Misunderstanding is afoot in America. People are talking, which is good, but they are not understanding each other, which is bad. There is a significant divide in American culture, a divide between a certain variety of intellectual and, not to put too fine a point on it, the rest of the country. This variety of intellectual stands on his side of the divide, ear cupped and heart full of good intentions, but cannot make sense of what he hears coming from the hinterlands. He looks over, studies the dark terrain, grows confused, draws the wrong conclusions, and generally has a bad time of it — whether he is aware of the fact or not.
The split is not between intellectuals and nonintellectuals — it is not between bookish scholars and virile factory workers, or for instance, between a yacht-bound William E Buckley, Jr. and a beer-drinking longshoreman. The divide is between people who have been socialized and educated in a secular culture in a way that has sealed them off from religion, and people who are either religious or at least familiar with the language and motivations of religious people.
A person of the latter persuasion may be decidedly secular in his take on life, but he will know what it means to believe things are otherwise. The person who is to some extent lost in a secular culture, on the other hand, is not really sure what religious people are up to. Because his life has been conditioned by a secular worldview, all convincing explanations of the mysteries of existence are necessarily secular ones. As an educated person, he may know something about religion, but, for the most part, his knowledge is strictly historical or literary — it is parlor knowledge, brittle and dry as dead men’s bones.
If he has been exposed to religious thinking at all, it was in a college course in which he read a few pages of Aquinas or some stanzas of Dante. He will not believe there is a modern-day Aqfinas. He will not think it possible for a contemporary artist to be as devout as Dante. He would never suspect that a scientist in the late 20th century could reverently dabble in theology in the way Newton did. He might have been exposed to T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland but would be shocked to discover his Christianity and Culture.
This brand of secularism is noteworthy for its insularity. And in its ignorance of the most enduring tradition in Western culture, such secular insularity has had a profoundly negative impact on our common American conversation. Observe, for instance, what hapens when someone utters the word “sin” in mixed company. To secularly tuned ears, the word sin stems from an antiquated religious tradition that retains historical and sociological importance at best. This tradition no longer carries contemporary weight. Its symbols and words are recognizable, but those words and symbols are stripped of original content, dressed up in the latest fashion, and denatured. When someone says, “sin,” secularly tuned ears do the best they can and produce, ” dysfunction.”
But while sins must be prayed about and forgiven, dysfunctions must be refunctionalized. Sins require priests and preachers; dysfunctions require politicians and perhaps psychologists. Thinking that a person is really talking about a dysfunction when she uses the word sin does violence to the meaning of the word sin and to what religious people mean when they use the word sin, but it is not necessarily an act of deliberate intellectual aggression. It may be a sign of confusion. It may reveal a type of parochialism that masquerades as cosmopolitanism.
And when the confusion becomes acute, it is difficult to ignore. When someone is bold enough to insist that sin is sin and not anything else, when someone is blunt about it, people condiioned by secular insularity eventually go dumb and stare; their jaws agape, their eyes agoggle, a peculiar dysphasia sets in on them like a terrible hangover. There, in all its attendant ugliness, is a phenomenon that might be called Cultural Disconnect.
Cultural Disconnect may be defined as a phenomenon that occurs when people begin to talk past each other because they have been formed, and informed, by different cultures and are not fully aware of the fact. For long, painful moments, people who have been Culturally Disconnected continue to make points and ripostes in what they take to be a shared language, when, after all, they have ascribed different meanings to words belonging to a common vocabulary.
In recent years, Cultural Disconnect has been occurring more and more frequently between those who suffer from secular insularity and those who do not. It occurs on talk shows, news shows, during the course of debates, in polemics waged by usually crafty and sensible cultural observers, at swank cocktail parties, and even in the academy, a place where, as everyone knows, people take it as imperative to understand one another.
It is not that the number of people who suffer from secular insularity is so great, it is that they are conspicuous: They seem to always be on television. When they are not on television, they are writing books or, at the very least, articles, editorials, and newspaper reports. And because they hold positions of great visibility, their analysis of life creates a mystifying national spectacle in which they portray the convictions that are fundamental and familiar to Americans on the other side of the cultural divide as if they were artifacts from another time and place. In movies, television shows, and news broadcasts, Americans see people who resemble themselves to some extent but are strangely bereft of the convictions that in real life are found to be sustaining. They read columns and articles, they read books, and again, there they are — except, no, on second glance, there they are not.
It is as if a nation of body doubles is getting all the attention. People who look like Americans, and for the most part act and think like Americans, are being paraded as the real thing. But the telltale clue is there — the people who are getting the airtime and the print space are not very often religious people, while Americans are, more often than not, religious.
A July 8, 1995, Economist article finds America to be a country that ” oozes religion,” in fact. The article cites polls which suggest that around 95 percent of Americans believe in God, that four out of five believe in miracles, the afterlife, and the Virgin Birth. Nearly three-quarters of Americans believe in angels. Nine out of ten own a Bible. Twenty-seven percent own more than four copies. “Belief in the devil has risen sharply, to 65 percent in a recent poll,” the piece continues. That this is not consistently reflected in the American media is unfortunate and curious and maybe absurd — and points to the phenomenon of Cultural Disconnect.
Some beleaguered believers feel so harassed by the funhouse-mirror treatment they receive in newspapers and on television that they posit the existence of a cabal of God-hating intellectuals, a conspiracy of media-savvy secularists, who are out to deprive the nation of its religious life. But there is no such conspiracy, and the intellectuas, journalists, and media and entertainment producers are far from being savvy. They are, in fact, weirdly confused and disjointed. They are severely handicapfeed, in terms of their ability to understand America. they have eyes, but they cannot see. They have ears, but they cannot hear. American life appears to them as a bizarre pageant where people succumb to inexplicable motivations. National trends baffle them. The cultural zeitgeist forever eludes them.
