Modern American Religion: Under God Indivisible 1941-60.

I read this third volume of Marty's history of religion in America while on vacation in Florida last summer. While hardly a "page turner," it is, as everything Marty writes, well done. Florida was also the appropriate place for me to read it. Florida is my home state, and I had lived there on the Gulf Coast during the years Marty chronicles. It was there that I first knew about (to the degree that I did at all) Fulton Sheen on the television, Senator Joe McCarthy lambasting the Communists, and Paul Blanshard (a bete noire to us) doing the same to the Catholics, while every Notre Dame football victory was considered a fifth mark of the One True Church.

Marty's book is not simply a chronicle of this period. It is, rather, an interpretive history of American religion from the start of our involvement in World War II to the end of the period of Protestant hegemony, an end symbolized by the election of John F. Kennedy. Marty shows that the period of the war engendered a certain honest if papered-over religious consensus in order to focus on a common enemy. Just think of those army units in Hollywood movies composed of a spectrum of Irish, Jewish, Polish, Southern, and African-American names.

In the postwar period, however, there was a real fear among some Protestant commentators that Catholics (growing in numbers, education, and economic strength) might overwhelm the culture - a fear not assuaged by the situation in countries like Spain where the Catholic majority was less than tolerant of Protestant minorities.

The religious scene was not simply one of polarities. Apart from the articulation of a "civic faith" (of which Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, and Jew was paradigmatic) and the tensions between liberals and conservatives within Protestantism, there were the more vexatious and deeper questions. Where did the African-American fit into this picture? What to do about the genteel (and not so genteel: I remember Florida motels with the "restricted clientele" signs) anti-Semitism in the culture? Could one legitimately combine piety and patriotism (a kind of religion ruthlessly satirized by writers like Peter DeVries and Flannery O'Connor)? How did the evangelicals fit into this picture? The 1950s, after all, saw the rise of evangelists like Billy Graham who would play their part on the national scene.

Marty skillfully weaves these disparate threads together by means of this thesis: that to the tradition which strove for consensus, ecumenical and interreligious cooperation, and a healthy symbiosis of faith and culture, there was a countertradition which was critical, resistant, aggressive, and skeptical of the culture. Nonetheless, Marty sees the Eisenhower years as a time when there was a broad, if shaky, national consensus emerging, shaped somewhat by the cold war, but heading for trouble in the 1960s - a period which he will address in his next volume.

The most attractive feature of Marty's book is his skillful use of popular culture to flesh out his history. He examines at length, for example, Will Herberg's three religious groups by discussing a trio of postwar best-sellers: Joshua Liebman's Peace of Mind; Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul; and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. All were best sellers; all reflected the optimism of the period; all attempted to speak to a broad audience; and all are period pieces. Liebman wrote without any serious discussion of the Holocaust; Sheen's book had, sotto voce, Liebman in mind; and Peale's book was quintessential spiritual uplift. What strikes me as curious is that Marty does not mention the single most influential and popular Catholic book of the postwar period (still in print and still widely read): Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which sold 600,000 copies in its first year. If there ever was a book that told a story counter to the sweetness and light of Liebman, Sheen, and Peale, it was Merton's (very unecumenical!) conversion autobiography. Ask any committed Catholic of my age (especially if he or she were tempted to the religious life), and that individual will tell you that Merton's book was a powerful influence.

In fairness to Marty, he stipulates that he sought out representative persons - largely Caucasian males - who did the writing, organizing, etc. That did not permit him to drop a step below intellectual history to reflect on (in the case of Catholics) the crucial impact of parochial education and the seminal role of such innovative women as Sister Madeleva who, among other things, developed the first graduate program in theology for women in this country.

Alas, I am asking Martin Marty to write a different book with different parameters. What he has chosen to do he has done exceedingly well. Volume 3 only makes me wish that volume 4 be not far behind.