’ve hardly set the world on fire. The RJ tribe seems mostly spent and disillusioned. I don’t mean to diminish the significant contributions our pantheon of guiding lights but at this point we tend to be doing more assimilating than leading.

Summary

Even though I think Marsden at the payoff of the last chapter I still believe this is an important book. It is very helpful in illuminating the landscape of our present cultural impasses. Marsden’s gifts shine as a historian. He shows why we have the struggles we’ve got even if he really didn’t deliver on “the answer” in a way I found compelling.

If you want to see an excellent historian illuminate our present context the book is terrific. Read the book.