Religion on the American Mind

Is US literary studies in danger of being "left behind"—like the earthlings stranded after the Rapture in the best-selling series of novels by evangelical writers Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins? One of the marked disparities between its vicissitudes in the late twentieth century and the drift of mainstream US culture is that religiocentric frames of explanation started to go out of fashion at about the same time evangelical Christianity began to seize control of public culture to a degree unprecedented since colonial times.

Never before has there been an epoch in national history quite like the past three decades, during which every successful presidential candidate has felt it necessary at least to pretend that he was a born-again Christian. Yet during the same period, literary studies by and large has moved decisively away from religiocentric explanations of the dynamics of cultural history. The Carter era coincided with the ascendancy of poststructuralism. In American literary studies, the core dynamic of the Puritan legacy was reinterpreted by Sacvan Bercovitch as centering not mainly on the system of covenant theology and its aftermaths as Perry Miller had maintained but as an ideologized ritual of tribal/national consensus, soon after which the whole assumption of the historic centrality of Puritanism specifically, and WASP culture more generally, was scrapped by the now-not-so-New Americanists.¹ By the next generation it had become standard critical practice to assess religious issues and allegiances as subsidiary to secular concerns, motives, and modes of social belonging. In the 1950s, the question of Melville's religious orientation—how deeply marked he was by Calvinism, whether or not he was God-defiant to the last, etc.—was a burning question.² By century's end, Moby-Dick's whiteness had come to seem more compelling for its racial than for its religious symbolism, its politics much more so than its metaphysics, and the author's attitudes toward cannibalism and body-piercing more consequential than his religious convictions.³

To be sure, this hasty encapsulation of then vs now overstates the degree of shift within literary studies and its status as disciplinary outlier. Regarding the former point, Miller for instance shared with Bercovitch a keen sense of irony toward the hypocrisies, small and large, of Puritan oligarchs' politicization of theological discourse. In the long run, piety and doctrine often seemed for Miller less powerful human motives and historical forces than worldly self-interest. One can draw a zigzag line if not an absolutely straight line from Miller's penchant for urbane irony toward what he took to be retrograde intellectual paradigms to new historicism and beyond, as Hawthorne scholarship especially shows.⁴ Furthermore, religious studies were meanwhile almost as strongly influenced during the late twentieth century as literary studies were by what has been called the secularization hypothesis: the view that the dynamics of religious movements are to be explained on nonreligious grounds, behind which lies the post-Enlightenment conviction, or rather myth, fortified by Marx and Weber and many other social theorists after them, that "religion will tend to disappear with progressive modernization" (Casanova 7). After all, the late twentieth century was the historical moment when departments in university arts and sciences divisions were set up for the academic study of the field in contrast to seminary curricula. That in turn abetted first the rise of cultural–anthropological as against great-thought tradition approaches to religious study and then the "scientific study" of religion, one facet of which has entailed the interpretation of religious behavior in terms of the model of rational economic choice. As one of our 12 authors wittily remarks of this latter trend, "if the social scientific study of religion was once a branch of abnormal psychology, today it is a branch of neoclassical economics" (Nord 57).

Altogether a strong case can be made, up to a point at least, for the proposition that academic humanists across the board ca. 2000 were seriously underprepared for a world in which it is increasingly obvious that religious convictions can subsume secular interests as easily as vice-versa, not only in the nonwest (e...