America's Gods

Among the several motives that Herman Melville's Ishmael gives for going to sea in Moby-Dick (1851), one stands out among all the rest for reasons of prudence. "Not ignoring what is good," Ishmael confesses, "I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in" (7). Whether or not Americans inhabit some sort of common asylum, sanitarium, or convalescent home, there is no denying that many of the inmates believe that they are sharing this residence with what strikes them as a kind of horror. To a majority of the religious, that horror is to be found in the secularism of America's public and popular culture; to numerous secular modernists, it is represented instead by the piety and politics of America's more ardent believers. The difficulty is that, unlike Ishmael, neither group displays much interest in becoming social with what they abhor even if the distinction that they think divides them is at once historically inaccurate and intellectually simplistic. Both, in other words, might profit from a dose of Ishmael's, as it is later termed in the novel, "genial, desperado philosophy," since many of the values that secularists want to defend are rooted in the soil of America's religious past and not a few of the certitudes that the faithful proclaim manage to co-exist quite contentedly, or at least without as much friction as one would expect, with cultural assumptions and practices to which they think they are superior (226). The inmates need to get to know each other better if only to be prevented from throwing out the beneficial with the baleful.

What no one on either side of this porous divide can deny is that American society is, and always has been, saturated with religion, both organized and unorganized. What no one can agree on its how to account for it or what, in given circumstances, it seems to mean. If the first inquiry produces a predictable disparity of opinion, the second generates outright consternation. While the several books under review by no means clear the air on either issue—and sometimes strongly differ on what has befogged it and how it might be made more transparent—they are of one mind both about the centrality of religion itself to American self-conceptions and about the potency of American self-conceptions in determining what forms religion takes in the US and how it does, and does not, matter.

One indication of religion's hold on the American imagination is provided by a Harris Poll which reported in 1998 that 66% of non-Christians believed in miracles and 47% accepted the Virgin Birth. Newsweek stated at roughly the same time that 79% of Americans are convinced that biblical miracles actually occurred, and another 40% of the population generally (though surely this number must now be higher), and 71% of evangelical Protestants specifically, are certain that the world will end in a battle between Jesus and the Anti-Christ at Armageddon. At the same time, nearly 20% of American adults imagine that they belong to the richest 1% of the population and presumably another 20% believe that they will join that 1% before they die.

It would be easy to dismiss such statistics if they were not so compelling, those pertaining to economics no less than those to religion, but it is also easy to be misled by them. While it is alarming to discover that nearly 40% of the American people who live in a country where the gulf between rich and poor is greater than anywhere else in the developed world nonetheless are convinced that they now are, or are soon going to be, wealthier than 99% of their fellow citizens, it is truly astonishing to learn that the great majority of religious people find themselves completely at home in the world of American popular culture. We have been told that evangelical Protestants, like charismatic Catholics and orthodox Jews, to say nothing of traditional Muslims, Buddhists...