Book Review: 'The Twilight of the American Enlightenment' by George M. Marsden

From the WSJ

Almost all of the 'big idea' books of the 1950s shared the premise that self-fulfillment was the highest moral good.

By 

BARTON SWAIM

April 6, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET

Google the phrase "take America back" and you'll find thousands of people who feel their nation has been commandeered and must be retaken—maybe by force, maybe in a metaphorical sense; you're never sure. True, today the sentiment may be popular on the political right, but during the presidency of George W. Bush it was the left that wanted to take America back from right-wing religious nut jobs. It seems extraordinary that so many people can speak of their country as if it has been overtaken by a hostile force with whom they share no premises or aims.

The historian George Marsden, whose book "Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism" (1991) is widely and correctly regarded as the best historical treatment of Christian fundamentalism, traces this way of thinking—commonly summed up with the word "polarization"—to the 1950s. The '50s,
Mr. Marsden argues in "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment," was a time of cultural and political consensus. The U.S. had beaten two deadly foes in World War II, and Americans were enjoying unprecedented levels of prosperity; the future seemed secure. 

In politics, the opening of the Cold War had a unifying effect, and in religion the Protestant mainline enjoyed a quasi-establishment status. A sense of unified national purpose permeated the public sphere, and questions of personal morality were more or less agreed on.

But the midcentury consensus turned out to be flimsy. The liberals who dominated political and intellectual life, Mr. Marsden writes, "were passionately committed to principles such as individual freedom, free speech, human decency, justice, civil rights," and so on. But "their justification for these principles was not that they were fixed in a higher law or derived from an ideology. Rather, it was that these principles had evolved historically in the give and take of human experience in free societies." So, if the intellectuals' ideals weren't based on anything outside the self, the only other place to look was inside.

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Mr. Marsden scrutinizes the arguments of several of the decade's "big idea" books, among them David Riesman's "The Lonely Crowd" (1950) and Erich Fromm's "The Sane Society" (1955), and finds that all but one share a premise: that the highest moral good lay in personal self-fulfillment. The one exception—"Essays in the Public Philosophy" (1955) by the venerated liberal intellectual Walter Lippmann—advocated a rejuvenation of thinking on natural law. Whatever the book's problems, Mr. Marsden says, Lippmann saw that a free and prosperous society couldn't sustain itself on the brittle principle of being true to one's self. Lippmann's book received a cold reception.

The other governing principle in the decade's intellectual discourse held that the only unquestionable kind of knowledge was knowledge arrived at through scientific inquiry. That this second principle flatly contradicted the first, as Mr. Marsden notes, gives you some idea of how weak the era's philosophical foundations were. Even mainstream liberal theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, while resisting the more imperialistic claims of scientism, conceded the supremacy of scientific knowledge. As a result, Niebuhr wrote so that his many admirers could easily accept his conclusions but reject his God. Indeed for many educated people in the 1950s, Mr. Marsden observes, God was a kind of "useful ally" who confirmed their own opinions.

The midcentury consensus didn't allow much room for principles and opinions that were substantively informed by religious convictions. So it was not prepared when religion obstinately refused to decline as predicted and in fact grew in diversity and fervor. Liberal academics and intellectuals, still working with the old liberal-consensus model, tended increasingly to see religiously informed opinions on "public" topics as illegitimate; they insisted that religious conviction should be relegated to the sphere of "private" opinion.

Hence the "culture wars": disputes about politics and morality in which the disputants seem to operate from completely different sets of assumptions about life. While secularized liberals tried to rule the opinions of religious people somehow out of bounds, many Christians in fundamentalist and evangelical traditions responded by advocating a return to the allegedly Christian principles of the nation's founding—often sounding as if they would take us back to 17th-century New England. Brushing aside the rhetoric of both sides, Mr. Marsden astutely points out that fundamentalists and evangelicals on the political right are not theocrats; they value Enlightenment principles of individual rights and economic opportunity as much as their secularist adversaries.

Here Mr. Marsden moves from a tone of (mostly) detached historical analysis to one of measured exhortation. Instead of engaging in yet more culture warfare, he counsels, members of the "religious right" should consider the "principled pluralism" of Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Kuyper, prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905 and a devout Christian believer, rejected the idea of a "neutral" public sphere. In his writings and policies he advocated openness about presuppositions—whether of the secular or religious kind—and insisted that even those who disagree on fundamental principles can work toward equitable compromise...

Mr. Swaim is writing a book on political language and public life.