Of Ancients and Moderns:Religion in America

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New Criterion Magazine, March, 2004

Of Ancients and Moderns:Religion in America

David B. Hart

All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief. …no cultured person should remain indifferent to erosion of apprehension of the transcendent.

—Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age

The herdsman who comes to Pentheus from MountCithaeron in The Bacchae tells how the Theban women possessed by Dionysus (among other more fabulous and monstrous feats) take up serpents without being bitten and fire without being burned. It is not unlikely, given how common such phenomena are in “enthusiast” and “ecstatic” religion, that here and elsewhereEuripides grants us some glimpse of theactual dionysiac orgy, even long after its migration into Greece from Thrace, when the cult had been assumed into the soberer mysteries of the Olympians (that the revelers girded themselves with snakes, at least, bacchic iconography copiously attests). And other features of the rite, reported in various sources, follow the familiar enthusiast pattern. At the height of their devotions, the maenads were seized by violent raptures, to which they surrendered entirely; absorbed in the formless beauty of the god, and tormented by fitful intimations of his presence, they worshipped him with cries of longing and delight, desperate invocations, wild dithyrambs, delirious dance, inebriation, and the throbbing din of corybantic music; abandoning all sense of themselves, they suffered visions and uttered prophecies, fell ravished and writhing to the earth, or sank into insensibility. In short, it was all very—in a word—American.

At least, that is what I have been disposed to thinkever since an epiphany visited itself upon menearly twenty years ago, as I stood amid the pestilential squalor of an English railway station, awaiting my train, and deliberating on whether I should risk the ordeal of a British Rail sandwich. Generallyone might prefer grander settings for one’s moments of illumination—Wordsworth’s lakes, Amiel’s azure peaks—but it was, in this instance, the very dreariness of my surroundings that occasioned my awakening. The station’s oblong pillars wereblackly begrimed; shreds of posters in garish hues hung limply from the walls; in shallow depressions of the concrete floor opaque pools of oleaginous waterglistened with a sinister opalescence; an astringent chemical odor of antiseptics vying with various organic purulences suffused the damp air; a scattering of gaunt torsos farther along the platform bore eloquent witness to the malaise of Britain’spost-war gene pool; and nothing was out of the ordinary. But, all at once, two thoughts occurred to me simultaneously, and their wholly fortuitous conjunction amounted to a revelation. One was something like “Boredom is the death of civilization;” and the other something like “America has never been this modern.”

Not that this place was conspicuously worse than—or even as wretched as—countless stops along the way in the United States; but anyone who has lived in Britain for some time should understand how such a place might, in a moment of calm clarity, seem like the gray glacial heart of a gray and glaciated universe. Somehow this place was adequate to its age—to that pervasive social atmosphere of resignation at which modern Britain is all but unsurpassed;it was disenchantment made palpable, the material manifestation of a national soul unstirred by extravagant expectations or exorbitant hopes. Admittedly, contemporary England’s epic drabness makes everything seem worse; in the Mediterranean sun, culture’sdecay can be intoxicatingly charming (and Catholic decadence is so much richer than Protestant decadence). But really, anywhere throughout the autumnal world of old and dying Christendom,there are instants (however fleeting)when one cannot help but feel (however imprecisely)that something vital has perished, a cultural confidence or a spiritual aspiration; and it is obviously something inseparable from the faith that shaped and animated European civilization for nearly two millennia. Hence the almost prophetic “fittingness” of that rail station: once religious imagination and yearning have departed from a culture, the lowest, grimmest, most tedious level of material existence becomes not just one of reality’s unpleasant aspects, butin some sense the limit that marks out the “truth” of things.

Thisis aninexcusably impressionistic way of thinking, I know, but it seems to me at least to suggest alarger cause for the remarkable willful infertility of the native European peoples: not simply general affluence,high taxes, sybaritism,working women, or historical exhaustion, but a vast metaphysical boredom. This is not to say that the American birth-rate overall is particularly robust, hovering as it is just at or below “replacement level;” but it has not sunk to the European continental average of only 1.4 children per woman (so reports the UN), let alone to that of such extreme individual cases as Spain (1.07), Germany (1.3), or Italy (1.2). Britain, at almost 1.7 children per woman, is positively philoprogenitive by European standards. And the most important reason for the greater—if not spectacular—fecundity of the United States appears to be the relatively high rate of birth among its most religious families (the godless being also usually the most likely to be childless). It is fairly obvious that there is some direct, indissoluble bond between faith and the will to a future, or between the desire for a future and the imagination of eternity. And I think this is why post-Christian Europeseems to lack not only the moral and imaginative resources for sustaining its civilization, buteven any good reason for continuing to reproduce. There are of coursethose few idealists who harbor some kind of unnatural attachment to that misbegotten abomination, the European Union—thatgrandprojectfor forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity—but, apart from a bureaucratic superstate, providently and tenderly totalitarian, one cannot say what there is to expect from that quarter: certainly nothing on the order of some great cultural renewalthat might inspire a new zeal for having children. Unless one grants credence to the small but fashionable set that has of late been predictinga reviviscence of Christianity in Europe (in gay defiance of all tangible evidence), it seems certain that Europe will continue to sink into its demographic twilight, and increasingly to look like theland of the “last men” that Nietzsche prophesiedwould follow the “death of God:” a realm of sanctimony, petty sensualisms, pettier rationalisms, and a vaguely euthanasiac addiction to comfort. For, stated simply, against the withering boredomthat descends upon a culture no longer invaded by visions of eternal order, no civilization can endure.

