Mortal Follies. William Murchison

       ONE

       Sunset and Evening Star

      AND YET, BEFORE WE CAN START TO SEE WHERE WE ARE, WE have to look with some attention at the places where we have been.

      Nor need we travel far to get there. Many of us carry around intimate memories of the decade known as “the Fifties.” Others know the period by its legends, whether of repression, cultural twitching, or hi-honey-I’m-home complacency. A point easy to miss about the 1950s is that the period was deeply complex, neither one thing nor the other (as indeed might be said, in varying degrees, of all human eras).

      I was there. So were many who read these words, and may appraise differently the factors I lay out for consideration. On one point we might agree. It is that whereas the 1950s fairly tingled with religious energy, and worshippers overflowed the churches, and to some observers the Kingdom of God seemed ready to break forth right here in the good old U.S.A., there was much more to be taken in—restlessness, disquiet, a growing sense of agitation.

      The years that followed the defeat of the Axis Powers, and of the Great Depression as a notable bonus, were as good, seemingly, for American churches as for America itself. Everyone (so you might have guessed from externals) wanted to be a Christian. Returning veterans sought to get on with normal life, as they remembered or envisioned it. The church was a large part of that quest, holding out possibilities of community and fulfillment—and sometimes even of that spiritual redemption that churches were in business to encourage.

      As families expanded with the onset of the baby boom, steeples rose and pews multiplied to accommodate their needs. Religion, one might have said, was in fashion, possibly to a degree previously unknown even in a country proud of its longtime sacred commitments. By 1960, a truly flabbergasting 69 percent of Americans claimed membership in a church. Certain automatic assumptions filled the lungs. Of the new lawyer or teacher or store manager in town, someone was sure to ask, in a welcoming spirit, “Where do you go to church?” Not, “Do you go?” The only conceivable question was, “Where?” It was a genial form of recruiting, and it expressed the social conviction that the place to be on Sunday mornings was in God’s house.

      Popular culture, being popular, was suffused with religion—anyway, a sort of religion, obscuring more often than highlighting doctrinal differences. Where the customers led, the entertainment industry followed. The early Christian martyrs figured centrally in successful movies like Quo Vadis and The Robe. Charlton Heston parted, then un-parted, the Red Sea, to the admiration of millions who lined up to see The Ten Commandments, never mind their personal views on the original document.

      Television, then coming into its own, offered as spiritual commentator and guide the eloquent Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whose weekly program, “Life is Worth Living,” began its influential run in February 1952. The program drew immense audiences, quickly landing Sheen on the cover of Time. Another consequential personality was the popularizing Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale, whose book, The Power of Positive Thinking, published the year of Sheen’s television debut, purported to establish a vital link between religion and success, a link never long out of sight in American business culture. There was also—powerfully, unforgettably—the Rev. Billy Graham, inviting the world, in fervent gospel preaching, to find and affirm its Savior.

      New possibilities arose. Was it not time for Christian soldiers of every denominational variety, to march onward in unity? The National Council of Churches was the great cooperative venture that twenty-nine denominations, representing 33 million Christians, launched in 1950. The Episcopal bishop who was its first president spoke of the NCC’s goal: “a Christian America in a Christian world.” (Could any other statement by a public figure so starkly demonstrate the distance between the sixth decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first?)

      Congress played its own part in the religious revival, making us, via the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation under God.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself declared that “our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” The remark, despite exciting ridicule on the part of some theologians, was aimed, not inaccurately, at a broad and sensible consensus.

      And yet were matters as good as they looked? If at the popular level, religion—Christianity in particular, seemed the going thing, many “professionals”—theologians, pastors, priests—felt an unease bordering on discomfort. Were the churches doing what churches ought to be doing? Was it enough that people were showing up in increasing numbers for a closer walk with God? Perhaps, just perhaps, more was indicated.

      As various professionals saw it, a great deal more was indeed indicated. A bubble needed puncturing—the bubble of popular complacency and social comfort. The war had not long been over when an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Theodore Wedel, had intimations that all this might be so. In a series of lectures published in 1950, just as the National Council of Churches was beckoning forward the massed ranks of Christian soldiers, Wedel lamented that “Christianity is today, among a majority of educated men and women, including many nominal Protestant Christians, an almost unknown religion.”

      Unknown? How would that be, amid the bustle of masons and carpenters aggressively throwing together new churches? To Wedel’s mind, “Golden Rule idealism,” “moralism,” and biblical ignorance had become features of the religious landscape hardly less common than new white-painted steeples. “Main Street Christianity” was “a kind of Christianity without theology, one which does not repudiate the name of God, but which has basically little to do with him.”

      Many shared Wedel’s apprehensions. The Jewish theologian Will Herberg found America’s “common religion” to be nothing less than the American way of life, “the operative faith of the American people.” With a “spiritual structure,” yes—one that “embraces such seemingly incongruous elements as sanitary plumbing and freedom of opportunity, Coca-Cola and an intense faith in education—all felt as moral questions relating to the proper way of life.” God functioned, said Herberg, “as sanction and underpinning for the supreme values of the faith embodied in the American Way of Life.” It all amounted, he thought, to “secularized Puritanism, a Puritanism without transcendence, without sense of sin or judgment.”

      The bestselling sociological commentator Vance Packard declared wincingly that most Americans saw church attendance as “the nice thing that people do on Sundays. It advertises their respectability, gives them a warm feeling that they are behaving in a way their God-fearing ancestors would approve, and adds (they hope) a few cubits to their social stature by throwing them with a social group with which they wish to be identified.” A desired “social group”! Did anyone mention the Episcopal Church, with its ancient silver plate and gilt-edged membership rolls? There was some of that going about; there would be much more.

      The Christian churches were rising—slowly, gradually, but emphatically—to critique, if not to flagellate, the culture from which they were receiving such hearty back thumps of fellowship and encouragement. There might seem some oddness in this, except for the greater oddness we will note