American Worldview Expressions II

In his book on Hawthorne, Henry James made the obvious point that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce even a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. James went on to draw up a list "of the absent things in American life." The United States had now nineteenth-century national religious culture to take for granted. The Boston Brahmin, the Iroquois brave, and the Russian exile had nothing in common. Yet each was asserting a worldview and crying out to express it. What they had in common was, in the words of Robert Frost, to be created from the land,

vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless and unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

It was during this period that the United States was learning just how pluralistic it had become. This began to put the mainstream churches at a disadvantage. For they had to compete not only against the new ideological forces but also new religious groups which tried to remain unassimilated. In this chapter we focus on some uniquely American worldview expressions. These include the Christian Science, Mormon, Southern Baptist, and other movements which grew and flourished in and sometimes threatened a pluralist environment.

In the nineteenth century the combination of denomination plus creed plus region plus race produced deep clefts in society and the North and South fought the civil war as a result. Southern versus Northern Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian groups produced opposite justifications for the conflict, while white versus black Methodists or Baptists in the South reinforced the separate camps regarding slavery.

The Millenial Urge

Clues are legion that Americans felt suspended between primoridum and millennium and alienated from both history and tradition during the early years of the nineteenth century. This led to rejection of traditional churches and to an appeal for the rebirth of primitive Christianity. In one sense this merely continued the traditional Puritan quest for the early church. The common appeal was often an ideological premise for assertions of religious freedom. In the first three decades rejection of historic churches spread rapidly. One thinks of Elias Smith and Abner Jones, of James O'Kelley and Barton Stone, of Sindey Rigdon and Parley Pratt, of Anne Lee's Shakers. Let us begin with the Oneida Community.

ONEIDA COMMUNITY AND BIBLICAL COMMUNISM

John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86) believed that in his Oneida Community he had discovered the ideal path between profligacy and celibacy. He moved his group of followers in 1847 from Putney, Vermont to Oneida, New York and opted for "complex marriage." In this system, neither monogamy nor polygamy prevailed, but rather a community-ordered plan for unions between the sexes that saw all men as potential, temporary husbands and all women as potential, temporary wives. The children were regarded as offspring of the whole community. Noyes based his "communism" on the Bible. He argued that the more familiar marital arrangements do not have a scriptural foundation.

So much as this is perfectly clear: that they [New Testament writers] were not in favor of freedom of divorce, as a means of mitigating the difficulties connected with marriage. There cannot be any mistake about the fact that Christ, instead of being in favor of freedom of divorce, as it had existed under the Mosaic dispensation, restored the law to its simplicity and rigor, allowing no divorce except in cases of adultery. (Mark 10.) And Paul stood substantially on the same ground; that is, he forbade believers for any cause to sunder the external marriage tie. (1 Cor. 7.) It is true he supposed the case of separation brought about by the departure of an unbelieving partner, and said that the other was not in bondage in such cases. -- Whether this in his mind amounted to the privilege of divorce and marrying again, we cannot perhaps determine; but at all events, it was his will that the whole movement and responsibility of separation should be laid on the unbeliever. He did not allow the gospel to introduce separation between husband and wife, or to relax at all the marriage code.

The Bible view of divorce may be illustrated thus: Suppose a commercial system which brings people into a general condition of debt, one to another. Now one way to mitigate this fact and release people from such a state of things, would be by enacting a general Bankrupt law, which would make an end of all obligations by legal repudiation. The Bankrupt law operates to release a man from his promises; and this is just the nature of any legal increase of freedom of divorce....

Sympathizing with them in this respect, we as Bible Communists...will loyally abide by the view of Christ and Paul on that subject. If there is to be any alleviation of the miseries of marriage, it is not to come by freedom of divorce.

Again, we are clear that the teachings of the New Testament were sufficiently distinct against polygamy. We do not recollect any thing very positive and decisive on this point that can be quoted; but there is a strong intimation of Paul's opinion in the passage where he says, "a bishop must be the husband of one wife." (1 Tim. 3:2)

....

Here we may dwell for a moment on the identity in principle of monogamy with polygamy. And it will then be seen, that in following Christ we are further from the position of polygamists than ordinary society. It is plain that the fundamental principle of monogamy and polygamy is the same: to wit, the ownership of woman by man. The monogamist claims one woman as his wife -- the polygamists, two or a dozen; but the essential thing, the bond of relationship constituting the marriage, in both cases is the same, namely, a claim of ownership.

The similarity and the difference between monogamy and polygamy, may be illustrated thus: Suppose slavery to be introduced into Pennsylvania, but limited by law, so that no man can own more than one slave. That might be taken to represent monogamy, or the single wife system. In another State suppose men are allowed to own any number they please. That corresponds to polygamy. Now what would be the difference between the two States, in respect to slavery? There would be a difference in the details and external limitations of the system, but identity in principle. The State that allowed a man to have but one slave, would be on the same general basis of principle with the State that allowed him to have a hundred. Such we conceive, is the relation between monogamy and polygamy; and as we understand the New Testament, the state which Jesus Christ and Paul were in favor of was neither, but a state of entire freedom from both.1

SHAKERS

The Shakers usually recall images of simple, communal life and celibacy or their lively method of worship. The Shakers actually emphasized the Second Coming of Christ. The official title makes this clear: the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming (the Millennial Church). Further, this Second Coming was an event of this age. Christ had already appeared, and as a woman! Christ came first through a male, Jesus of Nazareth. Christ now appeared in a female, "Mother" Ann Lee (1736-1784). Ann was born in England but immigrated to American in 1774. She proclaimed that procreation was unnecessary since the kingdom of God was at hand. The "Church in Jesus" was a celibate church. To enter, one must live a life of purity and strict devotion.

These movements, like the American Republic itself, were born from a passion for freedom. The Revolution had made Americans free politically, but clerics and creeds still tyrannized the consciences of the faithful. The Christians therefore simply sidestepped the traditional churches by moving outside of history to a realm of pure beginnings where arguments drawn from history did not matter. These people argued that one of the characteristics of the primitive church was freedom. They claimed that the church fell from its original purity, not when it spawned false doctrine but rather when it enforced creedal uniformity under Constantine. Ironically, a further discomfort arose from the religious pluralism of the new nation. These reformers wanted Christian unity, but a unity that would not be contrived or legislated; rather, it would happen naturally through the compelling attraction of the recovered primitive church. Alexander Campbell, for instance, fully expected all humanity to abondon the creeds and traditions of men, whether Jewish, Islamic, or Christian, and to march into the fold. Further, and here is a third element in the agenda, the introduction of a united, recovered primitive church, untrammeled by the footsteps of history, would inaugurate the millenial dawn.

The basic dilemma involved pluralism. Indeed, so long as the Christians lived in their transhistorical possibilities, standing with one foot in primitive Christianity and the other in the millennial dawn, they had no need to take seriously the historical forms of Christianity. These reformers claimed that they were not a denomination at all and that once the millennium arrived, all denominational structures would crumble. All that would be left would be the true body of faithful now united and free in a primitive, apostolic community.

