The Wars between the Wars

Modern American Religion, Volume 2: The Noise of Conflict 1919–1941,by Martin E. Marty (University of Chicago Press, xiv + 464 pp.; $27.50, hardcover). Reviewed by John G. Stackhouse, Jr., who teaches modern Christianity in the Department of Religion of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

There are at least two Martin Martys. There is the public, popular figure, the “Media Marty.” This one writes the widely read books and articles on contemporary and historic Christianity, captivates audiences in keynote addresses, and holds the title of Most Quotable Pundit on Religion in America.

The second figure is the professorial one, the “Master Marty.” Those who expect to encounter Media Marty suddenly furrow their brows and stare hard, blinking, as Master Marty gets into his exposition. The kindly teacher who bent over so far to accommodate his general audience now stands up straight to speak to his peers. It is the second Marty who presents this latest book in his projected four-volume series on religion in modern America.

One of the most notable qualities the two Martys share is the ability at making maps, at surveying a bewilderingly varied landscape and suggesting helpful ways of discerning its major contours. The task in this series is not, as one might guess, to provide an introduction to the full range of American religious experience in this century. Marty is well aware of the complexity of this task; he chooses instead to trace the changing public faces of religion.

This will disappoint some who share the contemporary interest in “grassroots,” “bottom-up” cultural history. But the highly public Marty, much of whose previous writing is preoccupied with religion in the public sphere, surely can be allowed to continue his interest here in this important survey.

And survey it is. This era of conflict between the world wars, as Marty styles it, pitted Catholics against Protestants, fundamentalists against modernists, realists against liberals, and nativist “100 percent Americans” against virtually everybody else, whether Jews, African-Americans, Asians, or native Americans. Yet for all this vitriol and vigor, Marty notes that almost no one died, no military battles broke out, no struggle finally split the nation. Instead, a complex network of alliances and enmities so crisscrossed the American populace that no significant group could completely break free, nor could it consistently isolate a target in its gunsights. As one mounted a crusade against one’s religious enemies, one found that they were ethnically related. As one attacked one’s political foes, they turned out to be members of the same denomination. As one counted on allies from a former campaign for social change to support a new theological struggle, the allegiances suddenly shifted, and the allies were now across the trenches.

White, northern European, “original-stock” Protestantism continued to steer the ship of American culture, but Marty shows how loose had become its grip on the wheel as others vied for influence and as these hegemonic denominations themselves fragmented, most notably through the fundamentalist-modernist and liberal-realist controversies. Yet Marty looks back from the late twentieth century, from an era racked by murderous religious conflict elsewhere in the world, and sees instead an emerging realization in America that the former Protestant consensus would no longer suffice. As he concludes: “From the beginning of World War II into the mid-sixties one heard words like these: consensus, dialogue, ecumenism, interfaith, church unity, integration, … ‘global village,’ ‘spaceship earth.’ ”

Marty details the bitter progress of America toward those ideals, through Ku Klux Klan rallies, the mutual denunciation of various Jewish groups over Zionism, the anguish of native and African-Americans, the demagoguery of Catholic radio personality Charles Coughlin, the despair in the Depression. But he also highlights more winsome champions of new civil orders, especially Dorothy Day and the Niebuhr brothers. Along the way, the subtext is clear: such a complex of allegiances meant that Christians frequently acted or spoke publicly more as representatives of their ethnic, social, economic, or regional communities than they did as prophets of a transcultural gospel.

The narrative ends with the sound of dropping bombs at Pearl Harbor. But the bombs come from outside, from others. As America pulls itself together for war, it draws its networks up in a new configuration, the shape of which would emerge clearly only when the dust of war had settled.

Those who engage in the struggle for community in America, which has only become more pluralized since this era, will find here a helpful telling of part of the story of “how we got here from there.” Politicians, denominational leaders, lobbyists, public-policy institutes—and evangelical pundits who trade on myths of the “Christian days of yore”—all can profit from this dense, detailed, and discerning recognition of an inescapably diverse, yet still-connected, America.

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