To the Editor:

In “Religion in Post-Protestant America” [May], Peter L. Berger has provided a stimulating discussion of the constitutional setting of church-state relations and an intriguing proposal for the churches’ role in “post-Protestant” America, but his analysis of the larger issue of religion and politics is based on a flawed concept.

The notion of the “naked public square,” popularized by Richard John Neuhaus, is not without serious problems, yet Mr. Berger accepts this concept as fact and bases his proposal upon it. At bottom, the Neuhaus-Berger concept employs a physical metaphor and preys on the imagery of science. Society is assumed to be a space, occupied by legitimating symbols. Should one set of symbols be removed from the space, another rushes in to take its place. Society—like nature—abhors a vacuum. This process has all of the inexorability of natural law, indicated by Mr. Berger’s use of words such as “inevitably.”

But there is a double dose of strict necessity involved here. In the mature (Neuhaus) version of the concept, the first set of legitimating symbols is religious. The new set, which rushes in to fill the vacuum, is—dialectically—anti-religious. More precisely, it is anti-religious in a new, pernicious, pseudo-religious way. Apparently, human beings are inherently religious beings who cannot escape their religiosity. Their new social-symbolic “sacred canopy” is no less religious than their old one, only now it is ersatz, if not demonic. For Neuhaus, the alternative to a bona-fide religious public square is a totalitarian one. In Mr. Berger’s version, a “secular humanist” square occupies the social space. In both, more than a little old-fashioned philosophical determinism is implied. I submit that these two levels of necessity—one onto-logical, relating to the nature of society, the other historical, relating to the course of historical change—amount not to a sociological analysis but to a metaphysical one, where “metaphysics” is used in the medieval sense as a discipline that relies upon and picks up where physics proper leaves off. The “naked public square” rests on the intuitive appeal of horror vacui, but does not yet rise to the level of theory.

The metaphysical model requires the data to lie on a Procrustean bed of dialectics. If the first set of legitimating symbols is truly religious (thesis), then the cultural products of the “New Class” are falsely religious (antithesis). The fundamentalist Right enjoys the synthetic role of a historical deus ex machina, reaffirming the intrinsic, high religiosity of the American people in the public square. In this view, the fundamentalists merit, if not our acclaim, at least our approval, for they are getting the historical pendulum to tick back on track again. They are correcting an imbalance. Presumably, the Zeitgeist smiles on them.

But what of those whose acquiescence in the face of historical inevitability is still perturbed by traces of alarm? If the dialectic is abandoned, then it may well be that the new political-religious activism is not the antithesis of a pseudo-religious secular humanism, but merely an extreme, even warped, development of American religiosity itself. Indeed, the religious commitment of the American people never withered away. That religiosity, among other things, has been characterized by latitudinarianism, theological pragmatism, and a propensity toward a common set of moral virtues. The new fundamentalists reject this middle-of-the-road American piety and, by so doing, jeopardize the pluralism and civility it encouraged. And that is at least as disturbing as an alleged symbolic vacuum in our public squares.

[Rabbi] Alan Mittleman
American Jewish Committee
New York City

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To the Editor:

For several years now I have been telling my students that Peter L. Berger, besides being our best sociologist of religion, is always provocative. His “Religion in Post-Protestant America” verifies once more the accuracy of my generalization. . . .

It is more than a quarter of a century now since Mr. Berger’s Noise of Solemn Assemblies and Will Herberg’s still classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew tried to jar the mainline Protestant denominations . . . out of their easy alliance with the cultural status quo of an upwardly mobile American middle class. Peter Berger’s critique is less temperate than Will Herberg’s, but both authors are essentially preachers of jeremiads: religion may build comfortable bridges with culture, but unless it does so with extraordinary caution, it may also sell its birthright for a miserable mess of unseasoned pottage. . . .

It is an impressive argument, more impressive religiously than sociologically, however. In Mr. Berger’s case, it is obvious that he had been influenced by Karl Barth, whose entire enterprise constituted a monumental and magnificent attempt (certainly, I think, the most brilliant theological achievement of our century) to free religious proclamation from bondage to cultural mediation and thus also to allow theology to reflect solely on a message that breaks in as unexpected news from the outside. The people who hear and affirm this surprising news about themselves become, in Barth’s program, the religious community which, as God’s partisan band, owes allegiance to no cultural status quo or to any social program save obedience to God’s mandate. Barth’s view of authentic religion then was by necessity that of a sect.