But the millennium did not dawn and Christian unity failed to transpire. As the millennial vision faded and the denominations failed to fall, and as the Christians became increasingly conscious of their own identity as one group among others, many crossed the line and the cosmic vision of liberty and unity became, at least for some, a vision of sectarian exclusivism. The very lack of a tradition now constituted a tradition in its own right, the rejection of theology became a fundamental theological maxim, and the commitment to transcend history became the substance of the history of the particular people.

@MINOR HEADING = The Seventh Day Adventists

Adventism started in the United States with the preaching of William Miller (1782-1849), a Baptist. His study of the Bible led him to suppose that Christ would shortly return to earth, when there would be the resurrection of the faithful and the Kingdom of God would be established. His predictions made a strong impression. When he went on to say that the Second Coming was due between spring 1843 and spring 1844, excitement among his followers mounted. Farmers failed to harvest their crops; men left their affairs; the eagerness of the waiting was scarcely bearable, but yet sweet and joyous. When the promised event did not occur, it was heart-breaking. But the faithful mostly stayed with Miller and his cause. One disciple wrote:

The passing of the time was a bitter disappointment. True believers had given up all for Christ, and had shared His presence and never before. The love of Jesus filled every soul and with enexpressible desire they prayed, "Come, Lord Jesus, and come quickly," but He did not come.

We can see here something of the perennial and poignant attraction of the Christian eschatological hope: the recurrence of hopes for the Millennium throughout Christian history is an element of Christian experience that is puzzling but significant. The Seventh-Day Adventists, the most powerful offshoot of Miller's movement continue as a zealous missionary movement.

Jehovah's Witnesses

The Jehovah's Witnesses likewise await the Millennium. But their doctrines, first propounded by a Pittsburgh businessman, Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), lie definitely outside the orbit of orthodox Christianity. They regard Christ as a creature who will come to destroy the forces of Satan at Armageddon. They teach that sinners who are not saved will perish; but the faithful will enter into a kingdom of joy and happiness. Despite scandals involving Russell himself, the movement has grown. It is particularly active in underdeveloped countries, where its repudiation of Christian orthodoxy and its promises for the future have a certain appeal. In their serene confidence of the coming of the Kingdom, the Witnesses undertake no military service. In any event, the institutions of government are, they hold, under the control of Satan. Thus they have proved recalcitrant and anarchistic, and have suffered some persecution as a result. They are peaceful, but fanatical; they know their Bible backward and forward, but they are rarely well educated. Such a movement appeals to those of modest education. The secret hope of the Millennium and the marvelous way they can interpet the Bible are compensations for their deprivation.

@MINOR HEADING = Latter Day Saints

Lucy Mack Smith, mother of the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, typified dissatisfaction with the traditional denominations when she complained that "there was not then upon the earth the religion which I sought. I therefore determined to examine my Bible, and, taking Jesus and His disciples for my guide, I endeavored to obtain from God that which man could neither give nor take away."² This reflected one of the two most significant manifestations of the recovery motif during the period. These two primitive gospel movements were destined to rank among the largest of all religious movements in America: the Christians/Disciples of Christ, led by Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, led by Joseph Smith. These groups appropriated names that were primitive and universal: Christians/Disciples of Christ and Church of Jesus Christ. Like the larger Republic which fostered their birth, both groups embodied all the tensions, paradoxes and dilemmas that came from standing squarely in the stream of history while at the same time finding identity in the innocence of the early church.

The dynamics and dilemmas of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints were similar, though rooted in a more explicit rejection of pluralism than characterized even the early Christians. Anxiety over pluralism was implicit in the beginning when young Joseph Smith, perplexed by the competing claims of various Christian sects, retired to the woods of Western New York in 1820 to ask a simple question of the Lord: which of the churches is the true church? Significantly, the Lord answered, "I must join none of them, for they were all wrong" and that "all their creeds were an abomination in His sight."³ Seven years later, Smith's restoration of primitive Christianity commenced with the recovery of the golden plates, the basis for the Book of Mormon. This Book of Mormon was a recovery of ancient Christianity once delivered to the Americas but lost by the Nephites because of wickedness and lack of belief. With the establishment of the Mormon Church in 1830, the restoration of the gospel and of the church was complete.

What now remained was the extension of the Mormon "gathering" throughout the earth, a "gathering" that would inaugurate the religious unity on Mormon terms and, as a consequence, the millenial age. In holding to this familiar recovery-unity-millennium progression, Mormons resembled the Christians. But there were two basic differences. First, restoration for the earliest Christians was a metaphysical expectation; for the Mormons it was an accomplished fact, predicated on the recovery of a tangible and visible book. To be sure, empirical reality was central to Mormonism at every significant point. But second, while the Christians aimed at a recovery of New Testament Christianity, Mormons aimed at a kind of "cosmic regeneration," blending multiple sacred times -- Eden, the patriarchal age, the Israelite theocracy, and the teachings and practices of the early church. What defined sacred time in the Mormon imagination was direct communication between God and humanity.

William James made a major contribution to the psychology of religion, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were great writers, Jonathan Edwards and Horace Bushnell were important theologians, John Dewey and Charles Peirce, major philosoophers, and all these and others are important figures in the spiritual history of the United States. Joseph Smith did not excel as a writer or philosopher, let alone as a psychologist or theologian. Yet he was an authentic religious genius and towers above all Americans, before or since, in the expression of the religion-making imagination. "The God of Joseph Smith is a daring revival of the God of some of the Kabbalists and Gnostics, prophetic sages who, like Smith himself, asserted they had returned to the true religion of Yahweh or Jehovah."⁴

Joseph Smith II (1805-1844), a handsome young visionary, was born in Vermont. His mother, as previously noted, was continually searching for a religion that satisfied her. At the age of fifteen Joseph had a vision of "two Personages whose brightness and glory defy all description." One pointed to the other saying, "This is my Beloved Son! Hear Him!" The substance of the message that followed was that there was need for a restoration of the Gospel. Some years later, Smith was guided by an angel to the discovery, according to his own account, of a number of golden plates containing inscriptions. Along side of them lay a pair of supernatural spectacles (other traditions say stones) which enabled Smith to read these inscriptions: he identified them with the Urim and Thummim mentioned in Exodus 28:30 as belonging to the high priest's apparel. Smith claimed that the language was Reformed Egyptian (Egyptologists have no knowledge of this mysterious tongue). As a result of his decipherment, Joseph Smith published, in 1830, a work called The Book of Mormon. It is from this that the Latter-Day Saints have obtained their nickname of "Mormons."

