The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief
By George M. Marsden
Basic Books, New York. 264 pages
George M. Marsden is one of the premiere Christian historians and historians of Christianity in our time. His “Fundamentalism and American Culture” (1980) continues to be the standard book on the subject more than three decades after its publication, and his biography “Jonathan Edwards: A Life” (2003) is universally acclaimed and a winner of the prestigious Bancroft award. His newest book, “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief,” looks back at a decade when America’s power and prestige in the world were at their zenith. Yet, ironically, it was also a time of intellectual crisis as the Enlightenment principles upon which the nation was founded were rapidly eroding into dust and shards.
America’s founding fathers, Marsden explains, shared views common to the 18th century Enlightenment: a belief in a benign Creator, human freedom and equality, natural laws that governed the physical universe, moral laws applicable to all human beings and the power of human reason to detect and comprehend them all. These truths, which they believed to be self-evident, formed the common ground upon which the nation was built. They were the essential principles behind the constitution and of all civil society.
The problem, however, was that by the 1950s they were no longer credible to most intellectuals. Over the previous century, as Darwinian evolution gained sway among biologists, social scientists had embraced an evolutionary theory of society in lieu of the founding fathers’ belief in natural law. Societies, in this view, were not founded on immutable and self-evident truths; rather, they simply erected social structures, laws and customs that evolved over time. In the view of liberals in the 1950s, this was the true strength of America, for the “American way” represented the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
Chastened by the brutal excesses of communism and fascism, intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger in “The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom” (1949) argued that old-isms and extreme ideologies should be set aside in favor of a politics that embraced a pragmatic, gradualist approach that sought to advance “human and libertarian values.” In effect, leaders should seek the “vital center,” the consensus vision of the broad, well-informed, non-dogmatic middle-range of people. In this approach there was no room for romantic dreams, and humankind would never devise a workable utopia. The best that could be done would be to achieve proximate and provisional solutions to problems as they arose.
Schlesinger’s “vital center,” of course, was mostly made up of intellectual leaders who were liberal-to-centrist in their politics and northeastern in their geography. They didn’t so much exclude as simply ignore other voices — blacks, women, Southerners and various minorities who, for them, were generally invisible. The leading intellectuals of the Protestant establishment were given an honored place and their voices a respectful hearing in this society, but, in fact, they were seen by secular leaders only as “useful allies,” not movers and shakers.
This was a society that for many “made sense,” as Marsden says in the first line of his book, for we had won the war, had a booming economy and were the leaders of the free world. Yet this was also the “age of anxiety.” Americans worried not only about the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Soviet aggression and nuclear annihilation, but also about the erosion of the American character. Our material success had led to a vacuous commercial culture, bland conformity in the suburbs and mind-numbing inanity on popular television.
Erich Fromm warned in “The Sane Society” (1955) that Americans were in danger of losing their humanistic values and becoming “part of the machine, rather than its master.” Similarly, David Riesman in “The Lonely Crowd” (1950) explained that in the Middle Ages people were “tradition-directed,” in the Renaissance and Reformation they became “inner-directed,” but in recent decades they had become “other-directed” — that is, rather than being shaped by the outside force of a specific tradition or ideas that had become internalized, modern people were simply shaped by “mass culture.” Popular literature echoed these themes, including such arresting novels as J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951), Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (1952), Sloan Wilson’s “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” (1955), and William Whyte’s “The Organization Man” (1957). There was also the memorable movie “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955).
Alone among the social commentators of the period, Walter Lippmann dared to offer a solution. In “Essays in the Public Philosophy” (1955), Lippmann reminded Americans that their nation had been founded on the Enlightenment principle that “there was a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed.” The thinkers of the 18th century may have disagreed about particulars, but all were certain that there was a higher moral order based on natural law. Lippmann urged Americans to reestablish this “public philosophy,” accepting that in a pluralistic society there would have to be some limits on freedom. In a decade traumatized by McCarthyism, many commentators were quick to dismiss Lippmann as out of step with the liberty and pragmatism prized by liberals — and in some ways he was. Marsden astutely observes that Lippmann’s “heresy was to say that his liberal colleagues were trying to build a public consensus based on inherited principles, even after they had dynamited the foundations on
which those principles had first been established.” Curiously, in these same years, Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to a “higher moral law” to defend the Civil Rights Movement, never more effectively than while invoking Augustine and Aquinas in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963). American liberals applauded King’s conclusions but not his reasoning. As Lippmann observed, they embraced natural rights even though they had rejected the underlying principles that made them defensible. The black civil rights leaders who followed King and those who subsequently sought equal rights for women and gays generally abandoned his approach, preferring to base their arguments on “identity politics” rather than universal truths.
