Religion: The American Religion

America is a spiritual paradox: it is, at the same time, the most religious and the most secular nation in the world. From 1949 to 1953, U.S. distribution of the Scriptures jumped 140%. In a recent survey of religious attitudes, more than four-fifths of U.S. citizens said they believed the Bible was the “revealed word of God.”

But another survey shows 53% unable to name even one of the Gospels. And a panel of 28 prominent Americans asked to rate the 100 most significant happenings in history, ranked Christ’s crucifixion 4th (tied with the Wright brothers’ flight and the discovery of X rays).

Published this week is a sharp-minded investigation of the American religious paradox. In Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Doubleday; $4) Jewish Author-Scholar Will Herberg maintains that both the religiousness and the secularism of the American people derive from much the same sources, and have combined to give the U.S. a religion all its own.

The Three Branches. A man’s religion in the U.S. is freighted with a special significance it does not have in other countries, says Herberg; it tells him where he stands. The immigrant to the U.S. in the 19th century was expected to change his language, customs, social attitudes—but not his religion. Second generation citizens, hungry to be “real Americans,” tended to get away from their parents’ ways as far and fast as possible. But the third generation looks back to find its identity: “What the son wishes to forget,” said Historian Marcus Lee Hansen, “the grandson wishes to remember.”

What he finds to remember is religion, but it is not the same as his grandfather’s, for this, too, has undergone Americanization. The many varied regional or national sects and churches which the immigrants brought along with their cooking and their clothes have been reduced to a tripartite division: Protestant, Catholic and Jew. These have become “three great branches or divisions of ‘American religion.’ “

The Biblical origin of the three faiths is not so important in this connection, Herberg believes, as the idea “that they are three diverse representations of … the ‘spiritual values’ American democracy is presumed to stand for.” Thus “it becomes virtually mandatory for the American to place himself in one or another of these groups . . . For being a Protestant, a Catholic or a Jew is understood as the specific way, and increasingly perhaps the only way, of being an American and locating oneself in American society.”

The New Secularism. Herberg cites a poll which asked U.S. citizens whether they obeyed the Biblical law of love toward a member of another religion (yes, 90%); of another race (yes, 80%); of a “political party that you think is dangerous” (no, 57%). “While the Jewish-Christian law of love is formally acknowledged, the truly operative factor is the value system embodied in the American Way of Life. Where the American Way of Life approves of love of one’s fellow man, most Americans confidently assert that they practice such love; where the American Way of Life disapproves, the great mass of Americans do not hesitate to confess that they do not practice it, and apparently feel very little guilt for their failure.”

Americans have faith in faith; they “believe in religion in a way that perhaps no other people do” as a “good thing” for man and nation, without making theological distinctions. Herberg quotes President Eisenhower: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

Professional unbelievers and out-and-out secularists like Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow are now all but extinct.

Instead, a new kind of secularism flourishes that uses and supports religion, and in turn is sanctified by it. Europeans, accustomed to a sharper confrontation between the two forces, are often puzzled by the U.S. brand of secularism which “is to be found within the churches themselves and is expressed through men and women who are sincerely devoted to religion . . . It is not secularism as such that is characteristic of the present religious situation in this country but secularism within a religious framework, the secularism of religious people.”

Herberg sums up: “The familiar distinction between religion and secularism appears to be losing much of its meaning under present-day conditions. Both the ‘religionists’ and the ‘secularists’ cherish the same basic values and organize their lives on the same fundamental assumptions.” True Christian or Jewish witness, Herberg points out, may be “much more difficult under these conditions than when faith has to contend with overt and avowed unbelief.”