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