The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  Frank Model, March 18, 1950, The New Yorker

  Most of the conversation emanated from the Northeast, to some extent from New England but more often from New York, which was unrivaled as the nation’s cultural center. The participants in the mainstream were, broadly speaking, “liberal.” Although that term had no precise meaning at the time, in general it meant centrist: one who was neither leftist (many American intellectuals had flirted with Marxism in the 1930s, but had since repented) nor “conservative.” The most evident threat to America was the vast Soviet empire, which in its ugly Stalinist form made a consensus of liberal opposition easy to establish. The prominent literary scholar Lionel Trilling went so far as to say in 1950 that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition in America,” a view that gained wide assent among moderate thinkers of the day. Sometimes I refer to them as “moderate-liberal” in order to signal that I am describing a broadly shared outlook rather than any precise ideology. Whether they were Republican or (more often) Democrat, they could participate in a single national conversation based on a broadly “liberal” consensus. Their job, as they saw it, was to define on that basis where American civilization was, and then to provide guidance as to where it should be headed.5

  One of the most fascinating and helpful dimensions of understanding another era comes about through the process of teasing out its widely shared underlying assumptions. The dominant public conversations of each age and culture have their characteristic, shared, taken-for-granted beliefs. Certain ideals or authoritative principles can be asserted without need for real argument in any age. At the time, they may seem almost self-evident, but later generations may find them curious. Not that later outlooks are necessarily better. Rather, we should recognize that dominant outlooks may improve in some respects while the society simultaneously loses some of the wisdom or insights of the past. Nonetheless, with that reminder, we can ask about the 1950s what assumptions were widely taken for granted that might seem peculiar or questionable to most observers today.

  That question brings us to the second motif and the central interpretive argument of the book, developed most in the middle two chapters: that the underlying assumptions of the dominant outlooks of the 1950s can be better understood if we think of them as latter-day efforts to sustain the ends of the American enlightenment, but without that enlightenment’s intellectual means. Since the word “enlightenment” as a historical term is used in many different ways, I hasten to add that I am not using it in any technical or philosophical sense. For example, I am not using it as it was used by some European-oriented intellectuals at the time, or as it has been used by some postmodernists in more recent years.6 Instead, I am using it in a sense that can be easily understood in a layperson’s terms: as referring to the characteristic outlook of the eighteenth-century American founders. My argument is that the mainstream thinkers of the 1950s can be better understood if we see them as standing in far more continuity with the cultural assumptions of the founders than would be true of most mainstream thinkers today. At the same time, the discontinuities between their assumptions and those of the founders were formidable. Consequently, their hopes for providing a common ground for a cultural consensus could not be long sustained.

  The American founders, men such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and the like, took for granted that there was a Creator who established natural laws, including moral laws, that could be known to humans as self-evident principles to be understood and elaborated through reason. Most mainstream mid-twentieth-century American thinkers, who, like most modern thinkers, assumed collective intellectual progress, thought of themselves as having left such eighteenth-century enlightenment views behind. They were post-Darwinists who worked in a framework in which they took for granted human evolution and cultural evolution that shaped human beliefs and mores. They believed that societies developed their own laws, rather than discovering them in the fixed order of things. Yet, despite their modernized intellectual starting points, many of their fundamental assumptions and goals were very much in continuity with those of America’s enlightened founders. They took for granted as self-evident many of the founders’ assumptions regarding human freedom, self-determination, and equality of rights. In fact, their hopes for strengthening the American “consensus” were built around the faith that America could be united on the basis of these evolving shared ideals. They also shared with eighteenth-century leaders a confidence that rational and scientific understandings were essentially objective and therefore should be normative. Most of them believed that applying natural scientific methods and empirically based rationality to understanding society was one of the best ways to promote human flourishing. In addition, they often celebrated the “autonomous” individual, an ideal that Benjamin Franklin, for instance, would have approved. So, despite the erosion of the original premises on which the enlightenment hopes had been built, the mid-twentieth-century thinkers shared the essentials of that hope. That outlook, especially its reverence for science and the individual, was commonplace in popular and commercial culture as well.

  One of the most conspicuous continuity with the eighteenth century and discontinuity with the twenty-first century was in assumptions regarding male leadership. In the eighteenth century, “the rights of men” had meant quite literally the rights of males. By the 1950s women were included, in principle. Yet, in practice, when it came to cultural leadership, almost everyone, including most women, assumed that men would predominate. Outstanding women were welcomed here and there, but as exceptions to an assumed rule.

