Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (review)

Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought. By Eugene McCarraher. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 240. $26.95.)

In Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought, Eugene McCarraher has produced a widely researched, detailed, and scholarly survey of liberal Catholic and Protestant criticism of American culture and political economy in the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century. Intellectual historians will find his interpretations thought-provoking, challenging, and controversial, and all will find the book informative.

At the turn of the century, the evils afflicting American society, chiefly as a result of the unrestrained industrial growth of preceding decades, were so serious and so widespread that remedies could no longer be delayed, and leaders of the Social Gospel Movement saw the opportunity to return America to basic religious principles. The Protestant Walter Rauschenbusch would reorder society along the lines of Christian socialism, while John Ryan, following Pope Leo XIII's rejection of socialism in Rerum Novarum, would guarantee workers a living wage through unionization. In the 1920's, Reinhold Niebuhr agreed with the need to permeate society with Christian principles but had little use for the optimism of other Social Gospelers, and Catholic social thinkers feared that the new freedom and new feminism of the decade could lead to serious abuses in contraception, eugenics, and disruption of family life. Jacques Maritain and others saw much to praise in the medieval legacy of guilds, Thomism, and the centrality of religion. In the Depression of the 1930's, the Catholic labor leader and New Deal supporter Philip Murray, influenced by Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno, championed a tri-partite management, labor, public control of industry, but more radical Catholics Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and Paul Hanley Furfey stressed personal growth in God's image through participation in the Liturgy, common manual and mental labor, and life in community. As World War II and the years that followed brought fear of both Fascism and Communism, disciples of the early Social Gospelers saw no viable alternative to New Deal-Fair Deal economics and a foreign policy of Containment but, against such "realists," personalists such as A. J. Muste, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and David Dellinger remained fearful of the baneful influence of corporate and imperial power. Postwar leftist criticism, according to McCarraher, may have reached its greatest influence in the work of Paul Tillich, advocating a socialism permeated by love and community and urging acceptance by God, even in one's sinfulness, as humanity's fundamental stance. Tillich's personalism and willingness to stand against convention and the established order deeply influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., although King chose to remain part of an institutional church. In the 1960's and 1970's, McCarraher notes the influence of Harvey Cox's The Secular City, the anti-government protests of the Berrigan brothers, Michael Novak's portrayal of the religious contributions of un-WASPed minority groups, the emergence of Black theology stressing liberation from Egypt and slavery in the past and from poverty and discrimination more recently, and the feminist theology of Rosemary Ruether and Mary Daly.

This book is too wide-ranging and too detailed to expect readers to agree with all its contents. The ruling professional, managerial, mandarin class is a frequent object of leftist criticism, but its precise composition in industry, government, education, and even church is not always clear. Lumping these critics together as leftists is certainly valid but, of course, they were not all leftist in the same way. McCarraher notes that Niebuhr and Tillich were in frequent disagreement, and one can only imagine what John Ryan might have thought of Philip Berrigan's methods or Mary Daly's theology. But, notwithstanding such reservations, and a very few minor errors of fact, this work deserves a wide reading. The research is extraordinary, the judgments and interpretations...