Overview:
This chapter has moved rapidly to look at relationships between the religions
and religion of the United States. In so doing, the danger of oversimplification
has been large, for exchanges between peoples are usually subtle, ambiguous,
and complicated. Still, the idea of boundaries -- between ordinary and extraordinary
and between the one and each of the many -- has been helpful. In a culture
of pluralism, the question of boundaries is crucial, for it is on the boundaries
that most of the issues lie. At present, some of the sharp edges have softened
for the mainstream and the "old" immigrant religions, but as new,
strongly committed religious groups arise and others become more self-conscious,
boundaries are once again tightly drawn.
Meanwhile, as the many centers meet, the old responses are still there. The one religion is anxious about its dominance, while the many seek to challenge it in the preservation of their separate identities. Patterns of housing, job, and educational discrimination still exist for African Americans, American Indians, and other groups. Christian Scientists come off slightly worse than others in some books, small groups are vulnerable to condemnation as "cults," and Appalachian Bible believers who migrate to northern cities are sometimes derided as "hillbillies." At the same time, in their desire to remain apart, Asian Indians erect lavish temples, suggesting by the character of the architecture their wish to separate themselves. Arab Muslims sometimes live in ethnic neighborhoods. Pueblo Indians prefer their adobe villages, laid out with central plazas for the performance of sacred dances.
Although some among the many retreat from the mainstream, others seek greater assimilation. Some Catholic Poles and Jews still change their surnames to blend into the "melting pot," even as other ethnics have proclaimed their religious and cultural origins loudly. Seventh-day Adventists discuss whether or not they have become a denomination, while some fundamentalists edge closer to the mainstream. Blacks move to the suburbs, and Catholics, with their own colleges, attend major public universities. Jews, to the disappointment of rabbis, frequently intermarry and drift away from affiliation with a synagogue.
When the many meet the many, they often find reason to be hostile to one another. Native Americans and Latino Catholics in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have resented each other and lived in mutual suspicion as well as anger toward the often- Protestant Anglo-American inhabitants of the city. Because of white community feeling, Afro-Cuban Santerians in Hialeah, Florida, were forbidden by law to slaughter animals for ritual sacrifices until, in 1993, the Supreme Court decided otherwise. American Arabs and Jews continue to face each other tensely in view of their different stances regarding the Middle East.
To sum up, throughout American religious history Protestant attitudes toward the many have been ambivalent, ranging from a defensive fear and hostility to, on the other hand, conversion attempts, qualified openness, and expansive fascination that led to some forms of cultural combining. The attitudes of the many toward public Protestantism have divided mainly between those who wished to preserve their old ways in the new land and those others who wanted to become more American and -- it followed -- more Protestant. At the same time, representatives of some groups have tried to win converts from the one (mainstream) religion.
Finally, as the many have encountered one another, they have frequently exchanged insecurities by voicing mutual suspicions and accusations. Still, some have found common worlds to share and have made alliances, while others have expressed their social and religious commitments in missionary work directed toward different groups and persons among the many.
What does this all mean, and to what does it all add up? The United States of America is among the most pluralistic religious and social experiments in history. Its people live in a social situation complicated by great diversity. Religions abound, and so do peoples, their beliefs, styles of worship, and moral codes. Community is fragile and temporary, and estrangement is probably the one thing that many have in common. While the vast machinery of government and of the corporate industrial complex continues, the frictions that face Americans are a recurring feature of life. The manyness of groups and movements heightens impulses for everyone to mark boundaries carefully or to reject them as strenuously in heightened forms of religious combinativeness. At the same time, the one religion of millennial chosenness, innocence, and hidden guilt fosters anxiety regarding the boundaries to the cultural mainstream.
Living with so many boundaries has proved a difficult task for Americans. There is a tremendous gap between the millennial goal of community and the realities of estrangement only thinly veiled. Faced with the problems of impersonality that accompany the corporate organization of any modern urban and industrial society, Americans have been beset with the serious religious problem of crossing the human boundaries that hinder community. That problem has had a long history: it began with the first collision between Native American ways of seeing and European interpretations of Indian life. And it began with the political realities of a power situation in which, though insecure and fearful, Puritans could dissolve their fright in a growing millennial fervor that expressed both dominance and innocence. The balance of political power has always complicated the picture of religion in the United States.
Still, to live without a public center -- a one religion -- seems humanly impossible. Shared sources of power, meaning, and value, however loosely expressed, must provide some kind of bonding, or society would lose all cohesion and fall apart. To live without the many who form so significant a part of American religious culture seems equally impossible. Although sometimes less fully organized and less visible, the many have deeply affected American life -- which would not be American without them.
