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PARTISAN REVIEW
PRAGMATIC RELIGIOSITY
PROTESTANT-CATHOLIC-JEW: An Essay in American Religious Soci–
ology. By Will Herberg. Doubleday. $4.00.
If
one judges by the campaign addresses of General Eisen–
hower in
1952,
the unbelievable success of "inspirational" books, the
concern for religious sentiment in public education-in sum, the myriad
examples of popular religious identification now being charted by re–
searcher5 and statisticians, it is apparent that a healthy America is
being thought increasingly synonymous with a religious America. This
is a rather forbidding conclusion, but
Protestant-CathoLic-Jew: An Essay
in American ReLigious SocioLogy
by Will Herberg leaves no other con–
clusion possible. Herberg documents, with care and selective intelligence,
the vague but pervasive phenomenon of the American religious revival,
a revival born, by and large, of the well-intentioned, unreflective grop–
ing for tradition that characterizes much of what is called American
culture.
Herberg has no thesis, nor is it necessary that he have one. The
importance of his work is that it discloses, albeit with charity and good
sense, the facts of the American religious revival and estimates their
significance. Religion is seen as a part of the problem of the settlement
of America; the desperate effort of the late-comers to acclimate them–
selves to an Anglo-Saxon Protestantism that not only had fixed its own
forms of worship, but had projected those forms and their associated
social and cultural commitments upon the whole of American life. The
problem of the European-born American was how to hold on to old
traditions while learning to acquire new. By and large they succeeded
too well in the former endeavor, while failing signally in the latter. It
was up to the second generation to refuse, to tum back the passport–
to become resolutely and unambiguously American. With the Ameri–
canization of the second generation the German language churches, the
Yiddish
uerbande,
the Polish sermons disappeared. Americans all, irre–
spective of national origin, formed parishes along religious, rather than
ethnic or national lines. Religion emerged in the third generation, "the
generation of the return," as the means of holding on to a vanishing
European past. Religion acquired as well the respectability of belonging,
of identifying with the great American diversity, the ideal pluralism.
The fourth religion, the American religion that is no religion, became
the justification of being religious. Whatever you are, be something, is