The contents are curious, and represent a mythology for the New World. That struck a chord in many hearts and the success of the new church demonstrates this. Already there were current in some circles theories that the American Indians were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel -- those, that is, who had disappeared from the view of history at the time of King Zedekiah, when Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. According to the Book of Mormon, these folk crossed the seas to the New World, continuing the religion of the Old Testament and compiling further records of events and prophecies. However, only some of those who had come to the New World remained faithful. The others abandoned the teachings and became savages. These were the Indians. Ultimately the culture of the faithful remnant came to an end in 421 C.E. The only survivors, the prophet Mormon and his son Moroni, hid these records in a cave in New York State, whence they were rescued briefly by Joseph Smith under the guidance of Moroni, now appearing in angelic form. This book also relates how Christ visited the Western hemisphere during the period after his ascension. On the basis of this primary myth and other visions of Joseph Smith, he proclaimed the establishement of a new church, at Fayette in Seneca County, New York, on April 6, 1830.

For Mormons the visit of an angel who said his name was Moroni to Joseph Smith during the night of September 21, 1823 constitutes the foundation of Mormonism. The angel said he was the last prophet of a vanished race that once inhabited the Americas. The angel told Joseph Smith of a collection of gold leaves or "plates" on which was engraved a religious history many centuries earlier by Moroni and his father, Mormon. The next day Smith went to a hill, "Convenient to the village of Manchester" (New York, near Rochester and Palmyra). "On the west slope he found a large rounded stone. Underneath he discovered a stone box containing the plates of gold and an instrument late used to aid in translation, which apparently consisted of two transparent stones attached like eyeglasses to a breastplate and which was identified by the angel as the biblical Urim and Thummim used by ancient seers."⁵

The Book of Mormon is a chronicle of people who lived in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. It begins in 600 B.C.E. when a small group of Hebrews fled from Jerusalem and travelled by caravan to the Indian Ocean. There they built a boat and journeyed to the west coast of the Americas. In the new land, conflict divided them into the Nephites and the Lamanites. After the crucifixion Christ appeared in the Americas and organized a church. When unrighteousness reappeared, the people split into opposing groups. About 421 C.E. one group destroyed the other and became the ancestors of the Indians of North, Central, and South America. Moroni, last prophet of the destroyed group, buried the records in "Hill Cumorah", where they remained until discovered by Joseph Smith for "the latter day saints."

The Book of Mormon relates how the prophet Ether foretells that a New Jerusalem will be prepared in America.

4. Behold, Ether saw the days of Christ, and he spake concerning a New Jerusalem upon this land.

5. And he spake also concerning the house of Israel, and the Jerusalem from whence Lehi should come -- after it should be destroyed it should be built up again, a holy city unto the Lord; wherefore, it could not be a new Jerusalem for it had been in a time of old; but it should be built up again, and become a holy city of the Lord; it should be built unto the house of Israel--

6. And that a new Jerusalem should be built up upon this land, unto the remnant of the seed of Joseph, for which things there has been a type.

7. For as Joseph brought his father down unto the land of Egypt, even so he died there; wherefore, the Lord brought a remnant of the seed of Joseph out of the land of Jerusalem, that he might be merciful unto the seed of Joseph that they should perish not, even as he was merciful unto the father of Joseph that he should perish not.

8. Wherefore, the remnant of the house of Joseph shall be built upon this land; and it shall be a land of their inheritance; and they shall build up a holy city unto the Lord, like unto the Jerusalem of old; and they shall no more be confounded, until the end come when the earth shall pass away.

9. And there shall be a new heaven and a new earth; and they shall be like unto the old save the old have passed away, and all things have become new (Ether 13:409).

Joseph Smith joined his followers to the great Old Testament patriarchs and in particular to Enoch. In his religious imagination, five figures may have melded to become a composite, comprising God or the Ancient of Days, Adam, Michael, Enoch, and Smith himself.

Organizing the new church in 1830, the recently married Joseph Smith used his charismatic leadership to attract converts from the established churches, all of which, according to him, were unworthy of the new revelation. By 1831, he and his wife, Emma, had gathered a thousand people who sold everything, gave most of it to the new church, and moved westward to establish a community that would be a model for the coming kingdom of God.

Of all the sacred times which Mormons sought to recover, the one which dominated the imagination was that of ancient Israel. For this reason, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was far more than a church. It was a kingdom, a new Israel. As God's kingdom, now restored in its ancient purity, it was destined to swallow all other kingdoms and churches until, finally, the Saints would literally rule with Christ on earth.

Implicit in this representation of recovery was the innocence of the Saints and the degeneracy of the Gentile religions. There was no subtlety of ideological development. Rather it was all very straightforward. The apostles of the church stated in an 1845 proclamation to "All the Kings of the World, to the President of the United States of America, to the Governors of the Several States, and to the Rulers and Peoples of All Nations" that "the kingdom of God has come, as has been predicted by the ancient prophets... even that Kingdom which shall fill the whole earth and stand forever." The apostles then warned the world leaders that these events are calculated, in their very nature, to reduce all nations and creeds to one political and religious standard, and thus put an end to Babel forms and names and to strife and war."⁶

Sometimes the early zeal of the members asserted Mormon innocence and Gentile depravity so thoroughly that visions of violence were by no means out of the question. Thus, Martin Harris, for example, was reported to have issued the following prediction in 1832:

Within four years that there will not be one wicked person left in the United States;... the righteous will be gathered to Zion.... and there will be no President over these United States, after that time.

I do hereby assert and declare that in four years from the date thereof (September 1832) every sectarian and religious denomination in the United States will be broken down, and every Christian shall be gathered unto the Mormonites, and the rest of the human race shall perish.7

Parley Pratt proclaimed that all who refused the message of the Saints "shall alike feel the hand of the almighty, by pestilence, famine, earthquake, and the sword: yea, ye shall be drunken with your own blood... until your cities are desolate... until all lyings, priestcrafts, and all manner of abominations, shall be done away.^"8In the midst of such visions, the Saints were confident of their innocence. They were, after all, not only God's representatives in a world of Gentiles. They also stood removed from the finite sphere of history. Having replicated the primordium and now providing the space for the millenium, they found their identity not in profane time but in a sacred time and space.

In the early years, this meant that the Saints were not responsible for violent retribution. Sidney Rigdon assured the Missourians that any guilt for violence would be the Missourians' alone: "We will never be the agressors... a mob that comes on to us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them, till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us."⁹ When war finally erupted in 1838 between the Mormons and the Gentiles, the Mormons preserved their innocence by identifying their cause with the cause of God. "I care not how many come against us," Joseph Smith proclaimed. "God will send us angels to our deliverance and we can conquer 10,000 as easily as ten."¹⁰ But their innocence ultimately was rooted not in an abstract identifcation with God but in a concrete identification with the sacred times: the times of Adam, of the patriarchs, of ancient Israel, and of the primitive church. Thus, the armies of the Saints were not, as they appeared, mere nineteenth-century mortals engaged in another war in the long stream of military history. They rather were "the armies of Israel... established by Revelation from God," who soon would "take the kingdom" according to the prophecy of Daniel.¹¹

Here was a new Israel in search of a promised land. The Saints settled in Kirtland, Ohio, and a prosperous community was established. The enthusiasm and discipline of the Saints was impressive. But it sparked animosity in the neighbors. Outbreaks of violence drove the community further west to Missouri. The place where the New Jerusalem would arrive was then thought to be Independence, Missouri. Smith made it the center stake of the large, geographical tent comprising the new community. There similar problems repeated themselves.

