1950's "Christianity"

I've always "had my suspicions" about the 1950s. In Turn Neither to the Right nor to the Left, I wrestle with that decade for almost five pages (in the section of the book on "legislating morality"). Among other things, I noted that comparison of morality over time in general-- and glorification of 1950s in particular-- are fraught with difficulties. Comparisons tend to be selective, based on poor memories, and focused on behaviors vs. hearts.

Here's one question I like to ask: how did the glorious parents of the 1950s yield the highly criticized children of the 1960s?

At the end of the day, it's an interesting question, but one that doesn't take us very far-- and may actually cause trouble if we handle it poorly.

As such, William Murchison has a few useful things to say about all of this in Touchstone. (I liked his title: The Way We Weren’t--Churches in the Fifties Were Filled, But Were They Faithful?)

Watching, a little idly, some recent televised reenactment of the Exodus story, I had a recurrent thought: Wasn’t it nice when Americans, by and large, to one degree or another, acknowledged Great Moments in Theological History—the parting of the Red Sea, Samson and Delilah, hungry lions versus stalwart Christians—and shelled out to see the cinematic reenactments of these moments? Wasn’t it nice? Although . . .

Although what? That’s the point. If you have the impression that the 1950s constituted some kind of last frontier of religious conviction and inspiration in the United States, you might wish to reexamine that impression with dispatch.

I say this out of concern for intellectual clarity in the way American Christians address concerns unimaginable not many years ago....Doesn’t it make you want to close your eyes and relive the era when prayer at school was a human right, as well as a duty, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, with wondrous clarity, and on television yet, set forth the case for Christianity?...

A lot was good back then....The fifties really were a time when the culture broadly affirmed Christianity as a Good Thing. I was there. I saw it; I heard it.

And yet some kind of demurral is strongly indicated: some sign of recognition that no human society, whatever its good intentions and methods, has lived unburdened, unencumbered by the crushing weight of human fallenness....

The fifties were not the summum bonum. They were an episode—a highly instructive one, I might add, full of dangers as well as satisfactions. We really don’t want to bring them back. We want something better, which is to learn from them....

Religion was a going thing, that was for sure. The war was over. Americans wanted something that looked more normal than a carrier deck or a pup tent. Moreover, the war years had in some ways been a praying time: Foxholes were, generally speaking, the last places you’d look for atheists.

The churches had been on hand—heroically, sacrificially....The military issued New Testaments to the troops. (I have preserved my father’s copy.) Christianity, and to a proportionately smaller extent, Judaism, emerged from the war looking better than they had since perhaps the first piercing notes of the Jazz Age.

A key element of post-war normalcy was anchorage in a church. By 1960, an astounding 69 percent of Americans claimed membership in one church or another. Here was evangelization—self-evangelization, really—on the grand scale.

Popular culture, being popular, was suffused with religion: anyway a sort of religion, obscuring more than highlighting doctrinal differences. Where the customers led, the entertainment industry followed, with Quo Vadis, The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, and, above all, Cecil B. de Mille’s cheerfully over-the-top The Ten Commandments...

Fulton Sheen was anything but alone among religious figures dispensing enlightenment and counsel. It was the age also of the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale’s attractive, and moneymaking, proposition was that “you can think your way to success and happiness.”...

There was unmistakably an element of American-ness in the postwar American embrace of organized religion. Into a Pledge of Allegiance too flat and secular for some tastes, Congress, in the mid-fifties, slipped the words “under God” by way of affirming the religious commitment everyone assumed we always had had. Charlton Heston as Moses, in the version of The Ten Commandments I saw as a high-school sophomore, could be viewed as defining the Exodus in Cold War terms: deliverance from tyranny by a jealous God with little time for tinpot despots and their minions....

Surely it was enough, of a Sunday, to put on a blue serge suit and striped necktie, walk the family to the church door, greet the grocer and the lawyer and the electrician, cut loose with “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty,” bow heads for the Lord’s Prayer, favor the collection plate with a few appropriately sized bills—then head home, or to a good restaurant, for the Sunday repast. I myself spent many a Sunday this way.

It was no bad way to spend a Sunday, I must remark in retrospect. Was it a good way? That might seem the larger question. It certainly was the question for at least some partakers of American worship in the 1950s. Was this all? For this, Christ had suffered and died?...

When the decade began, I was a mere third grader. I remember no ecclesiological questions arising at the Sunday dinner table. Only later would I become aware of the critics and their supposed effrontery. There was, for instance, the Reverend Theodore Wedel, an Episcopal priest, who, in a 1950 book titled The Christianity of Main Street, argued that “Christianity is today, among a majority of educated men and women, including many nominal Protestant Christians, an almost unknown religion”—combining “Golden Rule idealism” and “moralism”—“a kind of Christianity without theology, one which does not repudiate the name of God but which has basically little to do with him.”...

Are the 1950s in any way a useful model for American Christians of the twenty-first century? Would we like to go back? Would it be better, for instance, if the movie moguls returned to producing religious epics like The Ten Commandments, with their earnest depictions of the power of God?...The epics didn’t go away. The audiences did. When George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told fizzled at the box office in 1965, it became clear that new factors were forming thought—factors that mainstream Christianity might have addressed, or even headed off at the pass, had it listened more attentively to some of the unwelcome criticisms launched earlier against complacency and self-satisfaction.

I think what the decade of the 1950s gives us to think about, concerning the role and duties of religion—the Christian religion, specifically—in a secular society is a matter of some consequence. Two particulars come to mind. First, Christians who are set on identifying themselves with the purposes of the larger society should be, at the very least—careful. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said our Lord. And a good thing, too, given the world’s engagements and preoccupations....Second, complacency regarding the world’s purposes requires no less care and wariness....

At the end of the day, Christianity is about morals second and faith first. It is so easy and common to reverse those-- or to water down or simply eliminate the latter. As we're told in Ephesians 2:8-10...

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.