Blasts From The Past (addendum)

As I reviewed yesterday's post, I realized in some places it was very vague.  So today I'm posting part one of "The Polite Escape Revisited" which brings clarity to Harry's point about how the immigration experience of becoming American of necessity was/is a secularization process  involving a replacement of their belief in an Absolute being to believing in the The Republic as their new, reliable faith and Absolute being.  This explains much about the current fervor of the destitute and depleted among us who voted for their belief in a "deliverer" who had attached himself to The Republic.

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The Polite Escape Revisited (Part One)                                         (November 18, 2004)

Back in 1982 Harry Ausmus published his first book, The Polite Escape: On the Myth of Secularization.  I helped Harry with some preliminary editing, and the reading I did in that book has stuck with me.  It has re-surfaced now as I struggle to explain the difficulties some of us are having with this surge of “morality” and otherworldliness we’re facing in our culture.  By the way, I recommend the book, though, to be honest, it will send you to the library for further reading.

Harry (undergraduate divinity degree, PhD. in history) had some pretty specific ideas about American religion and how it works in our culture.  He got a great deal of his thinking from Will Herberg’s Protestant Catholic Jew, a study of how the immigrant experience effectively secularized the religion of America’s people.  Other studies have been done of how the land itself (the “wilderness”) effected the same result.  For Harry, this idea bore out Reinhold Niebuhr’s idea of “Christian realism” (which trickled down from Neitzsche, who announced that God had died…but not that belief and faith had died…more on Niebuhr in Part Two).

Harry’s idea that the secularization process in US is more myth than reality is based in the idea that the process involves both transference (state as metaphor of religion) and transformation (state as the religion).  That is, through the pressures of assimilation (social, economic and political) all major religions upon import to US conflate to a belief system that is The Republic, so that to be an American is to believe primarily in Americanism, a shared faith in the fundamental tenets and understandings associated with The Republic (freedom, opportunity, “democracy”, capitalism, “the pursuit of happiness”).  Because the established religions people bring with them are indicators of a first principle taboo, the religious indicators are reduced to secondary status and, in some cases, diluted so that they conform to the social and economic pressures of The Republic (e.g., alternative scheduling of services for Catholics, majority of Jews indistinguishable in their attire from the general population, etc.).  Especially in the US, the secularization process, for Harry, is a myth, because it does not create secularism; it creates a religion that is The Republic.

This religion of The Republic works pretty well until The Republic as a culture of people confronts extraordinary stress from the real world that challenges the peoples’ faith.  The Republic, after all, functions in a calm real world but seems arbitrary and uncertain during times of stress.   At times like this (The Mexican War, the 1850s, Reconstruction and the elections of 1876 and 1896, McCarthyism and Vietnam), people choose to default to an Absolute faith, one that contains a fundamental mystery, their familiar religion.  Harry sees references to faith in virtually all institutions of The Republic; the word federal comes from Latin fede, meaning faith, we trust in God on our currency, we have The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and even the single optic hovering above the unfinished pyramid on the $1 bill is based in faith, the all-seeing eye of divinity.  And so on. 

Harry’s theory is interesting and challenging.  Most of his critics think his last two chapters evoke optimism.  Perhaps, but then they didn’t have the long conversations I had with Harry.  Harry was essentially cynical about Americans specifically and humans generally.  Harry’s opinion was that most Americans prefer to speak little about their faith and that by speaking little we sort of live within our own myth of secularism.  We prefer to believe we live blissfully in a condition of separation of church and state.  But in fact, because we remain Americans, we are fooling ourselves to believe so.

Tomorrow's post will be related to these two posts, in that I will be demonstrating that we have shibboleths in our conversational usage and mind set that fit very neatly into our religion as Republic.