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 nation’s 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 America’s 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 XXIII’s promise of renewal through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council sputter into factionalism and, later, the moral authority of their leaders—from parish priests to scarlet-clad cardinals—compromised 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 nation’s second largest—after 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 Israel’s 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 or—like the Mormons, the Disciples of Christ, and other new movements of the day—sought 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 happened—or is even understandable—apart 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.
Five movements in the second half of the twentieth century were of such consequence for American religion that I have devoted a chapter to each: the civil rights movement, especially in the person of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the antiwar movement, especially in the figures of the Berrigan brothers and their clerical allies; the women’s movement, particularly in its efforts to advance a feminist reinterpretation of the Bible and a feminist rewrite of beloved Protestant hymns; the Liberation Theology movement, particularly in its conflict with American foreign policy in Nicaragua and other Catholic countries of Central America; and the Evangelical/Pentecostal movement, particularly as it impacted American politics.
The underlying premise of the pages that follow can be simply put: how Americans got religion determined the kind of religion they got. For example, in the Fifties, most people acquired a religion through parents, extended family networks, neighborhoods, and the religious institutions nested there. What part of the country you lived in also mattered, as the Atlas of American Religion visually attests. Religion acquired this way is what I call “embedded religion.”
Conversely, as the civil rights movement took on a momentum all its own, activists, from all sorts of religious beliefs (and none), joined King’s crusade. To be in “the movement” was to assume a new group identity as “brothers and sisters” yoked together in “the struggle” for racial equality. Or the struggle to end the war in Vietnam, or the struggle to liberate women from the grip of “patriarchy”—two of the more percussive movements in a menu of Sixties and Seventies causes. Those so yoked just “happened to be” from Detroit or San Francisco or Louisville and just “happened to be” Presbyterian or Unitarian or Quaker. Beliefs, behaviors, and belonging acquired in this way constitute what I call “movement religion.”
Although the decades of the last half century unfolded sequentially (as decades always do), the various ways in which Americans got religion, beginning in the late Sixties, occurred almost simultaneously. Hence the chapters that follow are organized thematically and should be read like the leaves of a palimpsest, one overlaying without erasing what came before. After all, most Americans still acquire at least their initial religious orientation from their parents and local surroundings.
Now, why being there matters. Many historians have examined segments of this story, the best of them well sourced in the work of journalists who reported events as they happened. History done at a distance in time and place allows larger patterns to emerge, and connections to be made, and I have benefited from books of that kind. But history at a distance often bears the watermarks of a research project. I’ve attended lectures where speakers discussed events I either witnessed personally or wrote about from files sent to me by Newsweek correspondents on the scene. “No, that’s not quite the way it really was,” I found myself muttering, “not that way at all.” Which is why I decided to write this book.
Being there did matter and being there does matter. It mattered in Vietnam when correspondents watched napalmed children trying to outrun their own burning flesh. Being there means remembering, as I do here, a Sandinista pilot in Nicaragua offering me his roll of toilet paper while I was deep on assignment, even though that was his allotment for the entire week. Being there allows for “aha” moments like the afternoon I watched Billy Graham watching himself preach on videotape, all the while assuring me that we were not hearing Billy Graham speaking but God speaking through Billy Graham. Being there means feeling the iron grip of the Dalai Lama as he welcomes you into his home in Dharamsala. It makes you realize that Buddhism’s doctrinal dismissal of the body as ephemeral doesn’t preclude a reincarnated Buddhist deity from daily workouts toning his. In many ways, it is personal accounts that give breath to the body of past events. How things looked and felt, used judiciously, helps the reader understand the way things were and in turn sheds light on why things are the way they are now.
The chapters that follow represent an exercise in what I call “lived history,” though perhaps not the kind that some professional historians mean by that term. The reader will encounter lots of I’s and my’s and me’s in passages of memoir and autobiography—plus quite a few stories of the kind that journalists like to tell whenever they gather over drinks. The aim, as I examine the intersection of faith, culture, and politics over the last fifty years, is not to insert myself, Zelig-like, into every scene but to insert the reader into the past as my companion. I want the reader to see what I saw, hear what I heard.
At its most basic level, history can be seen as a collection of stories. The first historians were really storytellers. And telling stories, of course, is what journalists are paid to do. Like other journalists, I had to learn my subject on the job. Inevitably, we journalists became participant-observers—participant because the stories we published mediated to readers the meaning of what we observed. Hence the more personal meaning of my title, Getting Religion.
My goal in writing this book is twofold: to provide an account of American religion, culture, and politics over the past fifty years by someone who was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to witness events and people in ways that others never could or did, and to challenge some competing narratives through my personal reflections on what happened and why.
Without Newsweek magazine I could not have written this book, or even conceive of it as a book that I could write. Beginning in 1964 as religion editor, I spent thirty-eight years as a writer in its service—longer, I am told, than any other writer in the history of the magazine. Over that span, I reported and wrote stories from five continents, a body of some one thousand articles, essays, and book reviews, including more than seventy cover stories. Fortunately, I’ve kept copies of nearly everything I’ve written. Just by rereading them I can readily summon up in an almost Proustian way the circumstances behind each piece. Accordingly, Newsweek and its specific newsroom culture are present throughout this book, much like the stage set of a play. Here again, how you got your information can influence the information you got.
A note on endnotes: Any quotations not sourced are taken from my own taped interviews, notebooks, and stories I wrote for Newsweek and other publications. I do, of course, source quotes and ideas derived from others. But I have reserved the endnotes mainly for brief additions, amplifications, and asides that otherwise would have interrupted narrative flow. A list of books consulted appears in the Bibliography.
I want to thank historians Grant Wacker of the Duke Divinity School, Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School, and Philip Gleason of the University of Notre Dame for their comments and criticism of the text. Now emeriti, all three were around when events here revisited occurred. As with my other books, I owe multiple debts of gratitude to my wife, Betty, who makes a few appearances in these pages. Fortunately, in a marriage of true hearts, spouses never achieve emeritus status.