The American Spiritual Culture: And the Invention of Jazz, Football, and the Movies (review)

William Dean has written a deeply challenging and thought-provoking book that ought to have considerable impact on the academic study of spirituality (and indeed on much of the field of religious studies) in this country. In clear, readable prose, Dean posits and energetically defends his thesis that there is a distinctive spiritual culture in the United States, rooted in the common experience of being displaced persons faced with the necessity of inventing a culture appropriate to our new American context. Dean contends here (as in his earlier work) that we need public religious critics who engage, critique, nurture, and reform this spiritual culture, since it provides us with a sense of common purpose and an ideal by which to judge our actions. After all, he insists, if that spiritual culture dies or becomes distorted, so will the country that lives by it. Since academic scholars of religion are seldom adequately equipped to identify the implicit spiritual culture of the United States, let alone to address it, Dean intends in this book to contribute to the development of a public religious criticism by identifying some basic characteristics of our spiritual culture, especially as evident in jazz, football, and the movies.

Even those who do not intend to join the project of religious criticism as envisioned by Dean will surely appreciate his argument that theologians and scholars of religion in this country seldom speak to the spiritual hunger of our time, because we too often are unattuned to our distinctively American spiritual culture. For the most part, he argues, we have developed a variant of European theology rather than a truly American theology, and have failed to realize that religious approaches taken from abroad must be adapted to our specific cultural context. Though written well before the recent national election, Dean has much to say to the many academics and intellectuals who currently sense that they are cut off from much of contemporary American sensibilities, and are unable to grasp why the perspectives most persuasive within universities do not resonate with the majority of the population.

Dean builds his cultural analysis on the claim that there is a common American story, and that this is, in its various particular versions, a story of displacement, of being removed (or removing oneself) from a place with a settled culture to a new environment in which that older culture cannot be sustained. (Even indigenous Americans, he notes, were displaced from their native lands, though they were moved to a new location within the same continent.) This experience of displacement grounds our most basic and common cultural traits of innovation and pragmatism, as Americans have been forced to develop cultural patterns able to sustain them in this new context.

The improvisational quality of our culture, Dean continues, is especially evident in the quintessentially American art forms of jazz music, football, and the movies. Jazz is an obviously improvisational form of music, while the violence of football and the fantasy of movies also speak to our need for a culture that enables us to come to terms with the violent act of carving our civilization out of the wilderness and with the self-invention inherent in this American experience. Any religious critic who wants to be effective in the U.S. must recognize the cultural importance of improvisation, along with the creativity, violence, and fantasy that are deeply ingrained in the American experience.

There is, however, a further and more specifically theological argument developed in this book. Dean contends that this experience of displacement has caused us to become an inherently pragmatic people who find value within rather than beyond our history. God, he claims, is thus best understood not as a being beyond history but as a social convention that evolves within history, even if God, as a real and living convention, transcends and judges the society that created that convention. This pragmatic historicism can (and probably for Dean...