Douthat paints an interesting picture of the era after World War II in American in which religious sentiment and influence were both evident and influential., setting the stage for a “what happened” discussion.
It might be worth thinking about what happened to make religious sentiment and activity so visible and pervasive in the 1950s and early 1960s. The world had just emerged from the World War that followed the War to End all Wars, two nuclear bombs confirmed the ability of mankind to incinerate itself, and there was a new, rapidly escalating Cold War that pitted the capitalist West against the Communist USSR. Media technology was also expanding rapidly, with television overtaking radio as a means of instant and visual communication. In short, many of the moorings of the pre-WWII world had loosed and there was a need to re-establish a sense of order, prosperity, and, in a sense, control.
There is a tendency for those of us living in today’s unmoored world to look back at that time with more than a little rose color in our glasses, a strain of wishful thinking that holds that a simple return to that time and place and way of thinking might remedy all that afflicts us today. In fact, it seems to me that the religious renaissance of the 1950s in all its forms was a relatively predictable event, brought on in fact by the events that preceded it.
Just as the Enlightenment was, in part, responsible for the First Great Awakening (by challenging faith with the notion of scientific inquiry and simultaneously enabling personal faith by underscoring the notion that if scientific truths could be discovered by individual inquiry, so could religious ones), the very real spectacle of the new and improved ways in which mankind could brutalize itself produced an equal and opposite reaction in matters of faith—how mankind could be saved from itself; a sort of spiritual physics lesson.
When faced with a new and overwhelming threat, it’s not surprising that our society held onto what truth it knew with a very firm grip. It is not surprising that there would be a profound need to re-establish the visible norm away from Auschwitz and closer to Boys Town—regardless of what was happening in the interstices of American culture—the usual mix of human failings that has bedeviled mankind since Eve ate the apple.
So for me, the interesting question is not what so much what was going on in 1950 but how reaction to it evolved into the current situation. A couple of observations:
(1) One reason religion was so prominent in media-television, radio, books and movies is because religious people—or at least people who were willing to support the externals of religion—were in charge of those outlets. One truth about any society: the storytellers have great power and influence over the corporate imagination, and hence, the community. It is one reason societies always seek to exert control over who gets to tell the story and what story gets told.
(2) A religious or even quasi-religious environment makes it easier to attempt, appear to or even succeed fit in with the religious norm. It’s easier—read that “less painful”—to be Christian in a society that is even nominally Christian. But the Christian faith has always been—indeed is intended by its very nature to be—counter-cultural. It is meant to shape the culture, not the other way around. When the culture appears to be reflexively Christian, it’s possible—even easy—to absorb the superficial aspects of faith without much interior growth. If the anchor for faith is largely exterior, it’s not surprising that, when culture changes, faith changes.
My thought is that the world Douthat sees as lost is not so much lost as unmasked a bit by a new generation of storytellers for whom the community experience of WWII, institutionalized segregation, and the Cold War are merely historical footnotes; and because of a real, sometimes calculated, shift in the powers of politics and social pressure. Perhaps the same percentage of folks who conformed to the outwardly religious culture of the 1950s without the internal conviction that produces a life lived out in faith (as opposed to a life in which the proper things are thought and taught) now conform to the outwardly irreligious (or badly religious, to use Douthat’s model) culture of today, now that the template and the prevailing stories have changed.
It’s always been difficult to live a life of faith, and that is the only sense in which orthodoxy has any meaning at all. When it looks easy, it’s an illusion. When it's all intellectual, it's equally illusory.
Martha
