I have spent six months contemplating the role of religion in America, reading and thinking about its unique emergence in the history of religion. American Religion provides a welcome perspective, summing up our strengths and faults. I am in total agreement with Richard Niebuhr that American pluralism is the key to our religious tolerance, and our tremendous denominational diversity, at the expense of an over-arching authority. The American faith is both denominational and non-denominational at the same time, even with-in the same person. Such complexity and divergence of thought with-in each of us underscores the perplexities of how we come together to worship at all. Yet we do come together, perhaps in a celebration of our own individuality. Each of us can have our own Jesus Christ, or our own relationship with God, in an unmediated inward turn that finds God--not in our various denominations but--with-in ourselves. Personal Experience is a hallmark of the American faith, and perhaps our supreme distinction from our European Christian traditions, which are both ironically less Biblical, and less open to pluralism then we are.
I am reminded of Paul Johnson's observation in his popular History of Christianity that American's tended to ignore the depths of European Christian history, and instead went straight back to the 40 days after Jesus rose from the dead. Nearly every American Christian I know views him self as an insider, privy to the secrets and knowledge of the early disciples and the apostle Paul. Much of this knowledge is experience driven. Thus, the American soul shows every sign of a kind of gnosticism in an age of total appropriation. Thus Joseph Smith has emerged as an American God, by now he is ruling his own planet. Leiland Jamison observes in his essay that there is no way to categorize all the various sects, cults, and divergent paths of the American faith.
Nietzsche's laments of God's death and burial cannot shake the American soul which finds proof of God inwardly in the lonely frontier at Cane Ridge and the tent meetings of the so called Great Revival. Europe can hardly touch us at all, which means that its traditional structures will slowly degrade over time here as Henry Browne and Oscar Handlin demonstrate in their surveys of Judaism and Catholicism.
My disappointment with the Book was that it failed to show the African influence upon this process with its gnostic undertones. The Afrikan Little me that is myself that is in me, bares a close relationship to Jesus living in our hearts, and one can marvel at Africa's influence over our soul even as we continue to send missionaries to their shores. It is no surprise to me that Pentecostals will soon--if not already--represent the largest influx of Christianities converts.
What is the price for our triumph? The American soul has an unmediated exchange with God that is as self evident as our constitutional rights. Since we spurn authority, no Church can impose its will upon us without our consent. We have the ultimate freedom of worship, but it is not freedom for the self but alas, from other selves. Tocqueville is our best Religious critic, who warned of the Democratic desire for flattery. The conquest of the frontier has turned us inward to find the manifest destiny with-in the self which wants no part of creation, but would over-come it to find each of us alone in the Garden with Jesus. This comes to us from the moderate Baptist tradition which may be America's most creative religious achievement, as Sidney Ahlstrom points out the brilliant theology of Edgar Mullins in his essay on American theology. The social political consequences of all of this are something else.
I am more moved by aesthetics than politics, and the American faith is a thing of beauty in its sheer complexity, and pluralistic diversity. Johnathan Edwards may write to our conscience, but Emerson and Walt Whitman both write to our soul, which finds God with-in. Our theological mind belongs to William James who most moves the liberals and moderates among us, as Daniel Williams points out.
This book was edited in the 60's and much has changed since. But I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to contemplate American democracy and its impact on faith.