However, as I say, this absolutedegree of modernity has never quite reached America’s shores. Obviously, in any number of ways, America is late modernity’s avant-garde; in popular culture, especially, so prolific are we in forms of brutal vapidity and intellectual poverty thatless enterprisingsavages can only marvel in impotent envy. Nevertheless, here alone among Western nations the total victory of the modern is not indubitable; there are whole regions of the country—geographical and social—where the sea of faith’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar is scarcely audible. There is in Americasomething that, while not “Christendom,” is notsimply “post-Christian” either;it is (for want of a better term) a “new antiquity.” In many ways, one might go so far as to say, the great difference between Europeans and Americans is that the formerare moderns and the latter ancients (if sometimes of a still rather barbarous sort); and the reasons for this are religious.

Though really it would be truer to say that, as Americans,we knowthe extremes of both antiquity and modernity; what we have never yet possessed is the middle term—a native civilization, with religion as a staid and stable institution uniformly supporting the integrity of the greater culture—that might have allowed for a transition from the one to the other. Thus it is the tension between the two that makes America exceptional, and that lends a certain credibilityboth to those who contemn her for being so menacingly religious and to those who despiseher for being so aggressively godless. In part because the United States broke from the old world at a fateful moment in history, in part because its immense geography preserves the restive peculiarities of various regions and social classes relatively inviolate, and so allows even the most exotic expressions of religious devotion to survive and flourish, it has never lost the impress ofmuch of the 17th century Protestantism—evangelistic, ecclesially deracinated, congregationalist, separatist—that providedit with its initial spiritual impulse. Hence Christendom could never die from within for us, as it has for the rest of the West; we fled from it long ago into an apocalyptic future, and so never quite suffered Europe’s total descent into the penury of the present.

Instead the United States, to the consternation of bien pensants here and abroad, is saturated in religion as no other developed nation is. Not only do 40% of its citizens claim to attend worship weekly,and 60% at least monthly (though those numbers have been disputed), but apparently—staggeringly—fewerthan 5% are willing to call themselves atheists or even agnostics. And an extraordinary number of the devout (at least in certain classes) are not merely pious, but God-haunted, apocalyptic, chiliastic, vulgarly religiose, and always living in the end times. Moreover, for most of us (even if we refuse to admit it), America itself is a kind of evangelical faith, a transcendent truth beyond the reach of historical contingency. Even our native secularism tends towards the fanatical. We remain believers. To some, of course, this American religiousness is simply anexasperatingly persistent residue of something obsolete, an alloy of which modernity has not yet entirely purged itself, andperhaps history will prove them right. But it is likely that such persons do not quite grasp the scale, potency, or creativity of the “ancient” aspect of America, and have little sense of its deepest wellsprings. —Which brings me back to the maenads of Dionysus.

In his account of Appalachian snake handling,Salvation on Sand Mountain (1995), Dennis Covington tells ofworshippers taking up serpents without being bitten and fire without being burned; ofa woman,seizedby raptures,emitting ecstatic cries of pain and pleasure, which Covington himself involuntarily accompanies with a tambourine; of the “anointed” losing themselves in what could only be called an erotic torment; of wild clamors of glossolalia, fervent invocation, and the throbbing din of Pentecostalist music; of the faithful suffering visions and uttering prophecies; even of his own experience of handling a snake, and of his sense of world and self, in that moment,disappearinginto an abyss of light. Nor is it unusual in many “Holiness” congregations for worshippers to fall to the ground writhing and “rolling” or—“slain in the Spirit”—to lapse into insensibility. Not that such forms of devotion are unknown in other parts of the developed world, but only here have they been so profuse, spontaneous, and genuinely indigenous. One might, for instance, adduce the 1801 week-long revival at Cane Ridge, whose orgiastic rites were celebrated by as many as twenty-five thousand worshippers; or the 1906 “new outpouring”of the scriptural “gifts” or “charisms” of the Holy Spirit—prophecy, speaking in tongues, miraculous healings, the casting out of demons, and so forth—upon the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, which gave birth to the “Pentecostalist” or “charismatic” spirituality that has spread throughout the global South more rapidly than any other form of Christianity in the modern world; examples are abundant.