  In practice, cultural leadership was also almost entirely the prerogative of white men, but in the case of race, the continuities with the American enlightenment had an important positive effect. Race prejudice and the power of slaveholders had prevented the founders from extending the full logic of the “rights of man” to African Americans. In the 1950s, the nation was still sharply divided on that score, especially, but by no means exclusively, North and South. But most mainstream intellectuals of the moderate-liberal variety favored full equality among the races. They wished to bring the enlightenment logic of the founders to its proper conclusion.

  In speaking of this dominant midcentury outlook as representing a latter-day version of the faith and hope of the American enlightenment, it is essential to be reminded of the significant place of Protestant Christianity in the American enlightenment. Unlike the French enlightenment and the French Revolution, the American Revolution involved a cordial working relationship between the dominant religious groups and most enlightened ways of thinking. In fact, a distinctive feature of the American experience was the synthesis of Protestant and enlightenment principles that one finds widely in the early republic. The colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant by heritage, and so Protestant support was of a piece with the revolutionary effort. Protestantism, even then, came in many varieties, from evangelical to liberal to deist and nominal, but almost all of these proved adaptable to prevailing eighteenth-century enlightened British and American assumptions. Typically, the proponents of all these forms of Protestantism saw a high regard for natural science, reason, common sense, self-evident rights, and ideals of liberty as fully compatible with their Protestant heritage. The more orthodox usually saw the truths of reason and nature and the higher truths of faith and revelation as simply complementary. More liberal Protestants, of whom Jefferson was a prototype, had greater faith in the dictates of reason as the standard that would shape the religion of the future. Despite such differences, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, mainstream American thought, as seen, for instance, in what was taught at most colleges, was a fusion of varieties of Protestantism with various degrees of enlightenment regard for natural science, reason, and commonsense moral judgments. Almost everyone agreed that Protestant Christianity provided an important support for the principles upon which the republic had been founded.7


  Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, this fusion of Protestant and more secular principles went through a number of permutations in response to romanticism, Darwinism, pragmatism, the rise of social sciences, and a dramatic liberalization of much of mainline Protestantism (that is, the major predominantly northern denominations, such as Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, and others), but something like the old alliance was still perceptible in the 1950s.8

  The overall cultural arrangements thus remained in continuity with the American enlightenment, particularly in the hope that a coalition of cultural leaders, including some religious leaders, despite their differences, could somehow guide the society toward a progressive, enlightened, and humane cultural consensus. Nobody thought that it would be an easy project. The founding fathers had realized that building a coherent voluntary civilization out of many competing subgroups would involve a tremendous balancing act. Mid-twentieth-century leaders wrestled with American ethnic, religious, and racial diversity, the disruptions of modernity and mass culture. The immensely precarious world scene increased the difficulties and raised the stakes. Extreme McCarthyite anticommunism, anti-intellectualism, populist racism, fundamentalist religion, and just the sheer shallowness of American commercialism and popular culture made it evident that the challenges were formidable. America had been thrust into world leadership, and this role accentuated the urgency of articulating ideals that would not only help bring unity out of diversity at home, but prove worthy of respect abroad.

  This brings us to the culminating motif of the book: reflections on the implications of this history for understanding the role of a variety of religions in American culture both in the 1950s and since. This theme predominates in Chapters 5 and 6 and in the Conclusion.

  The starting point for this exploration is a look at the role of the Protestant establishment in the consensus culture of the 1950s. Even though the vast majority of cultural analysis at midcentury was conducted in thoroughly secular terms, liberal Protestants retained a respected place in the cultural mainstream. Christianity, properly understood, and natural science, properly understood, the analysts typically argued, were not at odds. Rather, truths of faith and truths of science were complementary in that they dealt with two different realms of human experience. On such a basis, Protestant theologians, of whom Reinhold Niebuhr was the best known, could be prominent voices within the liberal mainstream. In Niebuhr’s case, his chastening words regarding the human condition could be welcomed, but his generalized Christianity offered little to challenge most of the secularizing trends that he himself identified.

  When the consensus culture collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s, taking with it all but the vestiges of the old Protestant establishment, that collapse initiated, among other things, a religious crisis.9 Formal recognition of Christianity, as in public school prayers and observances, declined at the same time. There were tumultuous changes in mores and a questioning of the shared patriotism that had characterized the 1940s and 1950s. This combination led at first to a cultural backlash, and then, by the later 1970s, to the rise of the religious right and the initiation of the culture wars. Although I do not attempt a full account of these developments here, I do offer an overview to illustrate how they may be illuminated by viewing them in the context of the demise of the consensus culture of the 1950s and the rise of the idea of taking back America by restoring a lost “Christian consensus.”

