Woodward - Getting religion: faith, culture, politics, from the age of Eisenhower to the era of Obama

Being there matters.

As a man who came of age in the 1950s and as a journalist who spent nearly four decades at Newsweek, I had the good fortune (or not) of living through the most volatile religious period in American history. There have been other periods of religious enthusiasm and upheaval but none of these, I argue, was so widespread, so wildly diverse in faith and practice, so direct in impact on electoral politics as the one that ranged from the end of the Second World War to the dawn of the new millennium.

How and why this happened, and to what social, cultural, and political effect, is the story I have to tell.

At midcentury, while a student at Notre Dame and later during my apprentice years as a journalist in Omaha, the United States was awash in religious belief. To be American was to believe in God and, when surveyed in those days, 98 percent of Americans answered accordingly. In the Fifties, Americans built more churches and synagogues than at any other time in the nations history. They regularly worshipped in them as well. Protestant Sunday school was a national institution. By 1960, half of all school-aged Catholics were enrolled in parochial schools. Seminaries thrived. Protestant divinity schools could pick and choose among applicants who might otherwise become lawyers, doctors, or corporate executives. Catholic parents felt spiritually remiss if they did not contribute at least one son to the priesthood and a daughter to the convent. To those like myself with memories of that bygone era it seems like only yesterday.

Yet, only a half century later nearly one in four Americans claimed no religious identification. Another 50 percent acknowledged only moderate or intermittent concern for religion. Faith was no longer a family hand-me-down: parents who sent their children off to Sunday school or parochial schools watched as a great many of them, in their maturity, embraced either another religion or none at all. Long before the new millennium the old Protestant establishment that represented the ruling caste in politics as well as in Main Street Americas largest churches had disappeared, replaced by a new, rougher-hewn establishment of Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, like Jerry Falwell, who had been waiting patiently offstage for their turn in the spotlight. Catholics saw Pope John XXIIIs promise of renewal through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council sputter into factionalism and, later, the moral authority of their leadersfrom parish priests to scarlet-clad cardinalscompromised by the scandal of clerical abuse and hierarchical cover-up. The leading liberal Protestant seminaries remained open only because the mainline denominations decided to ordain women. Vocations to the Catholic priesthood declined so precipitously that even the importation of priests from Africa and other continents could not make up the difference. If former Catholics all belonged to a single denomination, it would constitute the nations second largestafter the Catholic Church itself. The ranks of American nuns, once the face of Catholicism in countless hospitals and parochial school classrooms, receded to the point of extinction. And American Jews, who had found new pride in Israels victory in the Six-Day War against overwhelming Arab forces in 1967, now faced the certain prospect of being outnumbered back at home by the more fervent and fertile Muslim population.

The narrative of institutional decline from the age of Eisenhower to the era of Obama is only one side of the story this book has to tell. In the 1960s and 70s, Americans also witnessed an unexpected exfoliation of religious belief, behavior, and belonging. Some historians compared it to the great religious awakenings that occurred in the middle decades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Americans got religion at revival meetings orlike the Mormons, the Disciples of Christ, and other new movements of the daysought to recover the pure faith and practices of Jesus and His apostles.

But the kinds of religion that the baby boomers got was not like the religions of their parents and grandparents, nor were the new-time evangelizers. Many of them were Hindu gurus and Buddhist tulkus preaching salvation from the Vedas and Sanskrit sutras. Others were messiahs of sacred families like the Unification Church of Dr. Moon. Still others were secular gurus of transpersonal psychology and other techniques of the human potential movement that offered therapeutic solutions to the mysteries of life and death.

This midcentury spiritual awakening is another side of the story this book tells.

And yet neither of these transformations in American religion would have happenedor is even understandableapart from the cultural and political upheavals that convulsed American society as a whole. Among those addressed in these pages: the migration of southern blacks to northern cities, of whites to the green of postwar suburbs, and the creation of the Interstate Highway System in the Fifties; the expansion of higher education, the relaxation of sexual mores, and the rise of the drug culture in the Sixties; the collapse of bourgeois family structures and the culture wars in the Seventies and Eighties; and the repudiation of constituencies and principles that each of the major political parties once spoke to and for.