The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [94]
Of course, such religiosity is hardly new. The Pilgrims came to our shores to escape religious persecution and practice without impediment to their brand of strict Calvinism. Evangelical revivalism has repeatedly swept across the nation, and waves of successive immigrants have used their faith to anchor their lives in a strange new world. Religious sentiment and religious activism have sparked some of our most powerful political movements, from abolition to civil rights to the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan.
Still, if fifty years ago you had asked the most prominent cultural commentators of the time just what the future of religion in America might be, they undoubtedly would have told you it was on the decline. The old-time religion was withering away, it was argued, a victim of science, higher levels of education in the general population, and the marvels of technology. Respectable folks might still attend church every Sunday; Bible-thumpers and faith healers might still work the Southern revival circuit; the fear of “godless communism” might help feed McCarthyism and the Red Scare. But for the most part, traditional religious practice—and certainly religious fundamentalism—was considered incompatible with modernity, at most a refuge of the poor and uneducated from the hardships of life. Even Billy Graham’s monumental crusades were treated as a curious anachronism by pundits and academics, vestiges of an earlier time that had little to do with the serious work of managing a modern economy or shaping foreign policy.
By the time the sixties rolled around, many mainstream Protestant and Catholic leaders had concluded that if America’s religious institutions were to survive, they would have to make themselves “relevant” to changing times—by accommodating church doctrine to science, and by articulating a social gospel that addressed the material issues of economic inequality, racism, sexism, and American militarism.
What happened? In part, the cooling of religious enthusiasm among Americans was always exaggerated. On this score, at least, the conservative critique of “liberal elitism” has a strong measure of truth: Ensconced in universities and large urban centers, academics, journalists, and purveyors of popular culture simply failed to appreciate the continuing role that all manner of religious expression played in communities across the country. Indeed, the failure of the country’s dominant cultural institutions to acknowledge America’s religious impulse helped foster a degree of religious entrepreneurship unmatched elsewhere in the industrialized world. Pushed out of sight but still throbbing with vitality throughout the heartland and the Bible Belt, a parallel universe emerged, a world not only of revivals and thriving ministries but also of Christian television, radio, universities, publishers, and entertainment, all of which allowed the devout to ignore the popular culture as surely as they were being ignored.
The reluctance on the part of many evangelicals to be drawn into politics—their inward focus on individual salvation and willingness to render unto Caesar what is his—might have endured indefinitely had it not been for the social upheavals of the sixties. In the minds of Southern Christians, the decision of a distant federal court to dismantle segregation seemed of a piece with its decisions to eliminate prayer in schools—a multipronged assault on the pillars of traditional Southern life. Across America, the women’s movement,