America's Religious Exceptionalism
A Christmas mediation from a Jew by choice
Back in the 1990s, the Reason Foundation, my employers as editor of Reason, held a fundraising gala with Margaret Thatcher as the featured speaker. After her talk, the former prime minister took some questions, leading to a funny cultural moment. What, asked a guest, did she think about prayer in public schools?
Thatcher appeared baffled by the question, seemingly unaware that prayer in schools was controversial in the United States or, for that matter, anywhere. She answered something to the effect that she thought it was always nice to have a prayer or hymn. She didn’t make an argument. She treated the answer as completely anodyne—as if, in other words, she was speaking to a British audience accustomed to the existence of an established church.
This story came to mind because of the recent convergence of two year-end cultural experiences. The first was a moment in The Great British Baking Show: Holidays, as it’s known in the U.S.1 “The bakers can turn their attention to what Christmas is all about,” said the narrator. “Decorations.” Decorations? Really? I seem to remember something about angels, shepherds, and a babe in a manger.
When I converted to Judaism, I gave up Christmas and, unlike many converts, I’ve never really missed it. But watching bakers make Christmas treats did make me wonder whether Christmas might be a more joyous season in a culture that wears religion more lightly. It’s nice to have a winter solstice holiday marking a break in winter gloom and celebrated with festive decorations, traditional music, and characteristic foods. Yule is older in Britain than Christianity. Combine that history with an established church and you get a less religiously fraught holiday season. On London sidewalks, you see carolers singing religious hymns without regard to theology, while Americans are stuck with Dean Martin and Mariah Carey.
After the Christmas bakeoff, came another Advent experience: the December 19 article by David Brooks titled “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be.” Brooks tells us he has discovered that faith isn’t about belief but about “numinous experiences” and “wonder and awe.” His faith is yearning for the infinite, divorced from factual claims. It requires neither accepting nor rejecting the belief that Jesus was God incarnate. Brooks writes that “I’ve had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life..” What a statement! It would in multiple ways, confound my Calvinist forebears.
The essay is a complex piece of writing, articulating feelings that are hard to pin down. As a writer, I found it brave and accomplished. But as someone who has taken religion exceptionally serious since I was a wee lass, I found it aggravating and superficial. Brooks rifles through the works of sectarian thinkers like Joseph Soloveitchik and John Calvin, pulling quotes as though their ideas were as banal as a guidance counselor’s office poster. (Mark Oppenheimer’s take, titled “David Brooks, Please Stop Saying You Are Jewish,” is a good read.) I’m old-fashioned enough to think it matters whether you affirm that Jesus was God incarnate. Does im-anu-el mean “God is with us,” as the normal Hebrew translation would have it, or “God with us,” as Christians believe? Pick one.
Eventually I had an epiphany: One of America’s culturally defining characteristics, so deeply embedded that its pervasive influence is rarely acknowledged, is our lack of a default religious affiliation. David Brooks can’t be a Disraeli Jew because there is no equivalent of Church of England. We have no official religion to fall back on when you need a wedding, funeral, coming of age ceremony, or community of shared meaning. Everyone has to choose. The “cafeteria Christianity” derided by religious conservatives, along with its non-Christian variants, arises from this cultural requirement.
Dig down another cultural layer and the lack of a default religion reveals another obvious truth about American culture. This is a Protestant country and, more specifically, a Methodist and Anabaptist country. Individual conscience reigns. The Catholic converts of the theocratic integralist intellectual movement may be smart fellows but, in the American context, they’re also ridiculous—too absurd, in my view, to take seriously outside of culturally Catholic countries like Italy.2
In American culture, religion isn’t a matter of state power, family inheritance, or even divine election (sorry, Calvinist ancestors). You have to choose. Even if what you choose strikes other people as self-indulgent or wrong. As I wrote in my recent post for paid subscribers, “The one place in American life where that [“permissionless”] paradigm reigns is religion, thanks not just to First Amendment jurisprudence but to a national culture built by religious dissenters with strong opinions. Anybody can start a new religion and try to gather followers.”
For a serious critique, Kevin Vallier’s book All the Kingdoms of the World is the go-to text. His post about exchanges with integralist students is worth reading.
Religion may not be a matter of state power at the moment but there are people who want to use their form of Christianity to enforce control over society. Religion has to be a matter of individual choice and that choice should not affect anyone's standing as a citizen.
Another terrific piece for 2024, Virginia. Perhaps you would agree (having grown up as a Protestant) that in the American experience, Christian faith has been characterized not so much by individual feeling as individual action, as result more than impulse. To my mind, Brooks gets it backwards, in yet another fundamentally American way (which I totally cop to): confusing faith with feeling, elicited, at least in part, by the desire bordering on compulsion to feel better about oneself.