Mortal Follies. William Murchison
featured on its cover (as it had featured that of Bishop Sheen) spoke with some acuity, and certainly fluency, to an age more full of skeptical questions and blunt assertions than of reverent assents. It was an age of hard facts, with yet a high regard for the experts who came in so many guises: television commentators, soapbox haranguers on college campuses, secular politicians, founders of causes. He was all the more in tune with the times on account of his willingness to drink constantly from different springs and wells and chalices just to sample the taste. That he loved the church seems clear enough—though his manner of showing affection outraged a large portion of the church’s membership and leadership, who judged him to be putting souls in danger while bringing the church itself into disrepute. In the early 1960s, the Episcopal Church charged him formally with heresy, in response to an accusation by fellow bishops. There was general cringing at the idea of actual attempts to reprimand wrong teaching. Was there not about this whole enterprise the odor of wood smoke and burning martyrs? The church shrank back. Pike walked from his auto-da-fé bearing only a judgment against his theological “irresponsibility.”
Which had been considerable.
The bishop of California, it seemed, would say nearly anything that came to mind. St. Paul, to Pike, was “crotchety.” Ancient doctrinal formulas such as “came down from heaven” were to the bishop “incredible . . . in this Space Age.” The Virgin Birth of Christ he found troublesome “for many intelligent people.” The doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three Persons, was “unintelligible and misleading to men of our day.” More “unintelligible” by far seems the notion that no harm could come of taking particular Christian doctrines and giving them a swift kick, conveying to listeners the idea that modern folk who held to these ancient Christian ideas really weren’t (wink, wink) People Like Us.
Large numbers of American Christians listened. Large numbers nodded, or nodded and chuckled and smiled, with appreciation. On some of the points that streamed forth (endlessly, it began to seem) from Jim Pike and other theological jostlers of elbows, there was room for reservation, if not furious objection. Yes. Of course. But you never could tell. What if, after all, there was something to this new business about straitjacketed thinking and scandalously unpaid debts to the Lord of Life? Consider. If the life of the world could run in new, exciting courses after so much darkness and division, might not understandings of life and eternity be ripe for reappraisal? Might it not be time to . . .
So much for the 1950s, its questionings, quibbles, and persistent sense of unease. The noise of solemn assemblies began to fade. The church—not in every place, by any means, and with many a finger crossed, or set of arms folded in opposition—began to move its stiffened legs. Dead ahead lay the 1960s. Those years would prove decisive.
I am at the Phoenix airport, changing planes as I head home from a West Coast university for Christmas break. The year is 1963. And what is this? A man, possibly a year or two younger than I, hurries past. I turn around. I look. No, the truth is, I stare—at a head of hair, thick and loose, the bangs, like window drapes, falling to the eyebrows. It might be a sheepdog, or Moe from “The Three Stooges.” Then, as the saying goes, recognition dawns. This is a Beatle. An imitation Beatle, to be sure, but with the same hair we’ve seen in the newspaper photos relayed from England. One had known there was such hair; one just hadn’t expected it outside its proper context, at the Phoenix airport. Suddenly the age of the male flat top and of Bryl Creem (“A Little Dab’ll Do You,” the TV commercial promised) seemed less certain than before, to the extent one had thought to question its staying power.
It was possibly my first glimpse of that which later we would call “the Sixties.” I do not recall the moment as unsettling or premonitory. On the other hand, I find, looking back, no coincidence in the timing. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been assassinated barely two weeks earlier, less than sixty miles north of my hometown. The two things I desired most to see on landing that day in Dallas were my father, who was due to collect me, and, on the drive home, the Texas School Book Depository, a helpless monument to horror, surrounded still by gawkers, with index fingers pointed toward the seventh floor. I forgot for a long time about my Phoenix airport encounter. Afterwards, concerning that hinge moment, a great many things came to me, things that were fading even then, though we had no inkling of it, and other things that were putting out small shoots and tendrils.
The times, as a not-yet-world-famous Bob Dylan was to sing (and as we were to hear incessantly afterwards) were a-changing. Equally, as some of the ancient Romans had said, we were changing with those times (et nos mutamur in illis).
Was there something new in all this? No change, no growth, is the law of life. Yet the changes we were to experience—or endure, as the case might be—in the 1960s and afterwards were deeper, darker, and more disruptive than anyone could have foreseen in that deep, darkening fall of 1963.
Older assumptions about life, about norms, about reality itself commenced a slow fade-out. Into focus came new assumptions, rattling alike the windows and the nerves. It was more than just a case of getting used to daily sensations like “campus protest” and “flower power,” to cite two popular terms of the time. There was a sense, prevalent among the younger set but shared increasingly by older onlookers that personal expectations suddenly counted much more than seemingly stale viewpoints and definitions. What did parents know, anyway? They were so . . . old! As were their notions about life and how best to get along in it. It was appropriate, seemingly, to live by the slogan, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” (Until—naturally—becoming thirty yourself.)
Whatever justice and love and duty and hope had meant previously, these commodities no longer enjoyed special “relevance” (another then-popular term). A certain kind of sensitivity would lead us to the understandings necessary to carry on with modern life. What kind of sensitivity? Clearly the kind that people of sensitive outlook (people such as us!) were only too happy to employ. The logic of the new creed was never other than circular: What we say is so because we’re the ones saying it! Nor was it likely to be confused with the older wisdom founded on tradition and the slow, careful exploration of possibility and limits. It now seemed the very notion of limits was some archaic fantasy, some artifact in a dark attic made bright by the sudden flinging back of wool curtains.
An older culture was making way, with many a groan and grunt, for a new culture, one whose varied influences radically inform the living of life.
It is common nowadays to talk loosely of “the culture,” and of the various wars that rage within it. Learned books are written on the subject. Still, the term gives pause. Many of us think of the word “culture” as pertaining chiefly to artistic pursuits. People who went to the symphony and read books, perhaps even watched subtitled foreign films at the local arts theater, were “cultured.” Culture, in that specialized sense, was acknowledged a good thing, at least by those who thought about the matter. Culture stood over against barbarism, or, as some said, Elvis.
As we use the word today, “culture” mainly refers to an environment—moral, political, economic, or whatever, and a set of attitudes, actions, and assumptions associated with that environment. That is the definition I propose for present purposes. I mean by “culture” the ocean and all schools of fish that swim in it. I mean the modes of the larger society, in which institutions of every sort exist: viewpoints, mental habits, and crotchets; entertainments and obsessions, ideas and ideals, norms and non-norms, behaviors, memories, ways.
To taxonomize all things cultural is clearly not the task of an essayist (my self-definition), but of entire teams of sociologists, aided and abetted by those whom journalists always like to identify in news stories as “experts.” My own definitions of “the culture” are bound, for some, to fall short, a certainty I acknowledge with, I hope, appropriate regret. I would say in my own defense that anyone’s definition of a beast like “the culture” is bound to fall short. That is how things are. I invite argument and dispute as to terms, even as I implore the reader’s patience.
I have advanced the notion that America’s “mainline” churches in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular, whether meaning to or not, have placed themselves in at least partial thrall to the culture. I do not mean the whole of one church or another. I do not mean the whole of the culture.