Protestant Voice in American Pluralism

2. MORE RINGS IN THE CIRCUS: Realized Pluralism, after 1955

------ c h a p t e r 2-----More Rings in the Circus Realized Pluralism, after 1955 The metaphor of American religion as a show is not meant to demean ventures involving the sacred, life and death and eternity, and ethics. Instead the metaphor is intended to suggest that under the big tent of American life, the question of who runs the show, who manages, controls, and directs it,always endures.Though American religions have always had a significant, almost incomprehensibly complex diversity , even well before the first Europeans came, after they arrived, the force of numbers and influence and the disproportionate access to instruments of power gave a broad spectrum of Protestants the advantage in reaching the larger nation’s ear and heart and mind, to say nothing of its pocketbook and law book. 51 52 chapter two After the mid–twentieth century, however, long quiescent and quiet, often suppressed, voices gained a hearing.This new situation, still under the one large sacred canopy, featured more rings than one, more subshows than one, more managers , controllers, and directors, and more managed, controlled, and directed people and forces than had been visible earlier. This change did not mean the end of all power for those who had earlier run the show. Rather, this change meant that those who had run the show had to share power and spotlight with others, often at the expense of their own role and voice. In the first chapter I marked the turn of a very complex, decades-long process with reference to one book, Will Herberg ’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew in 1955. We need to revisit that book now to get some perspective on the move byAmericans to recognize pluralism as never before. The Jewish sociologist-theologian Herberg observed many changes after World War II. These included the move of Jews from inner-city ghettos to the blended populations of the suburbs and to other situations that were costly to the identity of people and peoples, an erosion of identity that people experienced as a threat. How were they to retain, retrieve, or manufacture identity? Herberg drew on a thesis about immigration , one that contended that “what the son wants to forget, the grandson wants to remember.” Immigrants retain the old ways; their children reject many of them; their grandchildren are lost, confused, subject to anomie. Members of the third generation cannot go back to retrieve 53 More Rings in the Circus the language of the old country. Certainly, they may adopt elements from it that we might call aesthetic, decorlike—for example, patronizing restaurants of an ethnic character or revisiting the old cookbooks—but nothing serves them better than some version of the religions of their ancestors. They identify with these, whether they practice the faith or not. And so a revival of religion occurred in the Eisenhower era. The revival was not profound in Herberg’s reckoning and in the eyes of many other observers. It was not ethically rich,not inconveniencing. In fact, it was conveniencing. And though people identified themselves as Protestant or Catholic or Jew, they also found themselves becoming devoted to a homogenizing civic faith, a religion of the American Way of Life. Herberg paid little attention toAfrican Americans, Hispanics , Asians, women, Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox, or “sects and cults,” the marginalized. His citizens mostly converged on three rather conventional pools. Herberg saw his nation diversely enough, however, that America came to be regarded not as Protestant or Christian but as Judeo-Christian. Campus Christian observances, including those at state universities, became Religious Emphasis Weeks, to which tireless priests, ministers, and rabbis migrated to assess the role of American religion. The fact that a Jew, not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (or wasp, a coinage of this era) wrote the book was significant. That many readers were Catholics, newly welcomed in tax-based public colleges and universities, was another sign of a new day. 54 chapter two The next twelve or thirteen years saw impressive enlargements of Herberg’s trifaith picture. He had hardly mentioned the Holocaust or the 1948 birth of Israel. The war in Israel in 1967 led American Jews to reappraise their situation, and new articulations of Judaism emerged. The civil rights and black power movements, both with their roots and corollaries in African American churches, further changed the mix. Native American, Hispanic American, women’s liberation, and...