Lynchburg and Other Cities on a Hill
Cities on a Hill, by Frances Fitzgerald (Simon and Schuster, 1986, 414 pp., $19.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Philip Yancey, editor at large.
What do Sun City, Florida; Rajneeshpuram, Oregon; “the Castro” gay community of San Francisco; and Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church have in common? Quite a lot, according to Frances Fitzgerald, whose recent book depicts life in each of the four communities.
Her introduction explains that the book came about somewhat by accident. First, she gained an inside look at the burgeoning gay subculture while teaching a class in journalism at Berkeley. While there she heard about Jerry Falwell who, along with Anita Bryant, was leading a campaign against gay rights legislation. Then, while lecturing at Lynchburg College in Virginia, she paid a chance visit to Falwell’s church and was amazed by the vibrancy of an institution so unlike her home church (Episcopal) in New York.
Few writers and social analysts were drawing conscious parallels between the newly evolving gay identity and the fundamentalist subculture, but as Fitzgerald studied each, separately, they seemed to her to share a common pattern. Eventually she came to view them as divergent responses to the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. After seeking out other communities formed around a new vision of society, she settled on the Rajneesh religious settlement in Oregon and on Sun City, one of history’s first attempts at a community composed solely of the elderly.
Fitzgerald sees these four communities as quintessentially American. Can you imagine, she asks, Parisians creating a gay colony or a town for grandparents? Pioneer movements express a distinctly American urge to start all over from scratch and form a new society. “We must consider that we shall be a City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” said John Winthrop to his Puritan settlers, and almost four centuries later Americans are still constructing hilltop cities.
American Patterns
The last chapter of the book, a rather remarkable essay in itself, identifies kinetic forces common to all four of these disparate communities. Fitzgerald takes us back to an earlier period in American history, roughly 1800–50, when revivalists crisscrossed the Northeast and the Second Great Awakening was producing what we now know as evangelicalism. Fitzgerald finds in these years the emergence of certain patterns still replicating themselves in American culture:
- Rebirth. The old-time revivalists, of course, emphasized the conversion experience, and this thirst for rebirth keeps cropping up in American society. Modern Human Potential psychology, for example, stresses the need to strip away neuroses and other “baggage” in order to allow the true person to emerge—innocent, spontaneous, and authentic. In each of Fitzgerald’s four contemporary groups, a member similarly sheds trappings of the past and, through a conversion-type initiation, enters a new life.
- Arminianism. The Second Great Awakening, according to Fitzgerald, dislodged Calvinist assumptions about society as a permanent hierarchy, with each individual’s destiny fixed from birth. People gained faith in their abilities both to affect their personal fates and also to reform society.
- Perfectionism. Charles Finney took Arminianism to its logical conclusion, thus setting loose powerful forces that would also fuel idealism and utopianism.
- Premillennialism. This view of the future, gaining popularity in the early nineteenth century, added a sense of urgency to the efforts of the new reformers. Christ could come at any moment—be prepared!
Fitzgerald goes to some pains to establish a parallel between the scene in Southern California in the 1960s and upstate New York in the 1840s—like California in the sixties, a place and time of extraordinary ferment. She discusses the economic disturbance resulting from, first, the industrial revolution and, later, the technological revolution. That turmoil, along with ethnic immigration and a general cultural upheaval, encouraged groups to band together with a conspiracy-theory view of the world.
Not Just Analysis
It would be a crime, however, to see Cities on a Hill as a book of sociological theory or historical analysis. True, it traverses some of the same territory as New Rules, by Daniel Yankelovich, and Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah and friends, books that assess the changing American psyche. But Frances Fitzgerald is a journalist, not a sociologist—one of the very best journalists, in fact, writing today. Fitzgerald’s one previous book, Fire in the Lake, earned her a trophy shelf that would satisfy most authors for a lifetime; it won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize for History, the National Book Award, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award.
Except for the introduction and concluding essay, Cities consists of long profiles of each of the four communities. My favorite was the section on the Rajneeshee. Her 135-page rendering of Rajneeshpuram’s inexorable self-destruction offers an effective warning against the New Age movement.
The section on Falwell, although not the strongest in “story line,” will probably prove of most interest to CT readers, for it offers a fine example of how the evangelical/fundamentalist world appears to an inquiring New York journalist. For some readers, the section may suffer from ordinariness. Would not a Pat Robertson or an Oral Roberts have made a better symbol for the meteoric success of American evangelicalism? But Fitzgerald was attracted to Jerry Falwell precisely because of his ordinariness. To her, he represents middle America at its most middling and most American.
