Dean, William. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group
Inc., 2002. 240 pp. $24.95 (USD). ISBN: 0826414400.
[1] This book extends the thesis that William Dean developed in his
award-winning The Religious Critic in American Culture (1994),
where he argued for the increased public presence of a type of intellectual
whom he called the religious critic. Too many religious intellectuals,
Dean argued, are isolated from the general public in institutions
of higher learning and too bound by secular ways of understanding
nature, history, and culture. Dean urged them to step boldly into
the public square, to critique and revise the meanings underlying
American myths of national identity. In so doing they would become
the kind of religious critic that Dean says the nation needs. They
should do their work as thinkers whose perspectives are rooted in
religious values, broadly conceived as those deeply-ingrained meanings
that arise from within human cultures but ultimately transcend those
cultures.
[2] In the present work, Dean argues that the religious ground for
religious critics is sacred convention. This sacred convention "takes
on a life of its own." It is "not simply the growing accumulation
of influences it has received from society; rather, it becomes in
some sense original, more than the totality of what it has received"
(72). God, as sacred convention, is not an absolute being existing
independently of history and nature, but the unpredictable and purposeful
means of history and nature's fulfillment. For Dean, the philosophical
context for understanding this sacred convention is pragmatism, which
he describes as a type of response to the world that characterized
ancient Israel, the New England Puritans, and other selected historical
cultures and subcultures that have profoundly influenced American
self-perceptions. This type of response relies upon practicality,
testability of propositions and methods, and rootedness in the common,
everyday experiences of ordinary people. The God of sacred convention
is the God of the ordinary and the practical. Yet this sacred convention
has an aura of mystery.
[3] The central feature of Dean's thesis in The American Spiritual
Culture is an idea that he calls "the irony of atheism."
Looking for God in history and nature, as the pragmatists have, can
lead to intense skepticism about God's presence. As Reinhold Niebuhr
noted in his critique of liberal religious thinking, pragmatism can
become too dependent on secular definitions of the divine, reducing
the divine to whatever can be explained "in terms of É nonreligious
and secular learning" (90). Ironically, says Dean, when people
reach the conviction that the divine is absent, even non-existent,
they are then overwhelmed by a deeper appreciation of the synergistic
intensity of sacred convention, that the whole is greater than its
parts, that something greater than oneself, or even all selves together,
is working in human and natural history.
[4] The "spiritual culture" of the book's title is the
entire program thus far described: a deeply-held mythic understanding
of America's identity, akin to Sidney Mead's "the religion of
the Republic" and Robert Bellah's "civil religion"
(22). This identity is based upon pragmatism as well as the ironic
discovery of divine meaning within history and nature. Dean says that
"the irony of atheism" of America's spiritual culture can
be illustrated by examining three cultural forms that have been identified
as unique to America and American history: jazz, football, and the
movies. These forms show that once individuals have invested themselves
in the horizontal aspects of music, sports, or moviemaking, they can
be vertically transported into greater spiritual awareness. But first
they must travel through these forms as usually practiced in order
to reach realms of greater delight.
[5] Dean doesn't tell us why these forms are used in his book. Why
jazz, and not the blues or country music? Why football, and not baseball
or basketball? Why the movies, and not comic strips or comic books?
There are a number of cultural forms that are associated with America
and America's story that might serve Dean's purpose equally well.
Further, based on the information that he provides in the endnotes,
it appears that Dean's depiction of these forms is supported by relatively
little, and in some cases outdated, scholarship about jazz, football,
and the movies. No one can become an expert in all three, but if these
are to be presented convincingly as the unique cultural forms that
make American life so compellingly American, so susceptible to the
"irony of atheism," then we need more justification for
their inclusion than is provided here.
[6] Dean also seems to affirm what could be understood as one side
of a dialectic in each case, whereas the dialectic itself might offer
more interesting grist for his thesis. Jazz, he argues, is important
because it is based on improvisation, and Americans are nothing if
not improvisational. It is in our blood to be innovative, to change
methods if original plans fail, and so on. But one could argue that
Americans are equally likely to conform. Examples abound in our history.
Henry Ford's automobile assembly line, itself an innovation, became
the symbol for the American tendency, in industry and elsewhere, to
mass produce the same thing over and over, with little variation.
Improvisation and conformity can be seen as values in dialectical
tension in American life. Football is described as the sport that
has articulated America's ambivalent fascination with violence. Violence
has been germane, Dean says, to American efforts to expand and settle
frontiers. But football, although definitely a violent sport, is not
entirely based upon violence. The peak moments in football include
those plays in which violence is avoided, as when an end catches a
well-thrown pass, and runs downfield into the end zone for a touchdown.
The beauty of such exertion lies in the lack of violence. Football,
like other sports, is a dance between the drama of contact and the
grace of speed and ball-handling. Sports, as has so often been argued,
reflect and nourish cultural meanings. Perhaps the dialectic between
violence and nonviolence could be found here, in football, rather
than exploring only the violent aspects of that sport.
[7] Dean's discussion of movies relies heavily on the cohort of studio
heads who dominated American filmmaking from the 1920s to the 1940s.
Most of them were Eastern European Jewish immigrants who rejected
much of the Old World culture they left behind, and helped to create
a new American culture through the formulaic plots and characters
of their movies. Dean fails to mention the other influences on the
movie industry during, not to mention after, the reigns of these studio
heads. Movies are multivalent in form and message. Far more happens
with this medium than simply portraying the American story in a stylized
fashion. Movies, in other words, operate within a multi-directional
dialectic. The studio heads made up one of many groups who created
movies, and the critics of movies, who are legion and constitute the
movie-going audience in total, help to fashion moviemaking by their
responses to movies.
[8] Finally, the very basis for Dean's depiction of American uniqueness
is itself open to a dialectical interpretation. For Dean, what makes
Americans American is their identity as displaced people. People came
to America because they wanted (or were forced) to leave an older,
more established place. Once they arrived in the New World, they had
to make things up as they went along (improvisation), sometimes violently,
opting for what worked over what might be theoretically elegant or
possible. However, this image of the early generations of non-Native
American settlement is based on older, exceptionalist notions of America
that more recent scholarship in American history and American religious
studies calls into question. Although many Europeans and Africans
came to the United States because they were displaced, once they relocated
in North America, they reproduced many of the cultural patterns that
characterized life in their cultures of origin. Americans, then, can
best be understood as not only those who leave the old for the new,
but those who bring the old with them and replant it in New World
soil.
[9] Alongside improvisation is reproduction, alongside pragmatic
options for building a country are seemingly wasteful, impractical
ones. They are all part of the American story. Religious critics need
to take the whole of the American mythic narrative into account, rather
than presenting only selected strains in it. Having done so, it is
quite possible that they might discover "the irony of atheism"
in America, for themselves and for anyone who will listen to them.
But will anyone hear them? That remains the most pressing question.
[11] Dean is correct that religious critics are desperately needed.
Strident voices on the extreme right and left of the religio-political
spectrum claim to speak for large constituencies (whose size is difficult
to measure), and they speak with great confidence. But they often
produce more heat than light. We need more of the kind of reliable,
responsible religious critic that Dean proposes, appearing on TV talk
shows and CNN, and writing pieces in USA Today, Time,
and Newsweek. In The American Spiritual Culture, Dean
has provided us with a thoughtful, ambitiously argued manifesto for
religious criticism as a more commonly-accepted element in our national
dialogue than has recently been the case. His work, despite the reservations
expressed in this review, should remain essential reading for ongoing
reflection about the place of religious critics in the forum of ideas.
William Michael Ashcraft
Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri
washcraf@truman.edu
