History of American Religion, 1865 to Present

One Response to “Don’t shoot the messenger (historian) – Religion in America since 1945”

1. Sorry, I’ve had no luck posting my blog in the usual fashion, so I’m posting it as a comment.

   Patrick Allitt’s Religion in America Since 1945: A History, ties together many of the themes we’ve been discussing for the past four or five weeks. He adds some things that we really didn’t have a chance to cover, such as Reinhold Neibuhr and other influential Protestant theologians, the Black Muslims, the cults of the 1960s and 1970s, Muslim immigrants in America, etc. He has some really good passages, such as the description of the Air Force Academy chapel: “Containing Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish worship centers and presenting a magnificent silhouette against the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, it suggested simultaneously the glorious verticals of Gothic architecture and a bristling row of intercontinental nuclear missiles; its seventeen spiky spires also brought to mind a pair of hands pressed together for prayer” (40). Truly a monument to American religious sentiment during the Cold War, the apotheosis of the Judeo-Christian tradition!
   Allitt occasionally throws in trite comments that mar the points he is making. For example in discussing the negative response on the part of some Catholics to reforms during the 1960s (that is, no more Friday abstinence from meat, no more fasting before mass, no more regular confession), he remarks, “Changes like these can be very upsetting…” (81-82). Or, in discussing the black militants who declared that Hitler didn’t kill enough Jews and who demanded that Jews in a Boston neighborhood hand over a synagogue to the black community or it would be burned down with people in it, he ends by stating, “No wonder such confrontations created a gulf between African American and Jewish activists” (97).
   The book’s conclusion starts off quite promisingly. Although there have been strong expressions of religiously-based viewpoints in public life and politics in the past few decades, Allitt argues that the American ideal of separation between church and state has not been endangered. His explanation of this seeming paradox is, “The American taste for verbal combat continued to be tempered by a strong American faith in civility” (264). He should have left well-enough alone and stopped there; his statements in the final paragraph about the supporters and defenders of religion and then its detractors suggest that he has not made up his mind which side he is on. His last line is tantamount to a plea not to shoot the messenger (historian), a weak ending to a book that has a number of very good points.

   Carol_Dockham
   December 2nd, 2007