She marveled at Falwell’s lack of glitter. “The most sober and conventional of preachers,” he offered television viewers a simple videotape recording of his Thomas Road church service. “The choir behind him sang traditional Baptist hymns and he, strong-jawed and portly of figure, wearing a three-piece black suit, looked every inch the Baptist preacher of the pretelevision era.” Fitzgerald, betraying her New York roots, can’t seem to get over the fact that such a conventional figure could inspire the loyalty of millions of followers and somehow become, according to a U.S. News and World Report poll, the third most-influential person in the U.S. private sector.
Falwell’s Lynchburg
She cannot get over Lynchburg, Virginia, either: “If there is a single public nuisance for the young in this town, it is surely boredom.” Here is her portrayal of a church potluck supper in a local home: “The man of the house—resplendent in a fitted white shirt, cream-colored trousers, and white shoes—watched a boxing match on television with the other men while his wife organized the dishes of ham, baked beans, candied squash, and potato salad the other women had brought with them. At dinner, around a lace-covered table, the guests joked, and made small talk about their gardens, the water system in Lynchburg, the problems of giving a Tupperware party, and the advantages of building one’s house. After dinner, the men and women separated, the men going into the living room and the women upstairs for an hour or so of Bible reading and prayers.”
To Fitzgerald, such a scene seems every bit as strange and exotic as the gays parading in costume down the streets of San Francisco, or the red-robed Rajneeshee sitting in Yoga positions chanting mantras. Yet Fitzgerald does not set out to make fun; she is genuinely seeking the secrets of a community that seems almost invulnerable to seismic changes in the larger culture. In the process, she gives many helpful insights on the phenomenon of “the vast revival tent” of religious broadcasting and on the abrupt migration of evangelicals into the political arena.
Fitzgerald strives admirably to get the facts right, even when discussing such subtleties of doctrine as the conservative rationale against ERA, the scriptural basis for baptism, the “headship” of husbands, the lordship of Christ, and pretribulationism (she falters there, confusing it with the posttribulationist view).
In a refreshing twist, the evangelical heritage is not seen by this secularist as something that must be overcome, but rather as something that still gives life to a variety of forms. In the concluding essay, Fitzgerald draws the four profiles together with her fascinating thesis that the same sociological fuel that runs Jerry Falwell’s movement also energizes the other three.
The conclusion of the book includes a striking image from nature—the molting of eider ducks—that illustrates how groups of people may respond to drastic social change. “Losing all their feathers at the same time, these sea ducks as individuals lose all their capacity to avoid predators both from above and below; so, when they are molting, they join together in huge naked bands, or ‘rafts,’ to paddle and skim the surface of the ocean pretending (for the benefit of larger predatory fish and fowl) that they are one large thing.” Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad analogy for the body of Christ.
A Philosopher’s Lament
Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer, by William Barrett (Anchor/Doubleday, 1986, 173 pp.; $16.95, hardcover; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Bill Durbin, Jr., a free-lance writer living in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
William Barrett is a distinguished American philosopher now teaching at Pace University in New York. He is credited with introducing existentialism to the United States. In the forties and fifties he was associate editor for Partisan Review, “voice of the New York intelligentsia.”
None of this, however, should intimidate the average reader. In fact, Barrett, in style and sympathies, is a philosopher for the common man. He writes so that the musings of philosophy may be understood in the street, and so that the experiences of ordinary people may enrich philosophy.
His latest book accomplishes this for the soul. Death of the Soul is largely a lament over how far theories of mind and self have come from our everyday experience of these things. In a short space and clear style, Barrett reviews the last 350 years of Western philosophy, a period in which “the labor of a good part of our culture has been reductive: to undermine the spiritual status of the human person.”
His focus is on major philosophers: from René Descartes, who dreamed of mathematical certainty and wrenched conscious man from the machine of nature; through Immanuel Kant, whose reasoned attempts to reconcile moral man with a vast, amoral universe furthered the separation of reason from faith; to present-day promoters of artificial intelligence, whose mechanical models of the mind complete the death of the soul—in theory, that is.
Here, as elsewhere, Barrett fights against the “deranged rationality” infecting our times. His simple point is that philosophy could benefit from a heavy dose of common sense. His major plea is for us to stay in touch with the “I” of human experience, the actual and real person who experiences life as a unity of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and creative ideas, and for whom God is real.
Flowing toward reconciliation
The book flows in the direction of a reconciliation: of man with nature; of philosophy with real life; of past insights with present dilemmas; of scientific understanding and spiritual longing; of God and society. Such a reconciliation would clearly benefit the modern philosopher, nervous about the implications of an immaterial consciousness, and the common man, uncertain of the validity of his faith in a scientific age.
Though the general outline of such a reconciliation is here, the reader’s expectations of it are left largely unfulfilled. Finally, Barrett offers only the promise of a “future work.”
