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 » 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