In The Lady's Not for Burning, Judge Tappercoom glared out at a
religious riot and fretted over the intrusion of spiritual terrorists and
witch burners into the prudent business of the practical world. "Religion
has made an honest woman out of the supernatural," he huffed, and did
not want her out in the street again.
Religious institutions in our day—the standard-brand temples and
churches—do seem like the most honest of women, even antiseptic, like a
public health nurse, there to inoculate the children against today's
epidemics of spiritual turmoil: against Moonie-style cults, Jesus freaks,
meditation movements and body mystics, invading squads of Indian
gurus, humanistic psychologists chanting uplift slogans without benefit
of collar, est-like seminarians in secular disguise, crusading national
organizations of fundamentalists, proud witches and trembling exorcists,
tribal shamans and extraordinary believers in Gurdjieff, charismatics
speaking in tongues in thousands of Catholic prayer groups, hands-on
healers in rich Episcopal parishes, Rosicrucians and out-of-body tourists,
dream cultists and psychics of all flavors, and hard-sell evangelists
raising millions in cash on TV while claiming decisive power through
personal prayer and national politics.
Today's Sunday school boom—Catholic, Jewish and Protestant—owes
much of its success in numbers to nervous
parents. Millions herd their reluctant young off to church for an
occasional hypodermic of traditional serum (presumably a killed
virus) to protect them from infection by one of the more virulent
strains of spiritual plague.
Such parental worry is understandable. Since parents have
raised the kids in a germ-free environment, wherein spiritual
fervor is rarer than scarlet fever, the entire population seems to
lack immune defenses against just about. any religious germ that
happens to pop up. And as parents we are seldom prepared to
discriminate among the various forms of live spirit so as to reject
one and feed the other. One Harvard professor who was a disciple
of a ribald black healer felt acute distress when his youngest
daughter married into a Jesus sect.
Prudent persons in charge of the establishment in any era have
tended to fear sudden change in the routine mixing of religion
with the politics of everyday life. They sense, like Judge
Tappercoom, that great writhings of the spirit, if allowed to break
out of their confining institutions, soon wreak havoc upon the
social order. It's been so long since we watched religious fires
bend our country's structures that we have only a vague memory
of how it happens, but the memory makes us uneasy. As T. S.
Eliot reminded us in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture,
political and economic institutions are but the surface expression
of a culture's spiritual base. Religion defines culture, and
religious change redefines everything in sight. So the shifting of
the spiritual base, either by slow decay or by sudden upheaval,
shuffles all the surface structures; spiritual turmoil soon builds up
like the early shock waves of an earthquake.
And each new shock hits us without warning. There's nobody much
to watch over religion's violent landscape—except those who
are trying to sell us some particular piece of it. Our intellectuals
are out to lunch. Blinded by the fads of twentieth-century thought,
writers and talkers in the universities and in the media are mostly
spiritual innocents, as unaware of religion's danger as of its hope.
The national data are clear: the University of Chicago's National
Opinion Research Center (NORC) has found through opinion polling
that our paid brains, more than any other group, are buried in
dogmatic materialism. Most suffer
from an educated ignorance about religious ferment. So the
biggest story of our time gets the poorest coverage.