American religious reality is a dialectic between the one and the many. The one religion suits active and energetic people who desire clear and simple directives for their work. Its evangelical warmth seeks to provide solace for Americans uprooted by a society ever on the move. Huge numbers, strong institutionalization, wealth, and political prestige have given it a clear role of leadership in shaping the nation. So in Part Two we paid attention to the one religion in its various forms. At the same time, the many possess ordinary and extraordinary religious capital of their own. Their ways of living within boundaries and learning how to cross them tell us many things about human possibility and realization that the story of the one religion cannot tell. In a word, both American culture and American religious history would be diminished without the many. Their stories need to be told with a sense of texture and a feel for detail that hints of who they are and what material and spiritual resources they have acquired. This the chapters tried to do in Part One.
The coexistence through several centuries of one religion and many religions is, of course, a fact of American life. But it is also a significant ordinary and extraordinary religious achievement, an achievement that suggests a potential to be tapped and a basic fund of regard and respect to be counted. Still more, the tension between the one and the many is not simply a burdensome condition with which American religious history has been saddled and with which it has dealt in a successful way. Rather, the tension created by point and counterpoint is an asset. The tension has meant a more complex, more ambiguous, and finally more "live" religious situation for all Americans, one in which forms of religious combinationism have flourished in new and exciting ways. To say this, however, is not to say all. In the end, we need to return to the problem of forging community.
Over the years, as pluralism grew stronger, despite the combinative instinct with regard to religious forms the problem of creating community became more acute. People spoke but often not to one another; they heard sermons and gave speeches but frequently did not communicate. Instead, they bypassed their differences and their mutual fears. Sometimes they did so through pragmatic and functional interactions, cooperating when a set of circumstances could be manipulated for joint advantage. In a social sense, they jockeyed their concerns to create a "new" order of things in which the old fears and prejudices remained largely unexamined and unchanged. Interfaith and multidenominational efforts were accepted styles of relating among some religious groups, but they were styles in which people mostly did not face their differences.
At other times Americans chose a community of feeling -- private emotion that through a complex religious etiquette could legitimately be expressed in public. Shared feeling could make the "others" no longer other and knit the many into one. Significantly, the shared feeling that could evoke community most effectively, again and again, seemed to be the violent feeling that generated attitudes of millennial dominance and, as their underside, righteous innocence. Americans never looked more like a community than when, under the banner of their civil religion, they marched to war. Fired with the rhetoric and passion of millennialism, Americans found community in their historic venture but not in the humbler, more modest need of individuals and groups to speak to one another. Under the terms of the millennial covenant, in all honesty they could not speak. The chosen, like an army in a colonial fortress surrounded by a moat, could not consciously let down the bridge to the "others." To do so might lessen the monopoly of the dominant center and lead to a situation of decenteredness, to a loss of purity and the creation of a new religious center. The many, beleaguered and precarious, could not begin the conversation either. They were too involved in the task of defining and maintaining their boundaries -- their side of the territory. So behind the problem of community in the United States is another one. The ordinary and extraordinary religious problem of the nation is finally the content of the one religion and the many religions insofar as they share, in certain respects, a pronounced culture of contraction in the present and an overexpansive millennial vision for the future. In short, caught between boundaries and visions or dreams, the one and the many have found it difficult to maintain balance. Ironically, the numerous forms of religious combination that flourished did not appreciably alter the human substrate of apprehension at other groups and misapprehension of one another.
Dreams, we know, are not reality. Although they can be a source of creativity and vital energy, they can also weave illusions that leave people ill-prepared to cope with daytime problems. And dreams can also mask fears that constrict the waking lives of dreamers. In the case of millennialism, at the end of one century and the start of another -- indeed, at the beginning of a new millennium -- the irony of the dream is large. Bound to the vision of an expansive new heaven and new earth, millennialism is an old dream from an old world. Although it has thrived in the con- text of the North American continent and has lent itself to multiple forms of religious combination, millennialism is largely a product of the European heritage and the European imagination. Up until this time in the study, this text has stressed the Americanness of American religions and religion, but now at the core of the new, we must confront the presence of the old. Millennialism represents what Europeans have thought over centuries more than a fresh response to a new situation. Its continuing versions, evoking either Armageddon or paradise, prevent the realities of North American existence from being adequately seen and met.
In short, millennial time is not lived-through time; and it cannot help
Americans to know and care for one another. It is true that in the midst
of their millennial dream Americans have tossed fitfully at times -- as
if half awake or just about to awaken. Yet as a product of their waking,
a completely American religion has not yet come to be. People in the New
World are still learning to do something really new.
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