And this is why I say Americans are “ancients:” not simply because, throughout the breadth of their continental empire, as in the world of late antiquity, there exists a vague civic piety ramifying into a vast diversity of religious expressions, even of the most mysterious and disturbing kind; but because here there are those to whom the god—or rather God or his angel—still appears. That sort of religion is immune to disillusion, as it has never coalesced into an “illusion;” it moves at the level of vision. In a country where such things are possible, and even somewhat ordinary, the future cannot be predicted with anycertitude.

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One must at least say of the old Christendomthat, if indeed it has died, it hasnonetheless left behind plentiful and glorious evidence of its vanishedmajesty: its millennial growths of etherealized graniteand filigreed marble,its exquisitely wrought silver, its vaults of gold:in all the arts miracles of immensity and delicacy. And the very desuetude of these remnants imbues them with a special charm. Just as the exuviae of cicadas acquiretheirmilky translucence and poignant fragility only in being evacuated of anything living, so the misty, haunting glamor of the churches of Francemight be invisible but for the desolation in their pews. Similarly, countless traces of the old social accommodations—laws, institutions, customs, traditions of education, public calendars, moral prejudices, in short all those complex “mediating structures” by which the old religion united, permeated, shaped, and preserved a Christian civilization—linger on, ruined, barren, but very lovely.

There is nothing in the least majestic, poignant, or “exuvial” about American religion, and not only because it possessed very little by way of mediating structures to begin with. If the vestigial Christianity of the old world presents one with the pathetic spectacle of shape without energy, the quite robust Christianity of the new world often presents one with the disturbing spectacle of energy without shape. It is not particularly original to observe that, in the dissolution of Christendom,Europe retained the bodywhile America inherited the spirit; but one sometimes wonders whether for “spirit” it would not be better to say “poltergeist.” It is true that the majority of observant Christians and Jews in the United States are fairly conventional in their practices and observances, and the “mainstream” denominations are nothing if not reserved. But, at its most unrestrained and disembodied, the American religious imagination drifts with astonishing ease towards the fantastical and mantic, the messianic and hermetic. We are occasionally given shockingreminders of this—when a communitarian separatist sect in Guyanaor a cult of comet-gazing castrati commits mass suicide, or when an encampment of deviant Adventists is incinerated by an inept Attorney General—but these are merely acute manifestationsof a chronic condition. The special genius of American religion (if that is what it is) is an inchoate, irrepressibly fissiparous force, a peregrine spirit of beginnings and endings (always re-founding the church and preparing for Armageddon), without any middle in which to come to rest.

In part, this is explicable simply in light of colonial history. The founding myth of the English settlements, after all, was in large part that of an evangelical adventure (as can be confirmed from the first Charter of Virginia, or the Mayflower Compact, or the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut),marked indelibly by covenantal Puritanism. Even the Anglican establishments in the Deep South, Virginia, and Maryland (a criminal imposition, in this last case, upon an aboriginal Catholicism) were deeply influenced by Puritan piety, as wereperhaps even the Presbyterian churches. Quakerism, principally in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, infused a mystical noncomformism into the colonies, while later immigrations of German Anabaptists—Mennonites, the Amish, Hutterites—imported a “free church” discipline of somewhat more rigorist variety, and perhaps something of radical Anabaptism’s apocalyptic utopianism (it would be difficult, at any rate, to be unimpressed by the similarities between the tragic history of the 1535 “Kingdom of Münster” and that of the compound at Waco). In time even small Pietist communities added their distinctive colorations. And so on. Though the churches of the magisterial reformation, the Church of England, and Catholicism found America fertile soil (as every religion does), the atmosphere in which they flourished was one permeated by a religious consciousness little bound to tradition, creed, hierarchy,or historical memory, but certain of its spiritual liberty and special election.

Which is whyone could argue that American religion found its first genuinely native expression during the great age of revivalism. The two Great Awakenings, early and late in the 18th century, the spread of evangelical Christianity throughout the southern states, the sporadic but powerful western revivals—all of these contributed to the larger synthesis by which contemporary American religion was fashioned. And from the revivalist impulse followed not only the broad main currents of American evangelical Protestantism, but innumerable more heterodox and inventive forms of Christianity: millenarian sects like theAdventists orJehovah’s Witnesses, spiritual or enthusiast movements like Pentecostalism,perhaps even (in a way) “transcendentalist” schools like the quasi-Swedenborgian Christian Scientists. Nor, indeed, are the differences in sensibility as great as one might imagine between all of mainstream evangelicalism and its more outlandishoffshoots(one need only consider the huge success of the ghastlyLeft Behind novels to realize that an appetite forluridly absurd chiliastic fantasiesis by no means confined to marginal sects.)