And where were the religious voices in this hey-day of the Protestant establishment? Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman was offering “Peace of Mind” (1946), Norman Vincent Peal “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952), and Billy Graham “Peace with God” (1953). In other words, religion was presented as a private matter, a field of human activity dedicated to self-fulfillment. The public dimension of religion was simply the American civil religion. Martin Marty, in “The New Shape of American Religion” (1959), quoted Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake to sum this up as “humanistic nationalism.” Blake explained that the typical American’s “articles of faith are science (in its engineering application), common sense (his own ideas), the Golden Rule (in its negative form), sportsmanship, and individual independence.”
The prophetic voice that attempted to counter this insipid American conformity was that of Reinhold Niebuhr. Yet, Marsden contends, for all of the insight and brilliance Niebuhr brought to bear as a critic of American civil religion, he presented “a generalized Christianity that offered little to challenge most of the secularizing trends that he himself identified.”
The consensus politics of the 1950s were doomed to failure. Already in the mid-1950s, William Buckley and others were forming a conservative counterattack. Most important, the consensus did not survive the social revolution of the 1960s because mere pragmatism was not sufficient to decide the moral issues that rivaled the era — racial equality, the sexual revolution, feminism, the Vietnam War, homosexuality and abortion.
In the 1970s America saw the rise of the Religious Right, whose most articulate early spokesman, Francis Schaeffer, critiqued the secular humanism and moral relativism that he believed predominated in America. In 1979 this movement took on an institutional form when Jerry Falwell established the Moral Majority — a great irony, Marsden points out, because Fundamentalists in the 1950s had been cultural outsiders but were now assuming the mantle of “true insiders.” Politicized Fundamentalists exacerbated the cultural divisions in the country by reducing complex issues to simple dichotomies — for example, offering a stark choice between Christianity and secular humanism. Liberals often took this rhetorical posturing seriously, believing incorrectly that the Religious Right posed a real threat to liberty, a reign of would-be Puritan ayatollahs.
And so the center did not hold, and America since the 1970s has been beset by “culture wars.”
In the final section of his book Marsden proposes that Dutch theologian/politician Abraham Kuyper’s notion of “common grace” may provide a way out. He believes that new common ground may be found in the Christian idea that God’s grace extends to all human beings so that everyone — Christians, secularists and others — should have a place at the table and be given a respectful hearing. Unfortunately, Marsden does not develop this idea sufficiently for the reader to know how it would work in practice. He admits, moreover, that there are some religious differences that good will alone cannot reconcile or mollify. One might also ask why secularists would accept a Christian concept of equality as a common ground for public discourse.
What Marsden writes of one of Niebuhr’s essays can also be said of his book: “What is striking … is the disparity between the profundity of the diagnosis and the superficiality of the prescription.” I suspect that for all his assertions about “common grace” Marsden, when push came to shove, would be forced to revert to some form of 1950s-style pragmatism — the very thing he says will no longer work in our fractured society.
Nevertheless, this is an important book because the problem that it highlights, the lack of a philosophical foundation for American society, is only likely to produce more acute divisions in the years ahead. The mainstream culture is swiftly coming to accept homosexual ministers and marriages, but what’s next? Why not plural marriages? Why not euthanasia? In a pluralistic culture are there any legitimate moral boundaries beyond the prohibition of impinging on another’s rights or freedoms?
If the answer to the latter question is no, American Protestant Christians may finally have to embrace the paradigm shift that we have all been resisting since the 1960s: Christianity in the United States is no longer the dominant belief system of the nation, and, therefore, if we are to have any relevance in the wider culture, we must present a clear alternative. That is, we must become a genuine counterculture.
I don’t mean the easy counterculturalism of the minister who takes a few safe swings at the misdeeds of society in a Sunday morning sermon but all the rest of the week, by word and example, is a living endorsement of the status quo. Rather, we must became as countercultural as the early Christians were within the Roman Empire or as the Reformation-era Anabaptists were in Europe. To do this, Christians in America will need to grapple honestly and comprehensively with what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ in a pluralistic and predominately secular society. If we are truly faithful and courageous in this undertaking, we may find ourselves in the uncomfortable and certainly unfamiliar position of being a shrinking and contemptible minority.
MICHAEL PARKER is director of graduate studies and professor of church history at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt.