  These observations on the 1950s consensus outlook and the subsequent rise of the culture wars lead to the constructive purpose of this book, made explicit in the Conclusion, which is to reflect upon the problem of how American public life might better accommodate religious pluralism. My argument, in brief, is that the culture wars broke out and persisted in part because the dominant principles of the American heritage did not adequately provide for how to deal with substantive religious differences as they relate to the public domain. The American paradigm for relating religion to public life was an unusual blend of enlightenment and Protestant ideals. In some ways it was the model of inclusivism and religious freedom. But because it also fostered an informal Protestant establishment, or privileges for mainstream Protestants in public life, there were always those who were less privileged, who were excluded or discriminated against—such as Catholics, Jews, people of other world faiths, or those in smaller sectarian groups. Even in the more inclusive 1950s, mainstream Protestantism retained its preeminence in American public life. It is not surprising then that, by the 1970s, after the long-standing enlightenment-Protestant paradigm collapsed, mainstream America lacked the theoretical resources for constructing a more truly pluralistic way of dealing with the relationships of varieties of religions to public life. My contribution is to point to an alternative paradigm for thinking about the varieties of religious outlooks in the public sphere and the roles they play within that sphere.

  Finally, let me say a word about point of view. One of the conventions of the mid-twentieth century was that authors and teachers normally did not identify their points of view but spoke as though they were neutral observers speaking on the basis of universal reason. Such practices reflected standards that went back to the eighteenth-century enlightenment, in which one was to hold forth on most topics on the basis of objective standards rather than from the point of view of one’s particular faith. Mid-twentieth-century commentators, unless they belonged to a peculiar party or sect, could speak as though they represented an outlook that, at least so far as fundamental assumptions were concerned, every educated person should share. Every critical thinker recognized, of course, that their opponents at least were smuggling in some biases. But even those who recognized the relativism inherent in much of modern thought rarely spelled out exactly what their own prejudices might be. Such conventions of discourse in fact helped to create the illusion that it was still possible to create a national consensus, despite residual sectarian differences.

  In recent decades there has been greater recognition that, although there are common standards for rational discourse, arguments, and evidence, there is no one standard, underlying set of assumptions, including beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality and values, that all rational educated people can somehow be presumed to share. So, although many still follow the old convention of posing as though one were objective, it has become more acceptable these days to help out the reader or listener by identifying one’s fundamental viewpoint from the outset.

  My own point of view has been shaped most basically by my commitments as an Augustinian Christian.10 Those commitments involve a recognition that people differ in their fundamental loves and first principles, and that these loves and first principles act as lenses through which they see everything else. At the same time, all humans, as fellow creatures of God, share many beliefs in common and can communicate through common standards of rational discourse. Furthermore, even though I am an Augustinian Christian, I am also shaped in part by many other beliefs and commitments that have been common in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One of my goals in life has been to understand such characteristic American beliefs and to critically and constructively relate them to my religious beliefs. This book is an instance of that project. Much of it is about understanding a fascinating moment of the American experience, but that account leads to critical analysis and reflection on the question of the place that religion should have in that culture.

  I hope that readers who hold other points of view, whether secular or religious, can nonetheless learn from what I present here. Although I write from a specific point of view, I do not differ from other writers or public intellectuals in that respect; I differ only in that I identify my viewpoint more explicitly than some of these other writers do. I hope that readers will benefit from that identification. It may allow them to learn from my analysis while taking into account the parts of my perspective with which they do not agree. That frank recognition of differenc
es may then help them to better appreciate the understandings and insights that we can hold in common.

  PROLOGUE

  The National Purpose

  In the late spring of 1960, Life, America’s immensely popular pictorial newsmagazine, claiming a readership of 25 million, published a “crucial U.S. debate” in a five-part series on “The National Purpose.” The authors, a distinguished group, included not only professional observers of the national scene, headed by the legendary Walter Lippmann, but also men of practical affairs, such as David Sarnoff, head of the Radio Corporation of America. Others, such as poet Archibald MacLeish, recent two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and evangelist Billy Graham, were among the most famous representatives of major areas of American life. It was unremarkable at the time that all the contributors were white males. It was just as unremarkable that the forum included a clergyman, even though the clergyman was an ardent evangelical (as well as being the only southerner in the mix).1