Will Herberg: from right to right.

Will Herberg: From Right to Right

IN A NOTE to Robert Hessen of the Hoover Institution discussing this book, Sidney Hook wondered how anyone could take Will Herbert "seriously as a thinker." Hook's question betrayed the bitterness of his battles with Herberg, going back to the Thirties. Hook and Herberg had fought furiously as Marxists, and they again disagreed as prominent anti-Communists. One was (and is) a religious skeptic and a democratic socialist; the other celebrated a redemptive history that he identified with Judaeo-Christianity.

In a certain sense, these two intellectuals represented different phases of postwar conservatism. Hook's view of things, it may be said with some over-simplification, has triumphed on the Right over Herberg's, give or take a few dissenting voices. The reason has not been Hook's polemics against religion: most conservatives even today would hesitate to describe themselves as atheists. Instead, Hook's triumph can be seen in the fact that most self-described conservatives (and a fortiori neoconservatives) glorify material progress and social equality while looking toward a universal democratic culture. The Right, in short, has become the home of cold-war liberalism.

Pointing this out is not "to make faces at history," a practice Herberg deplored. Rather, it is to note what has happened in the last thirty years. And the change in the direction of American conservatism over that period has created a problem that Harry J. Ausmus fails to address: hardly anyone today will feel compelled to read this biography of a figure whose impact the biographer never makes clear. Despite the multiple printings of Judaism and Modern Man (1951) and Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), and despite his provocative essays for NATIONAL REVIEW, Christian Century, and Modern Age, Herberg's life and accomplishments are by now unknown except to historians of the Fifties and some older conservatives.

Neither Ausmus nor Martin E. Marty, who introduces the book, demonstrates convincingly Herberg's importance. Indeed it is difficult even for me, as his onetime devotee and personal friend, to recognize his vibrancy in this well-researched but plodding biography. Ausmus uses a topical breakdown of Herberg's opinions, which provides a sense of comprehensiveness but does nothing to reveal the fiery personality of the man Ursula Niebuhr once compared to the converted St. Paul.

Despite these structural and stylistic limitations, Ausmus, by the end of his book, has told us a great deal about Herberg. He also give clues as to why Herberg and the older Right drifted away from the newer Right after the 1960s. Herberg lived in a divided universe between his theology of sin and redemption and his generally indulgent view of American life. Though Herberg professed to believe in the Judaic tradition (which he tried to distinguish from mere Rabbinic law), Ausmus is correct in stressing Herberg's providential, indeed Protestant, outlook. Herberg admired the Pauline emphasis on "the scandal of the Cross" and Luther's insistence on "letting God be God." He praised Reinhold Niebuhr not for his pragmatic liberalism, but for his appreciation of human frailty and the divine hand in history.

It may be argued that Herberg saw a special grace being showered on Americans. Even in Protestant, Catholic, Jew, a work intermittently critical of American religious shallowness, the overshadowing theme is the steady integration of immigrants, through their churches and synagogues, into a distinctly American way of life. Though in the final chapter he scolds Americans for abandoning authentic Judaeo-Christian religiosity, the book seemed upbeat to many of its readers, including myself. Herberg himself clung to its arguments, in the face of challenging evidence from Nathan Glazer, Gerhard Lenski, and Edward Laumann. These and other sociologists suggested that primary social relations in America were more closely correlated to clas than to religious affiliation.

By the Seventies, also, the Balkanization of America was under way, as racial and ethnic minorities began to assert their spiraling claims against WASP America. Even in the teeth of these challenges, Herberg continued until his death to speak of America's absorbing the children and grandchildren of immigrants through three Americanizing religions, all teaching patriotism and good work habits.

The erupting counterculture in the Sixties disturbed Herberg far less than it did Hook and the incipient neoconservatives. What horrified him considerably more was the liberalization of Cristian churches, particularly the watering down of dogma. He never tired of reminding his Christian readers and students at Drew University that fallen man, in Paul's words, was "groaning" under the burden of sin. As for the hippies in his classes, as long s they behaved,he was sure he could get through to them. In any case, they would mature with time, just as he and his generation had outgrown the Communist movement. Nowhere in any of Herberg's writings or remarks does one find the Sixties described as a menacing watershed, except when he speaks of reforms in the Catholic Church and inroads by American secularizers.

Herberg was also convinced that America would soon solve its racial problems--the way it had overcome its ethnic problems in the past. He quoted The Unheavenly City by Edward Banfield, which presented blacks as the most recently arrived unskilled laborers living in large cities. Blakcs were unhappy because of diminishing opportunities for unskilled labor. The disintegration of their communities and the criminal proclivities of black youths, Herberg thought, would end once the riots were put down and job training was made available.

Herberg's optimism about American life was unrelated to a belief in the goodness of human nature. Nor did he hold any brief for the progressive doctrines of his time: his view on sexual roles was defiantly medieval. But he did love America, his adopted land; and, like other paleoconservatives, he did not feel directly threatened by the assaults of the counterculture. It was not his career or vision of progress lying under the rubble at Columbia, Berkeley, or Cornell. The battles of the Sixties and Seventies created new lines of division, between Hook and his disciples and the unruly Left. From Ausmus's biography it should be apparent that these were not the battles that stirred Herberg's blood.