The 45 Years That Might Have Been

The Public Square

It is a commonplace that American public life is today “polarized” to a degree it has never been before. A short definition of polarization is that people no longer view one another as neighbors but as opponents; conversation is displaced by political combat. The unprecedented polarization thesis should be viewed with a measure of skepticism. First, because most people do not live their everyday lives in a manner dominated by political ideologies or allegiances. Second, because there probably have been other times in our history—before and immediately after the Civil War, plus the Depression and New Deal—when political lines were drawn as sharply and public rhetoric was as combatively partisan. In the raucous and rollicking course of history, it is dangerous to say that anything is unprecedented.

In the course of writing my book Catholic Matters (forthcoming from Basic Books), I had occasion to revisit Gerhard Lenski’s The Religious Factor: A Sociologist’s Inquiry. In the field of the sociology of religion, the book has the status of being at least a near-classic. First published in 1961, Lenski’s inquiry was based on survey research done in 1958. Then and now, although much less now, sociologists and political scientists tended to ignore or downplay “the religious factor” in social attitudes and behavior, including politics. Lenski argued that the immigration-based “ethnic factor” was in decline and the “socio-religious” factor was in the ascendancy, leading to what he nervously viewed as a “compartmentalized” America.

He was appropriately skeptical of the way in which people then thought about “liberalism” and “conservatism.” “Liberals,” he wrote, “are generally identified with the working classes and the intellectuals, and conservatives with the upper and middle classes.” This essentially Marxian analysis based on “class struggle” is, Lenski concluded, deeply misleading. With Max Weber, he believed that status is more telling than class. In America, the status hierarchy was white Protestants first, Catholics second, Jews third, and “Negroes” fourth. (Obviously, Jews were not third in economic-class standing.) Lenski used four controverted issues that divided people at the time: the welfare state, freedom of speech, support for foreign aid and the United Nations, and racial integration. The working class was “liberal” only on the first, while intellectuals and the middle-to-upper classes favored all four. The old way of distinguishing liberal from conservative, Lenski believed, was of very limited usefulness. The neglected component was “the religious factor,” and the important new component in that connection was the numerical growth and rising status of Catholics in America.

Although he carefully denied (as social scientists do) that he was making predictions, he wrote that “we may expect these gradual changes in population composition to encourage many, or most, of the following developments.” Then comes an interesting list. Keep in mind that this was before the Second Vatican Council and the many changes and destabilizations that followed in its wake. And keep in mind that Gerhard Lenski was of a very Protestant, almost Barthian, view that biblical religion is at war with the religion of communal-institution adherence epitomized by the Catholic Church. These are among the changes to be expected, he wrote, as a consequence of the growth of Catholic numbers and influence:

1. Rising rates of church attendance in American society
2. Strengthening of religious group communalism
3. Strengthening of both the nuclear and extended family systems
4. Declining emphasis on intellectual independence
5. Increasing support for welfare state policies
6. Increasing support for the Democratic Party
7. Shifting focus of interest from work group to kin group
8. Slowing rate of material progress and perhaps also of scientific advance
9. Rising birth rates
10. Narrowing latitude for exercise of the right of free speech
11. Increasing restraints on Sunday business and divorce, and possibly birth control
12. Declining restraints on gambling and drinking.

Some of these expectations (for instance, 4 and 8) may be attributed to Lenski’s low-key anti-Catholic bias. At least six of his expectations definitely have not happened (3, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11). Why not? In large part because, over the last forty years, Catholics have become “just like everybody else.” This, as I argue in Catholic Matters, is because the accent has been on being American Catholics rather than on being Catholic Americans. (The adjective modifies, and frequently controls, the noun.) And Lenski’s expectations failed because of the imperial judiciary’s usurpation of the political process, notably on questions of marriage, family, and sexual ethics. Remember that, on what today are called the “social and moral issues,” the Democratic party was then much more “conservative” than the Republicans.

The critical fact is that many, if not most, Catholics today are not the Catholics that Lenski thought he knew. Of course many other things happened that nobody at that time anticipated: the sexual and cultural revolutions, Vietnam, sundry feminisms, et al. But one might well wonder whether these things would have happened, or would have happened with such pervasive consequences, if so many Catholics had not been persuaded that the “post-Vatican II Church” had liberated them from what Lenski, and almost everyone else at the time, thought was Catholicism. Certainly he and others could not have anticipated the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, the single most important event of the past half-century in reconfiguring the socio-political alignments in American life.

Like others of that time, Lenski did not anticipate the resurgence of evangelical Protestantism in our public life, a resurgence that began slowly in the 1950s and came to widespread public notice in the second half of the 1970s. He wrote about “white Protestants” at a time when the mainline/oldline Protestant establishment seemed unchallengeably secure. As in Will Herberg’s undoubtedly classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew of 1955, the “neo-evangelicals” who would later be known simply as evangelicals were hardly a blip on the radar screen. There was a vague awareness of the “fundamentalists” who had slunk away into the wilderness after their devastating defeat at the famous 1925 “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, never to be heard from again. Among the many ironies of American history is that the return of the fundamentalists, now called evangelicals, met up with now culturally confident Catholics to form the base constituency of politically potent conservatism.

Evangelicals had been notoriously anti-Catholic. So much was this the case that the Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, supported Roe v. Wade because the legal protection of the unborn was viewed as an effort to “impose” Catholic doctrine on the nation. By the late 1970s, however, this dramatically changed as evangelicals moved toward the pro-life side of the abortion controversy. Not least of the factors in play was a sharp decline in anti-Catholicism due to a changed perception of the Catholic Church. The Catholic destabilization following the Council was advanced by liberal and progressive forces in the Church, but it had the unexpected consequence of making Catholicism, in the view of evangelicals, less the monolithic threat that they feared.

There were other factors, to be sure—notably the winsome Christian witness of John Paul the Great and Mother Teresa, as well as projects of rapprochement such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together. But the irony remains that the liberalizing dynamics within Catholicism contributed importantly to the conservative convergence of Catholics and evangelical Protestants. One is left wondering how many of Gerhard Lenski’s expectations would have been borne out had there been no council and no Catholic Left that exploited the council to transform the perception of the Catholicism that he and others thought they knew. It may well be that liberal voices such as Fathers Charles Curran and Richard McBrien, along with the National Catholic Reporter and kindred spirits, are largely responsible for the religious, cultural, and political convergence of evangelicals and Catholics they now fear.