Mormons were different from other Christians. "Mormon writers themselves unanimously deny that Mormonism is a Protestant church. They assert that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a restoration, not a reformation."¹² The Book of Mormon, their anthropomorphic ideas of God and Christ, and their intention to build a physical kingdom aroused suspicion. Fear of Mormon political influence also played a part in local citizens' tarring and feathering Smith.

They crossed the Mississippi River to Nauvoo, in Illinois. There a town of twenty thousand souls evolved, ruled over by Joseph Smith theocratically. It was a state within the state. It had its own militia and discipline. A fine Temple was built, and a university was established. Meanwhile missionaries were sent to the east and to Europe. The new faith caught the imagination of many who were looking for their own Promised Land, and could not find it in the machine shops of the English countryside and textile mills of Lancashire. It was the start of a new tide of religiously motivated emigration.

Meanwhile further troubles were brewing in Nauvoo. Smith's powers and that of the community he led roused fears in the rest of Illinois. The Saints were becoming a political force to be reckoned with. In addition, they gave cause for alienation and hostility not simply because they were close, inward-looking people, but because in 1843 Joseph Smith revealed the seemingly scandalous doctrine of polygamy. To check the continued increase of a self-contained group that granted little allegiance to state authority, the Governor of Illinois ordered Smith's arrest, together with that of his brother Hiram.

In retaliation for criticism of him in a Carthage, Illinois, newspaper, Smith led a group of Mormons into town to attack the paper. Citizens of the town captured and jailed Joseph Smith and his brother. Armed men broke into the jail and shot the brothers to death. The founder was now a martyr.

The succession passed to Brigham Young (1801-1877), a patriarchal figure, authoritarian and prophetic, and a clever administrator. Young supported Smith's view of plural marriages and baptism for the dead to Mormonism. Evidently Nauvoo was not the Promised Land. The Saints were looking for a haven where they would be free of hostility and violence of the unbelievers. The new Israel, then in 1846, set out on its greatest trek, into the wild and unknown western frontier and beyond.

Fifteen thousand men, women and children, and several thousand cattle, wound their way west through bitter and difficult country. In 1847 they came to the Zion for which they had been seeking. By the Great Salt Lake in Utah, then a Mexican territory, they stopped and began to build a new and more glorious Temple. Crops were sown, houses built. At first life was hard, but the new community was heartened by an apparently miraculous occurrence: the corn crop was threatened by hordes of insects. Just when it appeared that catastrophe was inevitable, a flock of seagulls consumed the insects. The successful ending of the long trek convinced the Saints that they were guided by Providence.

Now polygamy, hitherto a subject of private practice, was officially established. A true theocracy was instituted, ruled severely and sometimes violently by Brigham Young. Though most of the Saints remained faithful, others became restless under his iron fist. A number were execuited for apostasy. Meanwhile, Utah was ceded to the United States. A commissioner from Washington was sent to administer the territory, though Young was recognized as governor. The building of the transcontinental railroad destroyed Utah's seclusion. Under Young's second successor, Wilford Woodruff, Utah became a state of the Union, but only on the condition of the renunciation of polygamy.

The high standard of education of the Saints and their industry and sobriety, together with their emphasis on missionary activity, created a strong community. The Mormon Tabernacle and Temple in Salt Lake City is the center for the Chruch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For Mormons, it is the headquarters of an extensive administrative organization for missions and benevolence. Its more profound meaning lies in the Temple open only to Mormons. A marriage performed there is binding not only in this life but also for eternity.

The God of whom Mormons speak when talking to nonmembers is the God of this world. They believe that there are other gods of other worlds; they worship only the God of this world. God and Jesus are of flesh and bone, lacking blood. The Holy Spirit is spirit. Gods were once humans; they became gods. Humans now living may also become gods. Sterling McMurrin gives the following description of the Mormon God.

As a constructor or artisan God, not entirely unlike Plato's demiurge of the Timaeus, the Mormon deity informs the continuing processes of reality and determines the world's configuration, but he is not the creator of the most ultimate constituents of the world, either the fundamental material entities or the space and time that locate them. God's environment is the physical universe, the minds and selves which exist but are not identified with him, the principles under which reality is structured, and perhaps even the value absolutes which govern the divine will. In any case, it is entirely evident that it is a basic article of Mormon theology that God is related to a world environment for the being of which he is not the ultimate ground and by which he therefore is in some sense conditioned. This means that God is a being among beings rather than being as such or the ground of being, and that he is therefore finite rather than abolute.¹³

The world can be a very good place. Joseph Smith envisioned many prosperous model communities. The kingdom of God can be brought on earth. There is little that is world denying about Mormons, except for restrictions on tobacco, hot drinks, and substance abuse. Humans are descended from Adam and Eve, who, once immortal, became mortal due to sin. Since the coming of a savior, humans have an opportunity to regain immortality and live as gods. Education is helpful for living a responsible life. Science and industry are useful in providing good lives for humans. Persons who lived in the past, unless their descendants do something for them, remain short of the attainments open to those who have the complete revelation. This opportunity is open to ancestors; people may search their family tree and find names of ancestors who would have received the doctrine had they the opportunity. Their descendants can have them baptized into the faith.

Baptism on behalf of the dead is possible only in a temple, which is open only to Mormons. Marriage for eternity as well as for time is possible only in a temple open to Mormons. Neither baptism nor marriage is considered a sacrament, but the requirement that they can provide higher benefits only if performed in a temple indicates their importance. The sacrament is the Lord's Supper, celebrated each Sunday.

The baptism of the dead is one of the unique features of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints and is one of Joseph Smith's unusual innovations. Because Smith believed he was the prophet destined to restore the only true church, how was he to solve the problem of the millions who lived and died between the time of Jesus and himself. How were these countless dead to be saved? The question provoked the doctrine in which one's own salvation became linked to effort in the salvation of one's ancestors. The expression of this concern is the tremendous collection of geneological data containing more than two billion names of the dead. Sparing no expense of time or money, the Mormons dedicate themselves constantly to baptizing the dead, their ancestors and others. Smith had insisted that the dead were free to accept or refuse what is done for them in the temples. As a revelation, baptism of the dead represented Joseph Smith's work as a seer in January 1841. Smith is the essential prophet for Mormonism of these latter days.

The good life offered to Mormons is open to all who are willing to make the effort. Efforts for good accompany right beliefs. A Mormon should avoid any sex outside of marriage, and every healthy person should marry and have children. Everyone is expected to work and strengthen the economy. Mormons are expected to donate 10 percent of their income to the church and an additional 2 percent to the local congregation. Benevolence extends to non-Mormons. Young men are expected to support themselves when they devote their lives to two years of missionary activities. Since 1978 all males, including blacks, may be ordained to the priesthood. The church is organized around a male hierarchy. The First Presidency has three members, one of whom is the president, incorporating the powers of Smith, Young, and his successors. The president brings up-to-date revelations of God's will. Below the First Presidency is a Council of Twelve Apostles, whose choice is by revelation. The Council of Seventy, with responsibilities for the missionary work, comes next above the general boards and committees.