Mega-churches sprout up across the country just when religion is supposed to be on the wane. Mainstream Protestant denomirtations evolve nicely and appeal to principles that even they, mired in their secular vision, can applaud, but what happens? Those denominations begin to lose members, and a more robust, evangelical Protestantism begins to dominate the religious landscape. Racism is said to be the great American plague, and Christian fundamentalism is identified as a backward, cudely religious and racist example of what is going wrong, and yet, the explosive growth of Pentecostal churches, the fastest growing branch of Christianity today, utterly defies this paradigm — Pentecostal churches are typically the most racially integrated in the country.
There have been attempts to bridge the gap, of course. Most of the major networks have attempted to cover the religious nature of the nation and re- connect with Americans. There have been special reports and special editions, in-depth reporting and long, earnest articles, but they only reveal the Disconnect all the more.
A compelling example of this variety of Cultural Disconnect was provided by a summer segment of the venerable MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (now The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer), that nightly refiner’s fire where corrupt half- thoughts and misstatements, where media-hype tactics and pressures, are burned clean. If the NewsHour cannot strike a balanced note, there is something wrong in our culture. And that was what was revealed during the August 21 broadcast, featuring a misunderstanding concerning the Promise Keepers, the grass-roots religious organization for men founded by Bill McCartney.
McCartney, formerly head football coach at the University of Colorado, formed the Promise Keepers in 1990. While he had been a formidable coach, he was, he explains, a poor father and husband and almost lost his family. He knew his failings were not unique and believed a group that bluntly addressed the nation’s problems as spiritual problems, and not economic or even moral problems, would provide an answer for men across the country. McCartney believes the only way that lasting change can come about is for individuals to submit themselves to God. There aren’t 12 steps. There is one, and only one — to go God’s way, or the wrong way.
Richard Ostling, Time magazine’s religion editor, served as the narrator of the segment. Before the interviews commenced, footage of Promise Keepers gatherings was shown — men raising their hands, praising God, singing. Following the footage, Marie Fortune, a domestic violence counselor and minister, and Robert Bly, author of the bestselling men’s book Iron John, were asked to comment on the Promise Keepers. While Fortune clearly understood what the Promise Keepers were up to — and disagreed with them on explicitly religious grounds — Bly seemed lost. It was not that he disagreed with the Promise Keepers agenda — though he did — it was that he seemed utterly perplexed by it, not to mention alarmed.
Though Bly was described by Ostling as a “liberal Protestant,” it appeared he had never before encountered people who act from religious motives. He suggested that the Promise Keepers had been founded in fear, that it would be bad for America in the long run, that it would ultimately be . . . a political movement. “This group of enthusiastic men is bound to go politically toward the Christian right wing. There’s no other place it can go in American culture. . . . Pat Robertson is waiting.”
McCartney put it this way: “We have no political agenda. We have no candidates to endorse. We have no policies to suggest. We’re strictly after God’s heart for what He would do to rescue our nation from this downward spiral of morality and restore Jesus Christ to his rightful position as the head of every home.”
But such words, from Bly’s perspective, were code words, and he was crafty enough to decode them. He reacted to McCartney’s explanations as if they were a child’s explanations, just waiting for the author of Iron John to come along and peel away the playground rhetoric to expose the naked political truth.
Implicit in Bly’s take on the matter is the view that politics, and not anything else, is bedrock. That means that solutions to problems must be political. Thus McCartney, formerly an eminently capable football coach, drops the ball when he diagnoses his own problems and America’s problems as the result of sin, for which the only cure is redemption, not political action.
To take another example, in the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox wrote a fine article on the religious right in which he attempted, with some success, to cross the divide. While Professor Cox and the men and women he interviewed at Pat Robertson’s Regent University did not suffer from Cultural Disconnect, Cox clearly sensed that some Atlantic Monthly readers might, and so the article reads like an ethnographer’s travel journal, in which the natives’ habits and beliefs are explored and then translated into political terms, which is to say, terms his readers will understand. Cox casts himself as the experieaced traveler, trying to convince his readers that the natives at Regent University are people too. The professors who teach there hold advanced degrees from respectable universities, he explains. The students are actually quite bright, he allows. Everyone eats, sleeps, and drinks water to stay alive, just like people back home.
Manifesting scholarly prudence, Cox here and there expresses reservations: ” I was still not sure whether Regent was a cause or a college or a little of both.” (Of course, there are some who are unsure about Harvard for precisely the same reasons.) But in the end, Cox pointedly explains that those who are ” enchanted by deconstruction, postmodernism, and secular philosophies” will find it hard “to engage people like the Regent faculty members.” In order to do so, he explains, communication will have to proceed at “the theological level.”
That communication will not come easily, but it must come. Cultural Disconnect may be amusing when it occurs during the course of a dinner party, but it is massively destructive when it disrupts national debate and fogs a nation’s identity. It is not necessary that everyone agree with everyone else about politics and religion, but even the possibility of genuine disagreement implies some degree of understanding. As long as the evening news, and the magazines of opinion, and sitcorns, and feature films, continue to misunderstand the motives and ideas of Americans of faith, they will be responsible for the detachment and suspicion with which Americans increasingly view our common culture.
By Scott M. Morris
