I don’t think we ever had our religion in the United States, at least not a true Biblical religion. From an early period, immigrants to this country considered themselves largely freed of the traditions of their home countries, including their Christian traditions. They thought to retain the title of `Christian’ without letting anyone tell them what they had to believe or do as a Christian.
Jacques Barzun discussed a more general version of this American trait in The House of Intellect by first acknowledging that:
We [in the United States] have in fact intelligence in plenty and we use it perhaps more widely than other nations, for we apply it with praiseworthy innocence to parts of life elsewhere ruled by custom or routine. [page 4]
But there is more to the human mind than our thoughts as individuals. In fact, none of us, not even an Augustine or a Newton or a Goethe, can accomplish much without a different form of intelligence which Barzun described in these words:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
As Barzun tells us, and as I discuss a little more in Intelligence vs. Intellect, Americans have far less intellect than individual intelligence. Most of us don’t consider this communal form of intelligence to be very important and, as a consequence, have only partial human minds. Even those of us who have struggled to develop a truer intellect have a bit of strangeness about us: as a thinker, I’m in conversation with a lot of dead human beings, individual and communal, and a fair number of non-Christians or even anti-Christians through their books. Even as I try to redevelop a respect for community, especially that ultimate community—the Body of Christ, I’m isolated. I’m active in many ways in my family and my parish, but so far as my mental life goes: I’m a hermit of the sort I would preach against.
Our radical individualism, a disease in my view and one spreading across the world even as we become enslaved radical individuals, is an indication of the anti-Biblical views which underly American forms of religion, even those forms labeled `fundamental Christianity’ or `Biblical Christianity’. The Bible speaks of the formation of a people, described as `Israel’ in the Old Testament and `Church’ or `the Body of Christ’ in the New Testament. Religions true to the Bible, Jewish or Christian, can’t co-exist with that individualism which is so deeply a part of the American soul.
There are many concerned about the possible loss of liberty in the West as our central governments react to real and exaggerated and imaginary problems by building the pieces of police states. The critics of our political and economic systems might, and sometimes do, claim this loss of liberty has come about because the mass of citizens in the West have largely lost their ties to the Christian faith which was the source of so much good in the political history of the West. In a way, this is what has happened but the more clearly stated truth, as I’ve already partially stated, is: our ancestors developed a defective liberty in the United States even as they walked into the wilderness and left behind their Christian beliefs and any attachments they had to one or another cultures which were part of Western Civilization.
[I’m jumping over many rough spots in this essay. The reader wishing a deeper understanding of these issues should read or reread Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses where a coherent position is presented: the masses of peoples of Europe were freed from parochial lives and limited viewpoints during the years of revolution, French and Industrial and so forth, but were never integrated more completely into Western Civilization. This is a very complicated story which can only be told by way of iterations and complex loops over a variety of historical and theological and metaphysical and sociological and political analyses. And more.]
Having grown up in liberal Protestantism, the modern Congregational Church no longer of the Puritans, I knew little of the doctrines of traditional Christianity. Even the Trinitarian doctrine was sung once each Sunday and then ignored in sermons and Sunday School lessons as if a little embarrassing to an American with any common sense. So far as I could tell, the adults in the congregation were mostly good and decent men and women who were Christians by way of a momentum rapidly dying away. I suspect they thought Jesus was both holy and a good man and we should all try to be more like him. But he probably didn’t walk on water and we shouldn’t try that either, though it’s as good a story as Puss in Boots. Few of those in my Sunday School classes remained practicing Christians once they were old enough to decide on their own. Having since entered the Catholic Church, I’ve come to realize that American Catholics are simply American Protestants who practice strange magical rituals and lag behind their Protestant brothers by a generation or so as we all march into the Brave New World.
American Christians, both Protestants and Catholics, have, to my observation, been accepting of the political and historical myths of this country but also have been quite skeptical about some major portion of the Gospel as understood and preached by traditional Christians. We accept that American leaders would never engage in criminal conspiracies against their own country and citizenry but we have serious doubts about the divinity of Jesus Christ. FDR was infallible in ordaining how this country was to care for its elderly but we Americans know it’s absurd to claim that guy over in Rome could be infallible in any way. As for that Catholic and Orthodox business about bread becoming the Body of God and wine becoming His Blood, well, cubes of Wonder bread and shot-glasses of grape-juice are easier to swallow.
We take sides in the arguments about the orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers without having a clue about the true meaning of `orthodox beliefs’, but we’re raised to walk to the fridge during commercial breaks and to similarly exercise our wills by forming opinions which are then defended as if we did know what we’re talking about. Americans have been, and are, quite dismissive of any understanding of the Sacraments which admit any objective, real-world effect. They tend to think of Heaven as a place for hordes of individuals to gather for worship of God and a generally good time of a well-behaved sort. The Body of Christ is no more than a term to designate that gathering of individuals. It isn’t a real entity. Christ is head of that Body in the way the American President is head of a collection of 300 million individualists.