Harold Bloom sums up the question of Mormonism in his wonderment at its founder, Joseph Smith.

I end as I began, with wonder. We do not know Joseph Smith, as he prophesied that even his own could never hope to know him. He requires strong poets, major novelists, accomplished dramatists to tell his history, and they have not yet come to him. He is as enigmatic as Abraham Lincoln, his contemporary, but even if we do not know Lincoln, we at least keep learning what it is that we cannot quite understand. But with Joseph Smith, we cannot be certain precisely what baffles us most. As an unbeliever, I marvel at his intuitive understanding of the permanent religious dilemmas of our country. Traditional Christianity suits the United States about as well as European culture does, which means scarcely at all. Our deep need for originality gave us Joseph Smith even as it gave us Emerson and Emily Dickinson, Whitman and Melville, Henry and William James, even as it gave us Lincoln, who founded our all-but-all-powerful Presidency. There is something of Joseph Smith's spirit in every manifestation of the American Religion.14

Expressions of Christian Science

Joseph Smith had been dead for twenty-two years when Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) injured herself in a fall on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1866. If Joseph Smith's quest began in a search for assurance in religious truth, Eddy's began in a desire for physical and emotional healing. From a Calvinist family, Eddy was exposed to the healing methods of Phineas P. Quimby. But she went her own way in constructing Christian Science She concluded that what is wrong with the world and humans has its origins in a radical mistake of cosmic proportions about the nature of reality -- that it is dual in nature, both spirit and matter, or worse, that reality is composed of matter alone.

Eddy wrote, "there is not life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter."¹⁵ Her radical premise of the non-existence of matter means tht what our senses seem to perceive is an illusion. Material sense cannot detect spirit and so give false testimony about the nature of reality. If matter is not real, then evil, sickness, pain, and death are likewise not real. Her experience gave rise to a new primary myth, Science and Health, and a new tradition. But Christian Science was to be more than just a new understanding of the cosmos. It was a means to curing both sin and sickness. She discovered that she could heal herself and others of pain, both physical and mental. She found herself understanding "for the first time in their spiritual meaning, Jesus' teaching and demonstration, and the Principle and rule of spiritual science and metaphysical healing, -- in a word, Christian Science."¹⁶

Like Mormonism, Christian Science called for a new interpretation of traditional theological ideas. Mormonism derived much of its theological and practical dynamism from the nineteenth century and still does by embracing a materialist metaphysics and the evidence of sense experience as conducive to discovering truth. Christian Science found that same energy in an equally fervent rejection of matter and embracing of spirit. But while Mormonism expanded greatly, the same cannot be said for Christian Science.

Since Christian Science denies all empirical evidence, it is technically the most idealist worldview ever propounded in the West.

Appealing to the new interest in science, Mary Baker Eddy sought to combine insights of science with the gospel. In particular, she was concerned with alleviating suffering and promoting healing. She established the practice of healing through reading the Bible, interpreting it through her principles in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Although the Church of Christ, Scientist, has local congregations, Eddy wanted all Christian Scientists to belong to the mother church in Boston. Since her death, the church has continued as a highly respected institution. In the late twentieth century, however, practicing Christian Scientists have lost some court cases in which the state prosecuted parents who, because of their beliefs, have failed to provide customary medical treatment for their sick children.

A modern exponent writes:

Theories about germs and microbes come from beliefs which hold that life is material and that disease is real. The Christian Scientist knows by experience that his belief is demonstrable despite theories of disease involving germs, microbes and viruses.

Christian science aims to provide a religious theory to back up its spiritual healing. The movement has spread because those who are cured remain loyal. In an age of psychsomatic illness, such faith healing can produce results, and these outweigh the initial implausibility of the theory.

Scientology

Seventy-five years after the founding of Christian Science what was to become Scientology appeared. If Eddy looked to the healing passages of the Bible and her own insight for her new model of the universe, L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), the founder of Scientology, turned to contemporary sources. The movement originated in a system of self-help developed in early form in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, published in 1950. The book is a treatise on the human mind. The Basic Dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology defines Dianetics as a system of thought thus: "Dianetics is not psychiatry. It is not hypnotism. It is... defined as what the soul is doing to the body. Dianetics is a system of analysis, control, and development of human thought which also provides techniques for increased ability, rationality, and freedom from the discovered source of irrational behavior stemming from the mind."¹⁷ Dianetics developed from what initially was a self-help method to a more specifically religious symbol system and was registered as The Church of Scientology in California in 1954. In its Catechism Scientology is defined as religious in all senses, including ritual, creed, and a "religious philosophy in its highest meaning as it concerns itself with Man and his relations to the Supreme Being and life, bringing Man to total freedom and truth."¹⁸

Believers explain that theirs is a religious philosophy that sees past traumas, physical or mental, as barriers to rational behavior. These past traumas are called "engrams." When engrams began to emerge in the auditing process, a question and answer procedure by which Scientology methods are used to elicit recollections of past traumas, not just from the present life of Scientologists, but from past lives as well, Hubbard expanded the cosmology to take this new information into account. At large in the cosmos of trillions of years of human history are "thetans," spiritual beings free of the physical world but trapped in MEST (matter, energy, space, time). The goal of Scientology is the restoration of knowledge of the thetan's true identity.

Theosophy

In cosmological terms, Theosophy took a more moderate course than Scientology and Christian Science. Theosophy in America originated with the founding of the Theosophical Society by Helena P. Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Colonel Henry Olcott (1832-1907) in 1875. Theosophy does not denigrate earthly life or the physical body as illusory and useless for spiritual development. Rather Theosophy holds that earthly life is an essential but less spiritually aware existence than is possible on less dense planes of reality. It views both sprit and matter as equal manifestations of the Absolute.

Blavatsky said the movement had three objectives: "(1) To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, colour, or creed. (2) To promote the study of the world's religion and sciences.... (3) To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially."¹⁹

Theosophists claim that their aim is to recapture the ancient wisdom that Theosophists understand as having once formed the foundation of a civilization in which science and religion were united. Bits and pieces of this wisdom were believed to be scattered throughout the religions and philosophies of the world. Theosophy reassembles these into a coherent system which mitigates the intellectual failings, superstitions, and tyrranies of traditional worldviews. At the same time it reigns in the arrogance of science. The systme assumes a cosmos in which the spiritual and material are so intertwined that one can discern laws that apply to both. Particular attention has been paid to Eastern worldviews and the occult.

Paradoxes

The Seventh-day Aventist, originally a racist church, today is increasingly composed of African-Americans and Hispanics. It is a gentle paradox that the most conspicuous Seventh-day Adventists are no longer the prophetess Ellen White and her quondam disciple, Dr. John Harvey Kellog, inventor of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, but rather Little Richard and Prince, just as our leading Jehovah's Witness now is Michael Jackson.

