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149 = 10 “The Only Permanent State” Belief and the Culture of Incredulity Andrew Delbanco In Chapter 9, Alan Wolfe makes a strong case that many of the key figures of American intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s—C. Wright Mills, Richard Hofstadter, David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Arthur Schlesinger, among others—either missed or misused religion in their otherwise powerful analyses of American society. By the early ’60s, Bell and Hofstadter realized that they were witnessing the emergence of a new kind of radical conservatism that was making inroads into American political life, but they underestimated the significance for this movement of its evangelical religious element and regarded the whole phenomenon as a “rear-guard action” doomed to fail before the irresistible force of modernity. Even Will Herberg, author of Protestant , Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955), failed to see that local denominational allegiances were receding before the sweeping fundamentalist Protestantism that has since evolved into the single most potent force in American spiritual and political life. I think Alan Wolfe is generally right. He is right, that is, about the seriousness of the oversight. What I would like to offer by way of response are a few supplementary comments along with a brief reflection on the question of whether American intellectual life is much different in this respect today. One of Wolfe’s striking points is that even writers with a profound sociological imagination, such as David Riesman, were unable to apply their own insights into the American hunger for peer-group approval to the millions of people who found this hunger satisfied, or at least appeased, in communities of faith. In Riesman’s own tenth anniversary preface to The Lonely Crowd (first published in 1950), he took stock of its initial reception and used the occasion to dissent from Freud’s doctrine that childhood experience determines human 150 Andrew Delbanco development, proposing instead that the peer group and the school exert a shaping influence during adolescence. But Riesman still did not ascribe comparable power to the churches—a surprising omission since in many religious traditions adolescence and young adulthood are regarded as the likeliest seedtime of faith and the best time for voluntary commitment to a confessional community. Riesman does hint in his 1960 preface that he mistrusts his own understanding of the significance of religion, at least for those Americans whom death has placed beyond the reach of the pollsters: When we were working on The Lonely Crowd [this is not the royal “we,” but a reference to Riesman’s collaborators, Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer], we were frustrated by the paucity of historical materials in many areas we deemed relevant; for instance, we could not find reliable evidence as to what religion meant for the different social strata when Tocqueville was here in the 1830’s. We could get data on church membership and activities, on various revival movements, and on theological disputes, but little that gave us the firm sense of the emotional weight of religion for men as well as women, adults and children, the more and the less respectable classes, the newer and the older denominations.1 Since Riesman wrote those words, there has been impressive progress toward recovering what the historian David Hall has called “lived religion” by scholars who have searched the archives for memoirs, letters, conversion relations, and the like, but the inner life of believers, past and present, remains an exceptionally elusive matter. In the 1950s, those who did look for it, did not, as Wolfe says, always look for it on its own terms. They tended to think about religion in relation to social movements that seemed to feed on religion or turn it to political use. His most striking example is Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962), which assessed evangelicalism as an enemy of mind and a friend of groupthink. For Hofstadter, who had begun writing in the heyday of McCarthyism and finished in its aftermath, the revival meeting was, in effect, a training ground for demagogues. And Hofstadter’s contemporary, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had written an important history of the Jacksonian period (The Age of Jackson, 1945) with little reference to the churches or the religious sources of social reform, only got religion when he discovered Reinhold Niebuhr as a useful ally in the urgent work of warning liberal intellectuals to break off their romance with the Soviet Union...

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