Moore, R. Laurence. Louisville: Westminster
John Knox Press, 2003. x + 195 pages. $19.95 (USD).
ISBN: 0-664-22370-2.
[1] You know you are reading a book by R. Laurence Moore when
the second sentence wryly observes: “No one, to my knowledge,
has ever suggested that services in Presbyterian churches during
the 1950s were child-friendly” (1). Few scholars can
rival the controlled wit of Moore; he savours historical irony as
a connoisseur. His scholarly books, including In Search
of White Crows (1977) and Selling God (1994), are crucial
to the study of American religion and popular culture. Touchdown
Jesus aims for a different audience, carrying a more polemical
agenda than those volumes.
[2] Moore intends Touchdown Jesus for general readers
interested in a contemporary update of William James’ “varieties
of religious experience” (2). Despite the appeal (and
humour) of the title, the more serious subtitle–“The
Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History”–is
the burden of the book (the University of Notre Dame mural
lovingly dubbed “Touchdown Jesus” is mentioned but once,
at the beginning of the first chapter, yet adorns the front and
back covers). Acknowledging that he is “most interested
in religion when it is about something else” (2), Moore takes
the reader through a variety of cultural manifestations of religion,
in order to illustrate his overarching thesis that:
… in the United States the expansion of equality has always
involved the erasure of difficulties attached to being different. Religion
has been a constitutionally privileged form of difference, and religious
pluralism has played an important role in advancing the struggles
of many Americans held back because of their race, or ethnicity,
or sex, or national origins. The acceptance of religious
diversity as a normal condition has been crucial . . . American
freedom at its best is the freedom to have multiple identities
(5).
[3] When Moore makes this thesis come alive through popular
culture, he is brilliant, as expected. Describing Protestant
attempts at creating culture, he mentions the religious significance
of the Hudson River school of painters, then immediately juxtaposes
this to the rise of P.T. Barnum. Inspired insights like this
abound in the chapters that deal with cultural religious history. John
Foster Dulles, architect of the Cold War, was a co-founder of the
World Council of Churches in 1948–a fact Moore connects to
the latent triumphalism of the World’s Parliament of Religions
in 1893. He critiques the anti-Mormon baiting of Mitt Romney
by Edward Kennedy. The second chapter (“Post-Protestant
Culture”) makes a strong argument for Catholic and Jewish
tastes outstripping Protestant norms in the shaping of American
popular culture, thereby challenging putative Protestant hegemony.
[4] Moore’s placement of Emerson and Thoreau in the
chapter dealing with conflicts of science and religion is astute. He
shows that Transcendentalism transmogrified the meaning of miracle,
from something that defied nature to something ordinary, thereby
shielding this type of spirituality from conflicts with science. As
his analysis of Thoreau indicates, the cosmological implications
went further:
Thoreau…was not interested in how nature worked but in what
nature revealed. Transcendentalism….posited a religion
without dogma, without priests, and without a community of believers
organized into churches. Religion freed itself from history. What
mattered was the investigation of the present moment (140).
A fresher, more concise summary of Transcendentalism could hardly
be imagined.
[5] Taken as an entire volume, though, Touchdown Jesus is
not without problems. It is essentially an extended essay. Its
treatment of its thesis (a thesis with which I am in agreement)
is not always compelling in a narrative sense. Its ability
to reach its intended audience is likewise not assured. Though
it warms the intellectual’s heart, Moore’s love of detail
and historical minutiae interferes with his polemic. It is
not a free-standing volume; one needs to be fairly literate in American
social history already, or have a teacher on hand to contextualize
Moore’s wide-ranging allusions.
[6] Moore seems less self-assured in the central chapters
that deal with women, African Americans, immigrants, and Native
Americans. He touches on all the right moments in the struggles
of these peoples, but rarely articulates new connections and insights,
let alone integrating these (especially women) into the larger sweep
of an American history of difference. In the chapter addressing
African American issues–with its risky title, “The African
Future of Christianity”–Moore recognizes that the African
American experience was a realization of how “American freedom,
when it worked, allowed both separatism and integration. It
meant the freedom to be more than one thing, to have more than one
identification” (107-108). Yet he projects this energy
outwards, focusing often on Back-to-Africa movements, and ending
with the demographic predictions that show the center of world-wide
Christian population shifting to Africa and people of African descent. His
ending line in this chapter–“The white sponsors of the
American Colonization Society had started something quite remarkable,
even if the end of the story would have astounded them” (108)–inverts
the self-development of African Americans into an unintended side
effect of white patronizers. While I feel certain Moore did
not intend this reading, something in these chapters (a sense of
obligation, perhaps, or an uncharacteristic caution) leads to missteps
and a general lack of wit.
[7] These awkward moments are forgotten in the final chapters,
which return to some of Moore’s best topics, such as America’s “Therapeutic
Culture.” As the book nears its end, he makes some strong
statements of judgment, sharpening the focus of his thesis. He
condemns anti-Darwinists for maintaining a “flat earth” worldview,
notes the consequences of long-standing American misunderstanding
of Islam, and endorses utopian speculation for providing “space
for social reform movements to come into being” (168). He
saves his grand encomium for the end, supporting a strict application
of the First Amendment, in order to encourage religious difference:
… state-endorsed religion can act as an insidious form of
exclusion and intimidation. To practice religion freely in
an arena where government pays no attention to questions of faith
is intimately connected to the freedom to be different. Ralph
Ellison, the great black writer, decided that what made America
work as a society was the permission it extended even to people
far down the social totem pole to “cultural improvisation.” Religious
freedom, as a constitutionally privileged form of dissent, gives
men and women the right to claim an identity that while separate
from that of any purported majority has the same protection under
the law. It is the beginning of improvisation (189).
The introduction of Ellison’s “cultural improvisation” comes
too late to shape the book, but in retrospect it offers myriad pathways
to the intersection of popular culture and religion.
[8] The book has one other serious flaw: there is not a single
reference or bibliographic entry in the entire volume. While
a book intended for a popular audience might have fewer footnotes
than a scholarly tome, it was a mistake to wind down to zero. The
intricacy of Moore’s argument, the astounding range of examples
he raises, and the outlandish incidents he narrates, could generate
further explorations, but no resources for such a journey are provided. Furthermore,
for readers who do not know his work (and presumably they would
constitute a large portion of his target audience), and who find
themselves skeptical or hostile to his argument, the lack of references
renders the book an endless assertion. Moore’s earlier
works featured fastidious citations, so perhaps publication issues
created this stripped-down format.
[9] In sum, this book demonstrates the wit and wisdom of its
author, though it is not his finest work. It can serve as
a fast-paced introduction to the subject of American religious history
and popular culture for students and readers who possess basic background
knowledge.
Jennifer Rycenga
San José State University
jrycenga@earthlink.net
