Pagan America
Around the corner from my house stands a Southern Baptist church, across the street from the Garden Court housing projects. It's not my church, not my tradition at all, but my ex-girlfriend Lis and Luke and I went down there sometimes, dressed in our best, and sat up in the back, and heard beautiful, intense, moving musical performances. All for the cost of fanning yourself on a hot summer night and slipping a fin into the collection plate, I heard gospel music acts that put to shame any of the rock club and arena shows I've seen.
And in the same neighborhood, I lie in bed at night sometimes and hear the Amish buggies rumble down the street late on Sundays, or early on market days. I buy my apples and celery from Amish market stands, and flirt with the young girls in the bonnets (who flirt right back, because they know it's safe). They do sing, strangely and in Pennsylvania German and through their noses, but dirt and soil are their acts of faith. They don't raise voices, they raise vegetables.
And this is Christianity in America, and that is Christianity in America, and they are as unlike from one another as each is from the clean, spare, silent Quaker meetings I attended in Chester County or the snake-handling cults I could find driving down I-81 into Eastern Tennessee. The Amish sell corn to the black Baptists. They recognize each other as co-religionists. They think they ultimately speak to the same god. Spiritually, they have nothing else in common.
America is a Christian nation. I used to resist that, but now I accept it. Yet it's no more unified in its religion than ancient Rome was in its faiths. Or modern India. They are a collective tradition of individualist faiths. And so is America, a polytheistic religious culture under the very elastic tent of "Judeo-Christian monotheism."
Most modern polytheists don't worship all the gods at once, and I suspect most ancient ones didn't either. They respected them all, they felt close to one or two. Just so in America, a person can be raised Catholic, can attend Unitarian services in college, can be an agnostic in his 30s, can marry and join his wife in a Presbyterian pew, and can find himself in a Quaker meeting in old age. Religion in America can be a journey through faith, not a one-note symphony.
That quality in America is not an accident; it (and the British reformation that set it up) are the reason America can be what it is. The founders knew that they could set religion free of all government cognizance, because the multiplicity of sects in the nation would be checked by each other, and all would make concessions for their mutual benefit. Madison put it perfectly in "The Federalist":
Or, as Voltaire said of the Mother Country; "If only one religion were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary. If there were but two, the people would cut one another's throats. But as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace."
In reading Gertrude Himmelfarb's "The Roads to Modernity, I'm reminded how lucky we were to avoid the fate of France.
The "fundamentalist secularism" of modern Europe was born then. Edward Gibbon is considered an arch-Christian-basher by many today. I adore his notorious 24th chapter for its body-slamming of early Christianity back into its proper historical context. Yet visiting Paris in 1763, he noted the "intollerant zeal" of the philosophes, who "preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt."
Even Hume, another of my agnostic heroes, did not shout "Ecrasez l'infâme." "[Hume] displayed in his writings a tolerance toward religion and a benign view of it typical of most of his colleagues, If he did not make of religion the source of morality, he did regard it as a natural ally of the morality inherent in man. Reason and religion had equal but separate functions, reason providing the general rules of right and wrong, and religion reinforcing those rules by the commands and laws of the deity."
That's who we are; we give lip service to our fundamentalism, and the people who dislike America on principle will gladly stop there. But if you lift the lid on this culture of faith, which so appalls the modern Europeans, you find a rich pagan stew simmering happily inside.
And in the same neighborhood, I lie in bed at night sometimes and hear the Amish buggies rumble down the street late on Sundays, or early on market days. I buy my apples and celery from Amish market stands, and flirt with the young girls in the bonnets (who flirt right back, because they know it's safe). They do sing, strangely and in Pennsylvania German and through their noses, but dirt and soil are their acts of faith. They don't raise voices, they raise vegetables.
And this is Christianity in America, and that is Christianity in America, and they are as unlike from one another as each is from the clean, spare, silent Quaker meetings I attended in Chester County or the snake-handling cults I could find driving down I-81 into Eastern Tennessee. The Amish sell corn to the black Baptists. They recognize each other as co-religionists. They think they ultimately speak to the same god. Spiritually, they have nothing else in common.
America is a Christian nation. I used to resist that, but now I accept it. Yet it's no more unified in its religion than ancient Rome was in its faiths. Or modern India. They are a collective tradition of individualist faiths. And so is America, a polytheistic religious culture under the very elastic tent of "Judeo-Christian monotheism."
Most modern polytheists don't worship all the gods at once, and I suspect most ancient ones didn't either. They respected them all, they felt close to one or two. Just so in America, a person can be raised Catholic, can attend Unitarian services in college, can be an agnostic in his 30s, can marry and join his wife in a Presbyterian pew, and can find himself in a Quaker meeting in old age. Religion in America can be a journey through faith, not a one-note symphony.
In the polytheistic religion each individual worshiper has a chosen deity (ista-devata) and does not usually worship other gods in the same way as his own, as the one he feels nearer to himself. Yet he acknowledges other gods. The Hindu, whether he be a worshiper of the Pervader (Visnu), the Destroyer (Siva), Energy (Sakti), or the Sun (Surya), is always ready to acknowledge the equivalence of these deities as the manifestations of distinct powers springing from an unknown 'Immensity.' ... During the pilgrimage of life he goes from one temple to another, adopts different forms of ritual, different modes of living, and various means of self-development. He is constantly aware of the coexistence of different approaches to divinity, suitable for people at stages of realization different from his own. [Alain Danielou, "Hindu Polytheism," 1964]
That quality in America is not an accident; it (and the British reformation that set it up) are the reason America can be what it is. The founders knew that they could set religion free of all government cognizance, because the multiplicity of sects in the nation would be checked by each other, and all would make concessions for their mutual benefit. Madison put it perfectly in "The Federalist":
"A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source."
Or, as Voltaire said of the Mother Country; "If only one religion were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary. If there were but two, the people would cut one another's throats. But as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace."
In reading Gertrude Himmelfarb's "The Roads to Modernity, I'm reminded how lucky we were to avoid the fate of France.
"In France, the essence of the Enlightenment -- literally, its raison d'être -- was reason. "Reason is to the philosophe," the Encyclopédie declared, "what Grace is to the Christian." ... The idea of reason defined and permeated the Enlightenment as no other idea did. In a sense, the French Enlightenment was a belated Reformation, a Reformation fought in the cause not of a higher or purer religion but of a still higher and purer authority, reason. It was in the name of reason that Voltaire issued his famous declaration of war against the church, "Ecrasez l'infâme," and that Diderot proposed to "strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest."
The "fundamentalist secularism" of modern Europe was born then. Edward Gibbon is considered an arch-Christian-basher by many today. I adore his notorious 24th chapter for its body-slamming of early Christianity back into its proper historical context. Yet visiting Paris in 1763, he noted the "intollerant zeal" of the philosophes, who "preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt."
Even Hume, another of my agnostic heroes, did not shout "Ecrasez l'infâme." "[Hume] displayed in his writings a tolerance toward religion and a benign view of it typical of most of his colleagues, If he did not make of religion the source of morality, he did regard it as a natural ally of the morality inherent in man. Reason and religion had equal but separate functions, reason providing the general rules of right and wrong, and religion reinforcing those rules by the commands and laws of the deity."
That's who we are; we give lip service to our fundamentalism, and the people who dislike America on principle will gladly stop there. But if you lift the lid on this culture of faith, which so appalls the modern Europeans, you find a rich pagan stew simmering happily inside.