Southern Baptists

In our review of American Worldview Expressions, we have not yet looked at the largest, distinctively American expression, the Southern Baptists. This group, together with the Mormons, constitute the most uniquely American worldview expressions. Taken together, the Baptists are the largest of all Protestant worldviews in North America. Their worldview is neither European Protestantism nor historical Christianity. The Southern Baptist Covention was brought into being in 1845 and just as Mormonism may eventually be the Western American Religion, Southern Baptists form the Southern American Religion.

American Baptists originated with two rival sects of Inner Light English Puritans of the early seventeenth century. The General Baptists believed everyone could be redeemed, and the Particular Baptists held to the Calvinist principle that only those elected in particular would be saved. Both groups rejected infant baptism. In 1801, the year of the Cane Ridge Revival, the two sects combined and obfuscated the question of general or particular salvation. The Confederate loss, most of whose troops were Baptists, led to a trauma in the Southern Baptist spirit. Consequently nearly every new idea of the final thirty years of the nineteenth century was rejected by Southern Baptists. The consequence was that no other American denomination entered the twentieth century with such an anti-intellectualist orientation. This in turn influenced the Fundamentalists who came into conflict with the more moderately inclined.

Edgar Young Mullins looms as the figure who helped most in developing contemporary Southern Baptist expressions. Mullins reformulated and personified the Great Compromise which is only today coming apart. Mullins died in 1928, but his ideas carried on for another half century. Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was a major influence on Mullins who had memorized much of the epic poem. Milton's devotion to the Inner Light is the core of Mullins' teaching. A principal notion is that of competency of the soul which excludes all forms of human interference, whether by an episcopacy or infant baptism or any form of religion by proxy. A romantic personalism pervaded Mullins as it informed the genius of Faulkner (see chapter on the Novel).

The soul's competency is the soul's experience of the authority of Jesus Christ. Thus the individual is unassailable in her interpretation of the Bible and what it means. The Holy Spirit helps the Christian interpret. "Being born again" is the center of the spiritual life and is a totally inward process. The experience of knowing Jesus in a solitary encounter is more important than worship, doctrine, or acts of charity. This acquaintance allows the Baptist to participate now in the Resurrection and the Life. "What we have among the authentic Southern Baptists is one of the few manifestations of the American Religion that involves mystical experience among a fairly large group of people."²⁰

Baptist and Islamic Fundamentalists share a notion of biblical innerancy. "Innerancy" for both movements is a metphor for the repression of individuality. The literalization of the text turns it into an icon.

The Black Church is a paradigm for American Religious Expressions. African-American religiosity originated Pentacostalism and some of the major elements of Baptist experience. James Baldwin gave a classical expression to the struggle for freedom in order to be free for God. There is an African-American model for the immediate Baptist encounter with Jesus. Like the Southern Baptists and the Mormons, African-American religious believers often view themselves as another Chosen People.

Mechal Sobel wrote:

American blacks, in talking and writing of their experiences in converting to Christianity, have handed down a tradition that, on first appraisal, appears highly parallel to the white conversion experience. However, there is one jarringly different element, found only in the black recitals and found there with great consistency. It is the reference to "the man in the man," "the little me in the big me," "the little Mary in the big Mary," "the little John in the big John." For blacks, there was a twofold spiritual participation in the actual conversion experience that was not known to whites and, in each case, it was the "little me" inside the "big me" who traveled to visit God in Heaven during the ecstatic vision experience.²¹

The conversion experience enabled the African-American to sense personal value and vocation which stood in stark contrast to the devaluing social and economic situation in which many found themselves. The personal conversion by an individual African-American, however, is far from a communal experience. But this expresses a conflict endemic to American religion that is not confined to just the black churches. The revivalism that culminated in Cane Ridge and its consequences produced a distinctively American religious worldview that resembled the development of black Baptists in the eighteenth century. Current supporters of a "black theology" ironically move out of their own authentic tradition. American revivalism that is meant to raise consciousness can very quickly change into cheerleading. American worldviews such as we have been discussing are more biblical than their predecessors. Three groups have vivid expressions of the Kingdom of God in America: the Mormons, the Southern Baptist Fundamentalists, and many of the African-American churches. The three expressions are contradictory.

Walter Lippman: Typical Modern Expression

Walter Lippmann observed the changes technology wrought on the United States between the two World Wars. The effect of modern civilization, of which America was perhaps the best example, was "the dissolution of the bonds which bound one man to another." Modern civilization dissolved the emotiional ties and helped break up ethnic tribalism. Lipmann liked to contrast the modern situation with the past. Life back in what he styled the ancestral order was simpler, contained within narrower limits, and with far greater unity in the activity of each individual than contemporary living allowed. Allegiance to the tribe, he claimed, would unite the tasks of the people's acts of worship. No longer. "In the modern world this synthesis has disintegrated and the activities of a man cannot be directed by simple allegiance." Of course, sects tried this and Fundamentalists, by organizing and isolating a way of life complete with their own separate radio stations, Bible schools, publications, were "come-outers" who tried to maintain synthesis and simple allegiance.

The Protestants of the federating churches and the Catholics and Jews gradually coming out of their ghettos could not do this. Lippmann spoke of such citizens at the places where the lines of societal cleavage came together. He described personal life along what had been called the "dozen oppositions along lines running in every direction," the spiritual "cross clefts." As example, Lippmann said, "Each man finds himself the center of a complex of loyalties. He is loyal to his government, he is loyal to his state, he is loyal to his village, he is loyal to his neighborhood. He has his own family. He has his wife's family. He has his church. His wife may have a different church." This citizen may be employer or employee, who must be loyal to his corporation, trade union, or professional society. He belongs to a political party, to clubs, to a social set. "The multiplicity of his interests makes it impossible for him to give his whole allegiance to any person or to any institution." It was this criss-crossing of loyalties that Lippmann thought constituted modern society as pluralistic.²² The Great Depression of the 1930s produced the deepest crisis since the War Between the States. The conflict between people in competing economic and social classes increased. The right and left had their best chance to demolish each other. Differing reactions toward European and Asian totalitarianism (German Nazism; Japanese Imperialism) threatened to tear society apart. Economic disorder led people to adopt extreme positions: fascism and communism.

Two illustrations of the paradox of Lippmann's criss-crossing involvement are the positions of The Church of Christ Scientist and the Seventh-day Adventists. The Church of Christ Scientist had a doctrine which almost all Americans rejected, but the Christian Science Monitor won increasing acceptance and came to be regarded as a leading newspaper in the United States. The Adventists, in order to protect Saturday worship shared sympathies with Jews. Together they opposed "blue laws" in state after state and so extended the zone of religious liberties, and so despite the official intense religiosity, the group contributed to burgeoning secularity.

After the start of the Second World War and for the next several decades, disruptions occurred between camps of believers. Protestants formed an anti-Catholic organization and protested the appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican by President Harry S. Truman. Currently Southern Baptists are asking President Clinton not to appoint such an ambassador. Many opposed the election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as President of the United States. "McCarthyism" and the communist witch-hunts were carried out in the name of religion. Religion tended in some instances to reinforce racism.