In between my youth as a Congregationalist and my entry into the Catholic Church, I was a practicing Evangelical Protestant in a very good church community in the Atlanta area. I took away the impression that even Baptism is a mere sign and the real act of becoming a Christian occurs when we accept the Lord Jesus as our savior. Despite an official position that we can be saved only by God’s grace, American Evangelicals actually believe it is the public profession of our will to be saved that saves us. We Americans save our own individualistic selves.
In past essays, I’ve written about the tendency in the modern West to consider will as dominant over the mind. That tendency seeming to have begun with the radical Franciscan theologians at Oxford in the 14th century or so. Let me switch to the trio of mind, heart, and hands. As the Protestant rebellion against sacramental Christianity gathered steam along with similar rebellions inside the Catholic Church, mind and hands were both denigrated compared to heart, which would have been a disciplined heart in the thoughts of that radical Franciscan, William of Ockham, as well as in the thoughts of Calvin and Luther and various Catholic thinkers. In fact, mind and hands play a role in disciplining the heart. From my current view as a Monday morning quarterback, it’s hardly surprising that the wills of Western men have become rather flabby things capable only of soggy sentiments and corrupt desires. By now, this is also true of American Catholics and certainly American Episcopalians and probably Orthodox living in the United States. Indeed, this spiritual disease, this metastatic growth of an undisciplined will, seems to be little more in practice than an acquiescence to whatever our leaders tell us to think and feel and do. That is what we choose to will. I don’t think old George could have dreamed up the particulars of this Orwellian nightmare.
Without a well-disciplined Christian mind to shape itself and also guide the shaping of heart and hands, without Christian hands well-formed to good habits to actually deal with what lies outside of us, heart becomes a dangerous thing. It can become a little demon in our chests, whispering or roaring the Satanic desire: I will to control what is me and what is not me. The more cowardly of us might just think: I’ll eat and drink and smoke whatever appeals to me, and watch a lot of television.
In one of my early essays at a different website, What is Freedom?, I said:
In the modern world, we tend to think of freedom in terms of satisfying desires. To be sure, even many who live for that false sort of freedom seem to realize that we then become no more than our desires or, more horribly, the thwarting of those desires—a terrible and humiliating state in either case. Hannibal the Cannibal is the most free of all modern men because he has become his desires and he has gained the power to satisfy them. Hannibal the Cannibal is the role-model for our politicians and our lawyers, our investment bankers and our corporate executives, our athletes and our entertainers. He may even be a role-model for many clergymen.
We can restore Christianity worthy of the name only if we try to heal our entire selves, mind and heart and hands, with the mind of the creative trailblazers necessarily taking a primary and guiding role, but other parts and other human beings should be quickly joining in. In fact, I’m beginning to fear it will take the fresh minds of a new generation freed from our school systems and mass entertainment to follow any who might be trailblazers. [Be careful. We heal our selves only by shaping those selves by way of active responses to God’s Creation, not by concentrating too much on our own selves or a human leader. We and our leaders are part of what we should respond to, but only part.]
It’s hardly surprising to me that many in the United States have decided it’s not worthwhile to even pretend they are Christians or Jews when the guy with the clipboard comes by to measure the American soul, but some, including insightful and learned scholars and critics, see more true Christianity in the American past than I do. One of the Liberty Fund websites has published this different take on this issue: The ‘Nones’ and American Liberty. It is a highly intelligent perspective worth the read even if my view is more plausible, as I believe it to be. Near the end of essay, we find this quote from Tocqueville which, in terms of Eric Voegelin’s critique of the modern world, recommends we turn and start crawling back up the slippery slope, maybe halfway up would be good:
So it is that every day it [American democracy which glorifies equality] renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all these things; it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.’
I have a great deal of respect for Tocqueville and we should remember he wrote these words as a young man in a Brave New World where he had to develop new forms of perception and new tools of analysis even as he was exploring the newly revealed landscape and soulscape. Yet, I don’t see how a return to a Christianity based on a mutilated human nature, “Will is what will save us,” can help much. Tocqueville in these words, part of a critique of democracy, was speaking of a will (a part of what I call `heart’) which had weakened exactly because it had been glorified over mind and hands and too much had been expected of that will. Even more important than the excessive expectations is the fact that the American understanding of Christian man glorifies a mutilated human being and such creatures could never establish stable moral order, the basis of other sorts of order in our political and economic and cultural lives. Nor can such creatures be comfortable with a truer form of Christianity, sacramental in outlook and Sacramental in liturgical practice.
This is the optimistic viewpoint: God is smashing what we’ve misbuilt and our grandchildren will have a chance to build a better Christian civilization. There is still the small chance, getting smaller rapidly, that we will stir up enough creative turmoil that we can revive and reform Western Civilization. I’m not counting on it though I’m ever hopeful that I’m only one of many who are beginning to work to that goal. I wouldn’t think it possible to have any revival from inside the power structures or academic institutions or ecclesiastical institutions of the West. Individuals inside the power structures and institutions might participate but those structures and institutions will struggle to survive by suppressing reforms. At this point, I can recommend Carroll Quigley’s The Evolution of Civilization for a discussion of these latter issues and for short narratives of two times when Western Civilization did manage to pull out of a collapse to become greater than it had been. Not entirely by coincidence, this book has been republished by Liberty Fund, a good organization if a bit biased toward an excessively individualistic viewpoint.