The rigorous Barthian theology was wonderfully suited to a situation such as that created by the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism and its attempt to manipulate the church by affirming it while also forcing it to become heretical at the most basic level. It is from a tradition like Barth’s that we must look if we expect to find prophets and martyrs. (Not surprisingly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came from the Barthian camp.) On the other hand, the position articulated by Barth lacked satisfactory resources for dealing constructively with the ambiguities of the American civil religion and its relationships with the American class structure. It is not surprising that Mr. Berger later repudiated both the theological method and the sociological conclusions to be drawn from Barth’s “crisis” theology. . . .

Back in the 1960’s, both Mr. Berger and Will Herberg were enormously popular on just those more or less liberal seminary campuses that recruited the bright, articulate types who would become the future religious academicians, staffers of church offices, and writers of social statements. What those Berger readers learned was not so much to distrust every class identification and its ideology as to loathe and despise popular middle-class religiosity. Mr. Berger was never a New Class elitist. By the late 1960’s many of his readers had become that, however. Thus the middle class in general, and not just its religiosity, had become the enemy. Ironically, just as the members of the emerging New Class cut themselves off from the really “real world” of their constituencies, they shut themselves up in a sectarian movement that, most ironically of all, was rapidly moving toward a leftist secularism, pathologically hostile to American institutions.

The mainline denominations, most of whose members remain thoroughgoing, if not necessarily mischievous, middle-class Americans, are left with a leadership vacuum. The situation becomes pulpit against pew and insofar as the “enlightened” pulpit has become ideological (i.e., “sect type”), there is little chance for its reform. . . .

Since denominational constituencies remain “furiously religious,” if there is to be any leadership, it must come from outside traditional channels. Thus the new evangelicals fill the void. For all that one may deplore the excesses of the Moral Majority, its rise was made possible only by the delinquencies of those who gave up on the task that was more appropriately theirs. If one is tempted to think I exaggerate the situation, I only advise him to read through half-a-dozen issues of Christianity and Crisis, a distinctly New Class journal.

It is easy to damn the crowd as the reactionary enemy. It is hard, but both a noble and rewarding vocation, to identify with one’s constituency while also striving to mediate a better future. No one at work on the present scene lays out the desired agenda better than does Peter Berger.

Leigh D. Jordahl
Luther College
Decorah, Iowa

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To the Editor:

Peter L. Berger’s “Religion in Post-Protestant America” is interesting, provocative—and too onesided. His focus is the tension between the “establishment” and “free-exercise” clauses of the First Amendment, and the fierce contemporary debate between separationists who oppose establishment, and accommodationists who believe their opponents deny the right to free exercise. Mr. Berger concludes that the churches should “draw back from . . . partisan advocacy . . . and return to . . . mediation.”

That this advice is problematic can be illustrated through a consideration of his notion of “Protestant,” which needs clarification. The theologian Paul Tillich is helpful here. He distinguishes between a Protestant “era,” which is transient, and a “principle,” which is “eternal.” . . . But beyond era (and ethos), Tillich sees in the Protestant principle a universal significance exemplified in prophetic figures extending from Amos through Jesus to, no doubt, his colleague, Reinhold Niebuhr. The essence of the Protestant principle is immediate (non-symbolic) access to God, the eternal order of things. . . . The Protestant principle requires that those who understand it affirm it and work, often by radical criticism, for the betterment of an imperfect world in the light of it.

Its principle, its essence, is the aspect of Protestantism that Mr. Berger neglects almost completely. He concentrates instead upon Protestantism as a public, collective phenomenon and on its political, legal, and social features. Allied with this is his use of functional theory in assessing the meaning and value of religion. Accordingly, the tension between the two First Amendment clauses shows that the essential function of religion must be to supply symbols to legitimate . . . a temporal social order. . . .

Functional (and class) analysis of collective religious phenomena provide the basis for Mr. Berger’s contention that contemporary First Amendment conflicts are exacerbated by the fact that the “Protestant establishment” no longer exists. But, ironically, Mr. Berger does not seem so sure of himself on this fundamental point. He says that the phrase “may at first sound grating” (actually, it is an oxymoron, more on which later). . . .