Despite these signs of conflicts and actual conflicts, a new language developed. Words like consensus, dialogue, ecumenism, interfaith, church unity, integration, merger, collegiality, etc. increasingly were sounded by various worldview representatives. The World Council of Churches was founded and supporters gave religious symbols to causes of the United Nations. Groups began to enforce religious and sexual equality.

Another distinctive expression of American Protestantism has been the freedom of individuals to form their own evangelistic crusades and movements. These movements have often begun with an evangelist "led by the spirit" to operate outside denominational churches. Evangelists have appealed to people of all denominations to follow the living spirit. In frontier days, evangelists preached their gospel in tent meetings. In more recent times they have preached in city stadiums. Billy Graham is one example of a person who has his own ministry which he exercises in cooperation with many established churches. The advent of radio and television gave evangelists access to hearers and money from all over the nation and abroad. More recent examples included the ministries of Oral Roberts and M.G. "Pat" Robertson. Although these ministries have been largely free from government interference, at the close of the twentieth century the federal government has chosen to investigate some issues pertaining to the finances, investments, and political activities of some evangelical organizations.

Attitudes Toward Art: A Summary

The roots of the average American aesthetic attitude are entwined with a sense of cultural identity as it developed between about 1830 and the Civil War. But they reach down to a more primitive soil, that of Puritanism. The men and women of seventeenth-century New England did not have a lot of time for art and literature. Painting and sculpture were considered spiritual snares, best left to Roman Catholics. Their great source of aesthetic satisfaction was the Word, the logos. In their sermons one glimpses the preoccupations of a later America: the sense of nature as a sign of God's presence in the world, and the special mission of American nature to be this sign and to serve as the metaphor of the good society, new but everlasting, precarious but fruitful. Samuel Sewell (1652-1730), represented earlier in another of his sermons, preached in Massachusetts in 1697. The following excerpt from one of his sermons expresses this notion of new covenant:

As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the appointed post, notwithstanding all the hectoring words and hard blows of the proud and boisterous ocean; as long as any salmon or sturgeon, shall swim in the streams of Merrimack,... as long as any Cattle be fed with the grass growing in the meadows, which do humbly bow themselves down before Turkey Hill; as long as any free and harmless Doves shall find a white oak within the township to perch, or feed, or build a careless nest upon ... as long as Nature shall not grow old and dote, but shall constantly remember to give the rows of Indian corn their education, by pairs: -- so long shall Christians be born here; and being first made to meet, shall from thence be translated, to be made partakers of the Saints in Light.

Words similar to Sewall's resonate even today. The perception of redemptive nature, which would suffuse nineteenth-century American painting and reach a climax in the current environmental movement, was there in early colonial days. There was as yet no art in America that could rival the spiritual consolations of nature, or be invested with nature's moral power. Almost all Americans before 1820 breathed a very thin aesthetic air. They were short of good, let alone great art and architecture. Most citizens saw no monumental sculpture, few great churches, no Colosseums or Pantheons, and as yet, no museums. Everything, however, was new. The public momuments of American classicism, like Jefferson's State Capitol in Virginia, were exceptions. The average citizen did not live in nice hosues with foundations and porches, still less in permanent edifices of stone or brick, but in makeshift wooden structures.

So the sense of the beautiful resided more in nature than in culture. The intelligent American, if she or he got the chance to visit Europe, could experience a transformation of taste in a kind of pentecostal flash by a single encounter with the treasures of antiquity. Jefferson was astounded by the Maison Carree at Nimes, the Roman temple that created his conception of public architecture, that eventually influenced not only his own works but also many copies, e.g., Hendricks Chapel on the campus of Syracuse University.

One hour with the Medici Venus in Florence or the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican could outweigh all one's past aesthetic experience as a raw child of the new world. Today, with mass tourism and mass reproduction to prepare for the encounter, it is more difficult for us to recapture the state of mind of an early American arriving in Europe. To a culturally starved Yankee, arriving in Italy or France was a true revelation, a place reached like heaven after a purgatorial voyage across the Atlantic. Four weeks of vomiting, and then .... Chartres. "We do not dream," wrote one New Yorker in 1845, "of the new sense which is developed by the sight of a masterpiece. It is as though we had always lived in a world where our eyes, though open, saw but a bland, and were then brought into another, where they were saluted by grace and beauty."

To this frame of mind was added something more: a general admiration, among the thin ranks of American fanciers of art, for John Ruskin, whose work began to appear here after 1845. Ruskin never came to America, but he mesmerized its art values. His supple prose linked the rich ground of religious oratory inherited from the Puritans and the way mid nineteenth-century Americans were learning to think about the visual arts and what role they should play. To overcome the Puritan opposition, one had to exaggerate the therapeutic power of art and talked about it in terms of benefit, conversion, refinement, unification, etc.

When Henry Ward Beecher went to France to see the cultural sights, he spoke of "instant conversion" not mere enjoyment or edification. Such a man might have felt uneasy at the fleshy Madonnas of Titian (too much model, not enough virgin), but there was inspiration in Frau Angelico and Raphael. Beecher's sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), "positively ran," as she recounts it, into the Louvre to find pictures "that would seize and control my whole being. But for such I looked in vain. Most of the men there had painted with dry eyes and cool hearts, thinking little of heroism, faith, love or immortality." The real artist, she continued, went without explanation straight to the heart; his work was not an acquired taste; one did not need to learn to read it.

The notion that the visual arts had the power to change the moral dimension of life peaked between the death of James Monroe and that of Abraham Lincoln. The editor of The Crayon, New York's main art publication in the 1850s, wrote in 1855: "The enjoyment of beauty is dependent on, and in ratio with, the moral excellence of the individual. We have assumed that Art is an elevating power, that it has in itself a spirit of morality." The first form of the American artist as culture hero, then, is a preacher. He raised art from being mere craft by moral utterance. God was the supreme artist; they imitated His work, the "Book of Nature." They divided the light and calmed the waters, especially if they were from Boston.

The same publication, The Crayon, asked "What was art for?" in what it called "this hard, angular and grovelling age," the 1850s. Why, it was to demonstrate the artist as "a reformer, a philanthropist, full of hope and reverence and love." And if he slipped, he fell a long way, like Lucifer. "If the reverence of men is to be given to Art," warned another editorial, "especial care must be taken that it is not ... offered in foul and unseemly vessels. We judge religion by the character of its priesthood and we would do well to judge art by the character of those who represent and embody it." Such a notion would have been news to most artists of the Renaissance.

Under the influence of the Romantic movement, the desire for art as religion changed; it was gradually supplanted by a taste for the romantic sublime, still morally instructive, but more indefinite and secular. The Hudson River painters formed their images of American nature as God's fingerprint: Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt made immense landscapes that expressed all the traits of Romantic art -- size, virtuosity, surrender to prodigy, and spectacle -- with one exception, its sense of anxiety. Their vision of wilderness does not elicit insecurity; it is Eden, whose God is an American god whose gospel is Manifest Destiny. It is not a Turner world, nor is it the field of experience literature had trod -- Melville's sense of catastrophe or Poe's morbidity, not even Whitman's naturalism. It is pious, public, and full of uplift.

