Shouting religious truth in America is a no-no
John Murray Cuddihy in his 1978 NO OFFENSE: CIVIL RELIGION AND PROTESTANT TASTE says that it is not uncommon in America for people, especially younger ones, when speaking of their personal religion to say, "I happen to be Baptist" or "I just happen to be Episcopalian." I myself have never heard anyone say that. But Cuddihy makes much of it. In America everyone is free to choose or leave any religious denomination. Maybe that is not the way Protestantism, for example, sees itself. But that is the way America has tamed all faiths.
He argues that America has built over a couple of centuries its own Calvinist-derived, Freemason-approved "civil religion." On an optimistic, even triumphalist interpretation, America's civil religion is a kind of Judeo-Christian mission to the secular world. Civil religion is even less than the least common denominator of various revealed, transcendental sets of beliefs. Social pressure has compelled them to become purely or mostly private.
At some level almost all Americans, Cuddihy argues, adhere to the civil religion. Civil religion is all about surfaces, not depths. Indeed depths are taboo. Civil religion is polite, silently compels us to accept one another as social equals. It does not matter that our Judaism or Catholicism proclaims that is uniquely God ordained, true, binding on all mankind or makes analogous universalist claims.
Our national religion is a watered down, secularized version of Calvinist Puritanism, a religion that compromised, created a half-way house for the first generation of children born into families of people who had become true believers only in adulthood. As it takes root, America's civil religion increasingly makes the more explicit confessional religions mere matters of personal choice. "I just happen to be Jewish." I no longer rend my garments over blasphemies.
NO OFFENSE is built around several case studies of how religious champions of Protestantism, Judaism and Catholicism tried -- in vain -- to champion their faiths by wrapping their thoughts around a new set of secularized religious practices and beliefs that have raced into the field faster than theology or ideology can follow them.
A Jew might begin by asserting that Jews are God's chosen people (experienced by a young Philip Roth as "Jews are better.") But saying this loudly and with passion in public is perceived as rude, as disrespecting others. So he settles for Judaism as merely "equal" to America's other two established faiths.
A Protestant will tell other Protestants that salvation through Biblical faith is the only way to go. But he stops trying to convert Jews out of civil politeness.
A Roman Catholic may reluctantly admit as old dogma "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," i. e., "outside the Church there is no salvation." But he is sure to interpret it with lots of escape clauses for Protestants, Jews and anyone "sincere" in his agnosticism or atheism.
Thus civil religion doth make cowards of us all.
Some adherents of each major faith refuse to go along with civil religion's weakening of revealed religion. Rabbi Meir Kahane, Father Leonard Feeney, Reverend Dr. Billy Graham -- all stand out loudly for their old time religions. Never mind. Civil religion rolls them into historic insignificance.
John Murray Cuddihy's NO OFFENSE offers light, grounds (and rules) for debate. It explains why America frowns on discussing core religious beliefs in polite society. You may wish to be a zealot and shout God's truth from the rooftops. America's civil religion will simply smile knowingly and silence you. -OOO-