To Mr. Berger’s diffident remarks I would point out that there never has been an American Protestant establishment. On the other hand, to say that America was and still is “a nation with the soul of a church” is true. . . . The most striking religious fact about America is that it is both a secular nation and one with “a deep-rooted sense of historical mission” and, from its beginnings to the present, individually and collectively, a panoply of what William James calls “the varieties of religious experience.” Mr. Berger rightly points to the “vivid picture of the bewildering variety of the colonies in the matter of religious arrangements.” (Yes, and more variety than in just “arrangements.”) He adds, again rightly, that religious Americans have been mainly united in what they were against. And what did early Protestants like the deist Anglican James Madison and the dissident Baptist Roger Williams have in common? And what do the ACLU and born-again evangelicals today have in common with one another and with Madison and Williams? In a phrase, opposition to what William James calls the “spirit of corporate dominion” in religion. Voila l’ennemi!

American Protestants I have known are basically individualists in their religiousness, regardless of the church, sect, cult, or other group to which they may (or may not) belong. Mr. Berger has a point in criticizing the American penchant for transforming political campaigns into moral and religious Crusades—but not for the right reason. The reason is that such activity debases religion by misrepresenting it and obscuring its unique essence.

The true locus of the religious spirit of the American Protestant is in the soul of the individual. That Mr. Berger is apparently unaware of this fact is revealed in his reference to “any secularization scale, be it subjective (recording what people say they believe) or objective (recording what people actually do in terms of religious practice).” For Mr. Berger, it is clear, the “subjective” is a social-science, not a religious, concept. . . .

Let us look at William James’s concept of religious subjectivity and its implications for the public world of American religion. . . . For James, the religious experience of the individual is the best thing about the human species. The “root and center” of subjective religious experiences are “mystical states of consciousness”. . . . [which] James values above all others . . . because they foster qualities of “saintliness,” the essence of which is the propensity to produce and increase “goodness,” benefiting everyone. . . .

If James is right, the most creative function of contemporary churches would not be mediation, as Mr. Berger advises, although that is a most valuable one, certainly superior to the strident advocacy of partisan political positions. The most creative function of the church would be what it has always been—to produce mystics and saints, who, in turn, serve the common good. Such would be true even of those “so-called ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations . . .” which Mr. Berger dismisses too facilely and contemptuously. For even in their current misguided subscription to essentially political theologies (read: mythologies) of “liberation,” there is a growing counter-movement of “spirituality,” comprising much of what James means by the mystical, the saintly, and the pragmatic.

As a lifelong practicing American Protestant and an academic teacher and scholar of religion, I take delight in Mr. Berger’s notion of the “Protestant smile,” now said to be widely and indiscriminately diffused throughout American society and to have two basic forms, “heartwarming” and “hypocritical.” Surely this is the cream of the jest. Surely there must be as many different Protestant smiles as there are Protestants and the infinitely various occasions which evoke them. Downright compelling, for example, is the smile of amusement brought forth by Mr. Berger’s statement that “when it comes to religion, America is an India with a little Sweden superimposed.” I shall always treasure this image as a kind of koan as I ponder other parallels to “India” and “Sweden” in religious America. . . .

Again, if one takes seriously the Hebrew-prophetic provenance of the Protestant principle, with its iconoclastic and anti-mythic worship of the eternal, one smiles at such key Berger terms as “Protestant establishment” and “symbolic knowledge” as oxymoronic. For a serious Protestant, nothing is really established except the eternal order. . . .

But we have reached the point where we must stop smiling our Protestant smiles—even a weary one at worn-out Marxist class analysis—and get back to serious business. . . . The contemporary incarnation of “the spirit of corporate dominion” is the totalitarian state, particularly in its Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist form.

The generic spirit of corporate dominion can, of course, be found everywhere, not least in America itself. Pitirim Sorokin pointed out long ago that the Soviet Union and the United States were becoming mirror images of each other. But despite apparent similarities there is one decisive, all-important difference and that is the distinctive, perhaps unique, American religiousness. . . .

At this point the apparent paradox of America’s “deep-rooted sense of historic mission” and its prodigal religious diversity is resolved. Americans really believe in religious freedom and believe in freedom religiously. This is our national character and destiny, and the reason that America is “a nation with the soul of a church.” Hence, totalitarianism, including its ecclesiastical forms, is anathema. It goes against our grain. . . .