The American audience of 1870 and 1880 embraced it wholeheartedly, because this audience wanted relief from the dark side of life. It did not appreciate either realism or romanticism. The trauma of the Civil War received scant expression from artists. Writers like Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane, however, did express the sense of pity, fratricidal horror, and social waste.

By the 1880's the function of art in the United States as quasi-religious uplift began to modulate into a more secular form, that of art as therapy, personal or social. This had a profound effect on the character of that special cultural form, the American museum. The idea was that the rich, by a voluntary decision, would create zones of transcendence within society. They would share the cultural wealth with a public that could not own it. The public museum would soothe the working woman or man; the great art of the past would alleviate their resentments. William James said in 1903, after attending the public opening of Isabella Stewart Gardner's private museum in Boston, that visiting such a place would give harried, self-conscious Americans the chance to forget themselves, to become like children again, immersed in wonder.

Art was placed in the mansions of the robber barons. Dorothy Parker jotted in the visitor's book of San Simeon (home of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mogul) after noticing a Della Robbia over the entrance to Marion Davies' bedroom:

Upon my honor, I saw a Madonna

Standing in a niche

Above the door of the private whore

Of the world's worst son of a bitch.

But America's search for signs of spiritual value in art was not confined to the European Renaissance. It sought out Japan and China too. So the powerful effect of the so-called Boston bonzes like William Bigelow and Ernest Fenellosa, whose collecting efforts in Japan in search of their own satori would give Boston its unrivaled collection of Japanese art in the 1890s, a time when the Japanese themselves were first succumbing to Westernization.

Emphasis on the therapeutic value of art increased greatly after 1920. If cultivated American taste resisted modernism at first, it was because in its apparenta violence to accepted norms, it did not seem spiritual enough. The museum response to the problem of reconciliation was the Museum of Modern Art. The American worldview had changed so that the museum had to balance its sober nature against the basic claim of the modernist avant-garde, which is that art advances by injecting doses of unacceptability into its own discourse, thus creating new possibilities. The justification was twofold. First there was aestheticism, or art for art's sake, which decreed that all works of art should be read first in terms of their formal properties: this freed the artwork from Puritan censure. The second was the familiar one of social benefit: though art for art's sake was right to put them outside the frame of moral judgment, works of art were in themselves moral because, whether you knew it or not at first, they pointed the way to higher truths and so constituted expressions that did you good.

The changes that have been taking place in the past few decades have transformed the American worldview when it comes to public expression of art. On the one hand is the belated recognition of the contributions of previously marginalized groups and peoples. On the other hand is the emphasis on the individual right to express herself or himself in any way, that has led to confrontations such as those surrounding the work of performance artists like Holly Hughes and Karen Finley or the exhibition of photographs by artists like the late Robert Mapplethorpe. What is important to stress, because the issue is current, is how the standpoint one takes on this question is directly related to the dedication one has to a particular worldview. A conservative Baptist will react very differently than a free-thinking feminist.

Theoretical Issues

The issue at the center of the various critical and linguistic expressions involving worldviews in America today turns on the question of otherness, a notion that by definition is social and public rather than private or personal. It involves a notion whose problematic character arises with the idea of America itself. For initially America was the "other" to the European colonizers. What makes the problem more difficult today is the theory that, as Christopher Lasch put it, people "no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves and that survives their own passing."²³

The plural worldviews must resist erosion of those foundations, cultural and ethical, that stabilize the self in reality, so it is possible once again to confirm the sense of belonging to a world to and for which the self is responsible. The danger is expressed in figures like Captan Ahab in Moby Dick, or Thomas Sutpen in Absolom, Absolom, or Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin, all representatives of the kind of blindness that overtakes anyone who is ready to make over the whole of the public as well as personal world into an image of compensation for her or his outraged or injured sense of identity.

American Civil Religion

The term "American Civil Religion" refers to a somewhat incoherent but still recognizable set of beliefs and rituals that coexist alongside the traditional historical religions in America. It is not an offshoot of American Protestantism nor a sanctified version of democracy, civil religion constitutes a system of national symbols and rituals that express the American experiment in representative government as a decisive event in Old Testament language of "the mighty acts of God." Its primary myth is composed of texts like the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

We need to ask about the origins of the American tendency to give value to the public order by somehow making is sacred. Evidence abounds of attempts to interpret the pattern of events in the New World as fulfilling, either potentially or actually, the divine statements of scripture. Whether William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation or Fitzgerald's fictional Jay Gatsby's attempt to found a religion of wonder and awe out of the meretricious symbols of American success in The Great Gatsby, attempts to accomplish this are legion. The peculiarly American worldviews reviewed in this chapter such as Mormonism and the Southern Baptist Convention express this linkage of America and worldview aptly.

Endnotes

¹ J.H. Noyes, Bible Communism (New York: 1853), pp. 82-85.

² History of Joseph Smith by His Mother, Lucy Mack Smith, ed. Preston Nibley, (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954), p. 36.

³Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, vol 1 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co, 1927), p. 6.

⁴ Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 99.

⁵ Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saint (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 9.

⁶Proclamation of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To All the Kings of the World, to the President of the United States of America; to the Governors of the Several States, and to the Rulers and People of All Nations (Liverpool: F.D. Richards, 1845), pp. 1,6.

⁷ Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, Ohio, 1834), p. 14.)

⁸ Parley A. Pratt, A Voice of Warning and Instruction to All People (New York: W. Sandford, 1837), pp. 140-42.

⁹ Sidney Rigdon, Oration on 4th of July, 1838, Far West, Missiouri, in Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers, ed. William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p. 95.

¹⁰Reed Peck "manuscript" reproduced in L.B. Cake, Peepstone Joe and the Peck Manuscript (New York, 1899), p. 109.

¹¹ See Richard T. Hughes, "Recovering First Times: The Logic of Primitivism in American Life," in Religion and the Life of the Nation, ed. Rowland A. Sherrill (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 205-6. I am indebted to this article for much of the above text.

¹² William J. Whalen, The Latter-day Saints in the Modern Day World (New York: The John Day Company, 1964), p. 108.

¹³Sterling McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (1965), p. 29) in Bloom, op. cit., p. 115.

¹⁴ Bloom, op. cit., p. 127.

¹⁵ Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: First Church of Christ Scientist, 1971), p. 468.

¹⁶Mary Baker Eddy, "The Great Discovery," Retrospection and Introspection (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1925), p. 25.

¹⁷ Basic Dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology, from the works of L. Ron Hubbard (Los Angeles: Bridge, 1983) n.p.

¹⁸ "The Scientology Catechism" in What is Scientology? Based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology, 1978), pp. 197-98.

¹⁹ H.P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy: An Abridgement, ed. Joy Mills (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972).

²⁰ Bloom, op. cit., p. 206.

²¹ Quoted from ibid., p. 240.

²²Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 267-68.

²³Christopher Lasch, "1984 Are We There?" Salmagundi 65 (Fall 1984), 61.