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133 = 9 Hamlet without the Prince The Role of Religion in Postwar Nonfiction Alan Wolfe In 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite, a book that would go on to become one of the leading best sellers in the history of the field, still earning royalties in 2005.1 (I should know; I get a small portion of those royalties from my afterword to the edition published in 2000.) The Power Elite was very much a product of its time; its account of the way business and the military cooperated with Congress anticipated President Eisenhower’s warnings in his farewell address about the “military-industrial complex.” The cold war loomed over Mills’s book, as did all those transformations in American life that resulted in concentrated big business, complacent labor unions, an anticommunist foreign policy, and a public tasting its first fruits of consumerism. Yet in one important way, The Power Elite was not a product of its time at all. The 1950s was a decade in which mainline Protestant denominations, which had not yet begun to lose so many of their members, were still influential ; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a typical Millsian man of power, was also a Presbyterian church elder. Catholics were deeply ensconced in forms of parish life that dominated their predominantly Catholic neighborhoods and held tenaciously to rosaries, blessings, and confession. Jews were by and large observant and had not yet begun to intermarry in significant numbers. Conservative Protestants were taking the first steps toward the political influence and visibility, which would all but define contemporary American politics. On all these topics, The Power Elite did not comment. Mills grew up in Texas, where his mother raised him Catholic, even to the point of having him serve as an altar boy, but by his high school years Mills’s atheism was already pronounced , a commitment that stayed with him throughout his life. (Ironically, 134 Alan Wolfe though, Mills would later be adopted by many mainline Protestants as having offered the definitive word on America’s political and economic condition.) If Mills himself was not religious, however, he was also one of America’s leading interpreters of Max Weber, the greatest sociologist of religion the world has produced and, hence, not ignorant of the subject. Sociologists communicate through their silences as well as their words, and Mills’s silence toward religion is striking. One might respond by pointing out that The Power Elite was concerned with the highest reaches of influence in American life and that, for all their resonance among ordinary Americans in the 1950s, religious institutions were not part of America’s ruling class (even if missionary Christianity had played an important role in the creation of the American empire that Mills was attacking). Yet what then is one to make of White Collar, Mills’s 1951 disturbing account of middle-class life in America?2 Here is a book concerned with alienation, false consciousness, the lack of autonomy, and the corruption of character, yet nowhere can one find a word about either religion’s contribution to the state in which Americans had presumably found themselves or the suggestion that religion might offer a way out of that state. (At least Marx, from whom Mills learned so much, denounced religion as the opiate of the people.) Mills, Morris Dickstein has written, “was an almost novelistic observer of social change,” but that modifying “almost” has a lot of work to do; White Collar has no traces of Albert Camus or Saul Bellow, that is, no existentialist dilemmas or spiritual anxiety.3 Its chapter on the professions deals with doctors, lawyers, professors, and businessmen but not with the clergy. Mills worries about conformity but has nothing to say about creed. It is as if Americans go to inferior schools that fail to teach them critical thought, work for big organizations that frustrate their independence, and vote for candidates who perpetuate their woes, without ever attending church, confessing their sins, or asking God for meaning. The failure of Mills to take religion seriously is even more striking given what happened to him, and to his country, in the wake of his tragic death in 1962 at the age of forty-five. Anticipating that the complacency of the 1950s might come to an end, Mills warned the emerging New Left not to place too much of its hopes on labor, and for that, he is rightly...

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