Totalitarianisms do not honor the eternal order of things and violate the spiritual freedom which is the defining essence of being truly human. They are themselves, as Reinhold Niebuhr and many others have pointed out, false and perverse religions. As Niebuhr also pointed out, Americans have no reason to be complacent, since the impulse to tyrannize is universal. But the record shows that Americans have always on the whole resisted the “spirit of corporate dominion” in the realm of religion. Given our past and our virtually unique religiousness in the world today, we have no reason to doubt that amid the vicissitudes of history, the individual’s depth of religious freedom and its public defense will continue to provide Americans with access to an eternal order of things, from which perspective it is clear that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

William D. Geoghegan
Bowdoin College
Brunswick, Maine

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Peter L. Berger writes:

Two letter-writers find me “provocative,” one “stimulating.” I am mulling over the question of whether this constitutes faint praise, or indeed praise at all. In the meantime, I will respond to what I provoked and/or stimulated in the minds of these three readers.

In Rabbi Mittleman’s mind, I’m afraid, I stimulated a fantasy. Just about the last thing I believe in with regard to human history is some sort of quasi-Hegelian dialectic in which symbol systems succeed one another as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This is not what my article proposed, nor is it a tacit assumption underlying what it did propose. The central question is very far from metaphysics and very much one of empirical assessment: does a modern society require integrating symbols? Some social scientists have suggested that it does not, that it functions as a pragmatic arrangement similar to, say, the traffic system of a contemporary city: people generally obey the rules not because of deeplyheld shared beliefs but because it is in their interest to do so. I very much doubt whether this position is tenable. In this, I happen to agree with the majority of social thinkers of the last two centuries. Thus, the sharp reduction in shared symbols in modern Western societies constitutes a serious problem and possibly also a severe crisis.

The Christian Right is important not because it is “a historical deus ex machina,” but because, in plain empirical fact, it embodies the beliefs and aspirations of a significant segment of the American people. I neither acclaim nor approve this fact, but I think that it ought to be acknowledged. I also think that, for very practical reasons of civic peace, the rest of us should seek to draw this group of fellow citizens into open and constructive conversation. Precisely this, incidentally, is what Richard John Neuhaus has been doing very effectively in the Center on Religion and Society. I agree with Rabbi Mittleman that there are many things happening in this fundamentalist world that are disturbing to anyone committed to civility and pluralism. But surely this is not the only disturbing development on the American scene today. In the liberal academic milieu that is my social habitat, there are massive threats to both civility and pluralism, none of them coming from the Christian Right.

I gather that Leigh D. Jordahl basically agrees with my view of the current situation in American religion. I have no quarrel either with his account of how Will Herberg and I were understood, or rather misunderstood, by many “bright, articulate types” in the 1960’s. This misunderstanding greatly troubled me then, and it still troubles me. I console myself with the thought that much greater writers than I am have been misread and then shanghaied in support of causes deeply repugnant to them. I have done what I could by publicly protesting, correcting, reformulating. It seems that I have been successful in that many of the aforementioned bright types now look upon me as an enemy.

If I may slightly vulgarize William D. Geoghegan’s argument, he seems to be saying that there cannot have been a Protestant establishment because the Protestant principle does not allow it. Even if one stipulated that American Protestantism has been as individualistic as he makes it out to be (which is very doubtful—wasn’t there such a thing as the covenant?), this would not imply that such individualism manifested itself in society in an unvaryingly pristine form. History, alas, is not simply a sequence of “principles.” It is, rather, a series of messy and often illogical compromises between “principles” (ideas) and a variety of hard social interests. There was once a Protestant establishment. It did indeed embody some “principles,” including emphatically the idea of the sovereignty of the individual and his conscience, but it included a lot of other ideas too, some of them in tension with its individualism.

Be that as it may, what Mr. Geoghegan really does not like is the sociological way of looking at the world. That, of course, is his privilege. But even so, he should be able to distinguish between theological and sociological discourse, in my own writing or anywhere else. An attempt to understand the social realities of contemporary American religion is not “wornout Marxist class analysis,” but, quite simply, the stock in trade of social science. Theologically, perhaps, one may want the church “to produce mystics and saints.” Does one have to be a sociologist to recognize that the church occasionally fails in this noble endeavor? But when Mr. Geoghegan speaks about the fundamental contradiction between the Protestant spirit and any form of totalitarianism, needless to add, I couldn’t agree with him more. I am sure that this agreement between him and me is more important than differences of opinion about the uses of sociology.

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