TABLE TALK

The new-time religion

DENIS BROGAN

Washington—In a recent number of Time magazine we learn that the rumour so cur- rent a few years ago that `God is dead' is dis- credited. He is alive and living in the United States. This is a change from the high water mark of the 'God is dead' theorists who were teaching in famous 'church con- nected' universities, usually, if not always, in their divinity schools, that the Lord God of Hosts had evaporated. I can remember being on a very distinguished campus (Princeton, to be frank) when there was a gathering of the reporters of God's death at the Divinity School and one of the 'con- ferants' (the word exists), with a rashness that recalls Lord Snow, asserted that though God was dead, that didn't abolish the need for theologians.

Since I never believed that God was dead in the us (1 won't bet on His existence in England or even Scotland). I was not upset by the change of fashion. For I have always insisted that the United States is still a Christian country. At any rate, it is a Pro- testant country. The distinction is not meant to reflect on the theological or ethical be- liefs of the majority, simply to remind Catholics or Jews that, by an historical de- cision that cannot now be undone, all, or nearly all the national religious emblems and public liturgies are Christian and mainly Protestant Christian. Catholics may resent this and Jews. sometimes foolishly, can protest, but 'facts are chick that winna ding' as a somewhat irregular Scotch Pres- byterian once wrote.

And one of the alarming (and hopeful) signs on the American scene is the revival of genuine religious controversy which is a special aspect of the war of the generations. The quarrel can be summed up in the first question of the Shorter Catechism: 'what are the chief ends of Man?' It is, I hope. almost a work of supererogation to quote the answer: `to glorify God and enjoy him forever'. What are the chief ends of modern American man and woman? That is what the young are pondering deeply, and usually more deeply than their wondering, envious, alarmed, embittered parents pondered the formal religion in which they were brought up.

Of course, there are parents. the much abused 'permissive parents', who have sym- pathy with the soul-searching of their young. Sometimes they sympathise too much. I take with several grains of heroin the hostility of many young anarchists to 'the establish- ment' (bless Mr Henry Fairlie and this journal for launching that useful word in its modern context): those voluntary `drop- outs' of the establishment who sponge shamelessly on their rich parentso(sometimes more successfully on their grandparents). 1 know more than one case of this proud defiance of the social order combined with a great readiness to accept or even to de- mand the filthy lucre of the System. But

a great many of the rebels with too many causes are genuine fugitives from 'the acquisitive society', like (mutatis nuttandis) Gautama and St Francis.

But what are their causes? Some are, possibly (one never knows) deserving of dismissal. Some of the rebels are naively destructive anarchists who recall those Russians who wanted to wreck society be- fore thinking about what was to replace it. For them it is necessary to print the most famous of four-letter words (not love) on the covers of their underground magazines. Some are the children of rich, formally pessi- mistic, parents who think (or say they think) that 'the revolution' is coming, is inevitable (no reformists they) and will be quite a 'gas' or a 'giggle'.

But not all of the people who talk with cheer'ul pessimism are necessarily phonies like the French noblemen who joined the army of Conde at Coblence in 1792 to invade their country and stamp out the revolution in blood, a few years after they had rebuked their notaries for insisting on describing them as 'noble and puissant lords'. They are alienated from American society in serious and sometimes admirable ways.

True, the panting demands for a sexual revolution sometimes ring false or odd. Thus, in one of the underground news sheets that I recently read there is a cam- paign against 'male chauvinism'. (These 'underground' papers are, it may be said, openly on sale in all districts of Washing- ton. I buy mine, as a rule, outside the Press Club.) Whether the polemic against 'male chauvinism' expresses the true sentiments of a great number of 'the girls', ie any Ameri- can woman under seventy, I can't say. I am, I suppose, a 'male chauvinist' but I don't think that female masturbation and lesbianism will replace old heterosexual copulation. Without quoting from King Lear: 'let copulation thrive', I can only express my sentiments by telling a story. Fifty odd years ago, at the height of the celebrity of the Denver Post (the adjective is carefully chosen), an innocent (or ironical) young reporter dashed into the office of Mr Tammen or Mr Bonfils, the 'great twin brethren' of the Post, in high indignation. 11 have just come through the X High School grounds and the grass is covered with young couples copulating. We must stop this.' He was answered solemnly. 'Young man, I am as deeply shocked as you are. But nothing this great crusading paper can say or do will make this pastime really unpopular.'

But there is a lot more in the drop-out movement than permutations and combina- tions in the sexual field (or fields). One of the local dissident papers is campaigning against the ruin of Washington by freeways which, possibly not accidentally, will erect a 'Chinese Wall' betwen black and white quarters, creating (as did the Boulevard de Sebastopol under the Second Empire) a phy- sical barrier between rich and poor to add to the bitterness of the class war.

But the hippies, drop-outs, weathermen and the rest have a more serious challenge to their parents than their clothes (or nudity), their language. the smoking of 'pot' or the injection of heroin. In a deeper sense than many parents realise, their children are dropping-out from the 'Protestant ethic'. This revolt is against the association of 'grace and gear' (as an eminent Scottish poet put it). In the unofficial, but yet estab- lished religion of the confident America that I first studied nearly forty-five years ago, John D. Rockefeller I was right in saying that God had given him his money. Bishop Lawrence t was right in identifying wealth with sanctity. So was the ironist who buried among the lavish Gothic of Ralph Adams Cram's St Thomas's, half hidden in the decoration, the dollar sign.

And one of the greatest non-fiction best- sellers of this time in America, 'Adam Smith's' The Money Game, harks back again to the sterility of playing the market. It is at best a game. And more than once he quotes the comments of our Lord Keynes on the boredom of playing the market, ex- cept as a game and then only as a brief game. Keynes pointed out that money- making was as boring and degrading an aim in life as man could possibly decide to choose. Keynes was bitterly hostile to the

• Protestant ethic. lam tomorrow but never jam today.' He looked forward to a better time when more rational economics and technical advance would give endless leisure for better things—art, philosophy, love. But, alas, Keynes put this Utopia a century away. (Jam tomorrow.) But will the dis- senting young not accelerate this voyage to Utopia or Cythera? I fear not, though they may be making the right voyage.

But there are shoals ahead. Aotion is breeding reaction. There is in Washington what looks like a right-wing organisation of rugger toughs. The hippie young anger the old and even the middle-aged in the Middle West—and elsewhere. I. know how the adherents of the old time religion feel. It is as old as Ennius: Minibus antiquis res star Romani; virisque.

Yet it is some years since the chaplain of one of the two greatest Protestant 'con- nections' on a great mid-western campus told me he could still preach against pre- marital intercourse (formerly known as for- nication), but could not effectually preach against 'heavy petting'. 'For all I know, the boys and girls at the back of my church may be doing it during my sermon.' When I first came to America, a great friend of mine. a 'proper Bostonian'. was rebuked by a rich and enlightened Bostonian matron for bathing without wearing stockings. Nowt The old-time patriotic religion is on the wane, too. Where is the American Legion? Only the Papists try to keep the Sabbath day holy. One of the many reasons for the flop of the Sesquicentennial Exposi- tion of 1926 was that it was held in a dry and Sabbath-keeping Philadelphia. What will the bicentennial of the liberation of the colonists from the British yoke be like? I don't know, but I think that the tide of Puritan morality will have ebbed further, even to an extent that would have startled, if not shocked, the most eminent of Phila- delphians (born in Boston), Benjamin Frank- lin. For in this age, more than in any other, 'No winter shall abate this spring's increase'.