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The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict

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Robert Ellwood, a former Episcopal minister and expert on alternative and underground religions, has written a generally fine volume rethinking the role of religion in the 1950s. His premises follow largely from the iconoclastic work of Finke and Stark, and on the explosion of religion during this time period along multiple differing axes of analysis. At the same time his conclusions are more mainstream than Finke and Stark's, and his history of ideas focus is a welcome complement to other modes of analysis.

As always, Ellwood begins with historical grounding. What must be firmly grasped about the 1950's above all else, is that it was a post-war period. Much of the confidence in modernist ideas that existed before WWI, The Worldwide Great Depression, and WWII was shredded through recent history. At the same time, with the advent of the fission (and soon, the fusion bomb) the relief and capital expansionism of the postwar era was tempered with apocalyptic fears concerning nuclear war and the political threat of both communism and third world indigenous nationalism. There are contrasting views of why church attendance skyrocketed--but there can be little doubt of its growth. Constant change and innovation through capitalism produced not only prosperity, but public anxiety over ongoing challenges to gender and racial roles,. These anxieties were tempered and adjusted to with the assistance of religious community-building for baby-booming families. The ways that churches capitalized on consumerist approaches to marketing no doubt was as significant in the 1950's as it was in the Progressive Era. Consensus ideology among many churches, Ellwood thinks, also help cement Jewish and Catholic identities as authentic forms of 'Americanness.'

But similar impulses--fear and uncertainty, gave rise to American popular existentialism, both naturalist and Christian. UFO religion also expanded. Ellwood sees these both as a natural outgrowth of Cold War fears of instant destruction, and hopes for some form of outside intervention. (94). Commonalities exist for Ellwood in alternative leaders such as Thomas Merton, A.J. Muste, George Adamski, M.K. Ghandhi, D.T. Suzuki, Aldous Huxley and the movements inspired by them, for they all sought visions of community, however different from the mainstream. Different alternative responses were nonetheless united by a challenge to consensus forms of identity and being, even if their responses ranged from mystical and psychological introspection to the wanderlust of an American Beat Bhikku.

Liberals are not forgotten either. The World Council of Churches is covered, and set into its post -Bikini Atoll context well. The 1955 emergence of M.L. King as a major religious activist figure becomes a focal point for soul-searching among white churches and adherents, especially as the new movement takes advantage of the media. But with Ellwood it is the waning mainline of Protestantism, and growing alternatives, both radical and reactionary, that begin an ongoing crescendo during the last few years of the 1950's.

For Ellwood, the 1950's in the U.S. can be best summed up as the last modern religious decade. By this Lyotardian analysis, he means that it was the last time period when the metanarrative of universal progress and metanarrative of the unity of knowledge held such sway over the American religious public. Both of these collapse for Ellwood in the 1960's to inaugurate a postmodern religious environment. In the early to mid 1950's, there is consensus--the consensus of fear and unease coexisting with prosperity. In the 1960's for Ellwood, any sense of consensus would crumble.

There is much to admire in Ellwood's treatment, especially the market-oriented focus and capitalist context so often missing in American religious history. Ellwood 's focus is on intellectual history, and the milieu created by it, so we shouldn't be surprised at the relative lack of, for example, sociological data that bases much of Robert Wuthnow's work. Its a valuable complement to more quantitative studies, and Ellwood's movement toward rational choice theory, as exemplified by Finke and Stark, has much to offer.

The difficulties this work has are similar to other works trying to get a hold on recent American religious history. The 1960's are often designated as a turning point, and while this may be true in some sense, the effects of the Great Depression and WWII are hard to overstate. Perhaps the 1950's were a last ditch effort at unity and consensus following these blows to modernist liberal progressivism, but existential unity in the face of despair seems potentially as postmodern to me as anything the 1960's had to offer. Likewise, the growth of smaller sects throughout the 20th century (and in the 19th) cannot be dismissed as a product of the crazy 1960's. In fact, Finke and Stark, who are so prominently displayed in Ellwood's writing, have contended that more religious movements were founded in the 1980's and 1970's than the 1960's, and that the 1950's had its share as well, just under the numbers of the '60s. Other drawbacks are those common to intellectual history--such as the tendency of it to occasionally disintegrate into the history of particular personalities, rather than broader intellectual trends.

So I think the verdict is still out on the comparative roles of the 1930's and 1940's versus the 1960's in the shaping of American religion, but Ellwood makes it clear that both exerted strong connections, each in their own way, to the religious culture of the 1950's.