504
PARTISAN REVIEW
At this moment, on the contrary, if recent statistics
2
are believ–
able, 96 or 97 per cent of the American people declare themselves to
believe in God; 75 per cent regard themselves as church members;
90 per cent pray; varying but enormously high numbers of people
believe in Biblical inspiration, immortality, heaven and hell. At
the same time as they believe in such classic credal doctrines, a scant
5 per cent fear, much less anticipate, damnation; and 80 per cent, ac–
cording to one survey, were more concerned with being comfortable
here and now than occupying themselves with their ultimate estate.
Ninety-one percent felt most sincerely that they were trying to lead
the good life; 78 per cent considered that they had measured up to
their own standards of virtue; and 50 per cent believed that they
were observing the Golden Rule constantly and without fail.
American religiosity is paradoxically smug and self-assured.
If
there is such pervasive and abundant
~elf-congratulation,
can
the root of the problem be fear? The signs of fear need not be chil–
iastic passion, as in first-century Asia Minor, or, as
in
sixteenth-cen–
tury Europe, the preoccupation with hell, damnation, and evil. The
problem of personal evil and judgment is not serious at the moment.
What exists is radical self-deception; the fear is more terrifying for
being vague, nameless, and imprecise. With war and atomic de–
struction constantly threatening from without and incredible com–
plexity, meaningless pressure, and anxiety compelling our society
from within, the average American sees himself trapped in an unre–
leased pressure cooker. Fear, the pervasive quality of which is its
vagueness, is more devastating and critical, being too complex for
the single man to summarize.
It
is for this reason that the simplistic
vocabulary of man's limitation before transcendence, man's original
fall, man's departure from grace are hollow-sounding and unreal,
whatever their theological validity. The contemporary American does
not see
himself
fallen from anything, for he does not evaluate himself
individually.
His individuation is practically meaningless, for he is
absorbed into so many group and class situations that he can find
out who he is only by counting up his tags of membership. Not the
2. All of the statistics quoted here and subsequently appear in Herberg's
work,
op. cit.
They are drawn primarily from surveys conducted by the
Catholic
Digest
during 1952-53 and by
Public Opinion News Service
(Gallup Poll)
during 1954. The figures, if anything, would probably be steady or even slightly
higher today.