Nor does Barrett clearly distinguish between mind, soul, and spirit—distinctions one might expect from a Christian believer. (The book carries a gentle warning for “those of us who profess to be Christian.”) It may be that such distinctions violate Barrett’s point that the human being has become too divided in theory. Yet one waits to see how his holistic view may differ from those of Eastern mysticism now emerging in our culture.
In any event, Death of the Soul is a delightful and informative survey. Barrett pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing his colleagues “in a period in which triviality has almost become an occupational hazard among philosophers.” His treatment is lucid and occasionally humorous. (Of the diminutive Professor Kant he says: “The good people of Königsberg would have regarded him differently if they had known the thoughts he was harboring.”) And Barrett is never far from the mundane: using his sleeping dog to illustrate the alienation of man from nature and a web-spinning spider outside his window to explain the limits of our scientific theories.
In the end, the book provides sound philosophical and historical reasons for rejecting a prevailing prejudice: that the human mind is like computer software, and the human being may be duplicated in machine. “We do not understand the mind,” This eminent philospher warns, “unless we are able to grasp it as part of the total Being within which the human person exists and functions.”
Neither Enemies Nor Allies
God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1986, 516 pp.; $50.00, cloth; $18.95, paper). Reviewed by Charles E. Hummel, director of faculty ministries for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and author of The Galileo Connection (IVP).
What relationship has Christianity sustained with science over the centuries? The military metaphor propounded by Andrew White in 1896, epitomized by the church’s condemnation of Galileo, has continued to grip the popular mind. But in recent decades, a relatively new history of science has discovered a different, more complex picture than the science versus religion formula suggests.
In April 1981 Professors David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers organized a conference to consider this significant issue. An international group of about 50 distinguished historians met at the University of Wisconsin to present the results of their research and interact with one another. Eighteen of the papers appear in God and Nature, the first comprehensive history of the subject in the English language since White’s classic History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.
Contrary To Conventional Wisdom
An excellent introduction sketches salient features of the relationship between Christianity and science from Copernicus to the present. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Christianity provided a climate conducive to the development of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Foremost pioneers of this new understanding of the natural world—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton—were committed Christians who saw no conflict between their science and theology.
The editors describe a new view that emerged in fresh interpretations by able scholars during the 1950s, the decade in which the history of science matured as an academic specialty. They demonstrated that neither “conflict” nor “harmony” adequately captures the complex interaction between Christianity and science.
Conflict has appeared more as a battle of ideas within individual minds experiencing a “crisis of faith” in a struggle to come to terms with new scientific and historical discoveries. It was realized that scientists have often opposed religion for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with science. There has also been a growing appreciation of the social, economic, and cultural influences in the development of both science and theology, especially in the debates of the nineteenth century.
Following this introduction, the 18 essays cover a wide range of topics—everything from Science and the Early Church to Modern Physics and Christian Faith.
These essays show that Christianity and science have been neither arch enemies nor perennial allies. Some Christian beliefs and practices have encouraged scientific investigation; others have impeded its advance. The interaction has varied with place, person, and time, as in the cases of Galileo and Newton. The writers illuminate the historical realities with precision and clarity, free from the polemics that have all too frequently characterized these discussions. They plead to forsake the military language of White for a “non-violent and humane” interpretation of the relationship between science and religion.
Lindberg and Numbers have succeeded in compiling a fascinating set of essays that are eminently readable by those with little or no scientific training. But like an iceberg, the visible portion of their scholarship is supported below the surface by substantial research that points the way for new explorations in this field.
Giving Piety Good Press
Voices From the Heart: Four Centuries of American Piety, edited by Roger Lundin and Mark A. Noll (Eerdmans, 1987, 396 pp.; $19.95, cloth).
Piety suffers from a bad press, treated as a pejorative label with overtones of complacency, moralism, and ethereal spirituality. Not so, say Roger Lundin and Mark Noll in Voices From the Heart. Their book is a chorus of 55 voices ranging from seventeenth-century Massachusetts governor John Winthrop to twentieth-century writers as diverse as Thomas Merton, Elisabeth Elliot, Charles Colson, and John Updike. No less than 11 different genres (among them sermons, journals, letters, fiction, and poetry) are represented.
A ten-page introductory essay describes the roots of American piety as they are found in Augustine, Vergil, and the Bible. For Vergil, piety was both devotion to the gods and commitment to family, people, and work. Biblical character models also show a balance of devotion and practice. From these two streams, Augustine shaped his concepts of inner experience and responsibility to others.
Augustinian piety shaped the views of the Puritans who balanced introspection with a sense of historical destiny and public duty. Their heritage is central to American piety and shows most clearly the conflict between faith and secularism, which became a problem within half a generation of the founding of Plymouth. Hence the collection begins with Puritanism and returns more than once to those who either continued it or struggled against it.
Each selection is introduced with background information about the author, especially his or her place in the development of American piety. Though brief (about one page each), these readable essays are tightly packed.
