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PARTISAN REVIEW
should, it claims, make a man responsible, peaceful, and cooperative;
but to make him a patriot-with all its terrestrial commitment and
implication of automatic loyalty-is neither the spirit nor end of
religion.
If
religious leaders publicly combated the tendency on the part
of official leadership to make use of divine sanction, churchgoing,
and religious affiliation as an adjunct of public relations, such a
tendency might be less pronounced. Unfortunately it is true, as Will
Herberg points out in his recent book
Pratestant-Cathalic-Jew,
that
an atheist could not be elected at the present time to office if he
announced, as did Robert Ingersoll or Clarence Darrow, that he was
an unbeliever, or, for that matter, unchurched.
As
Herberg notes,
only one of 95 Senators in the Eighty-third Congress reported no
religious affiliation; and all others, whatever their vagueness, claimed
some credal identification.
1
Atheism, even skepticism, is not good
public relations-it is, moreover, positively dangerous if one happens
to be running for public office or working in the public school system.
What emerges is a rather bleak picture of religion compromising
itself for the sake of security and public policy hedging its own tradi–
tion of indifference to religious commitment in order to insure re–
ligious support under the ever-widening umbrella of the American
way of life.
Does this pattern of the evolving national religion imply the
existence of an ideology?
If
w~
mean by ideology the application of
coherent theory to popular activity, the transformation of doctrine
into viable terms of conduct, the identification of religion and
Americanism is not ideology. Ideology involving a doctrine of man
and history is not at the moment operative on the American scene.
This is both good and bad. Because the American ideology is vague,
it is fluid and malleable. It may be changed and reformed. It allows
for growth and the discharge of waste. It is in this sense that Ameri–
can democracy is fortunate to have no
dacta,
only a
praxis.
It is bad
and dangerous because being fluid, being dependent upon the popular
will and the popular mind, easy solutions become more easily en-
1.
Herberg,
Protestant-Catholic-Jew.
New York: Doubleday
&
Co., 1955.
Ref.
Information Service,
December 27, 1952.
