Is it more useful for the outsider to understand Judaism as a religion or as a people? I say people. Yes, I know it is the religion of a particular people (as was common in the ancient world).
I just told my friend: “Look, I’ll talk to him. I grew up Gentile. I know how they think.”
REVIEW REVIEW: In NO OFFENSE: CIVIL RELIGION AND PROTESTANT TASTE (1978), Professor John Murray Cuddihy makes a simple, straightforward case. America has created its own special “civil religion” and that creation has driven religions imported from Europe out of the public forum.
Civil religion is about behavior, not belief. It shuns depths, lives entirely on the surface of American social interactions. Its few commandments demand respect for the other fellow’s religious point of view, without ever allowing him to explain what it is.
Once upon a time Roman Catholic Christianity in Europe was something virtually everyone (except Jews) were born into. It claimed to be the sole channel of salvation and all men were invited to be baptized into it and never, ever leave it.
Similarly, in Europe Jews usually lived in isolation, kept a strict, elaborate code of behaving and dining, did not intermarry with goyim and believed that they were God’s Chosen People.
After Christianity’s Reformation, Protestants started out in America confidently asserting that they alone had found God’s unique intentions for how to be worshipped, studied and theologized about. Sects, notably Pilgrims and Puritans wanted liberty of worship for themselves, but for no one else.
In America, immigrant Catholics moved from despised minority to being socially tolerated, making up with Jews and Protestants one of three accepted “denominations.” By the late 1950s some Protestant theologians had given up on converting Jews. Jews were willing to build both Jewish, Catholic and Protestant chapels at Brandeis University. After the Second Vatican Council (1962-63) Catholics began to sense that God wanted there to be Jews forever. Inter-faith movements morphed into ecumenism. Differences were played down. Points held in common were said to be what was really important — as demanded by civil religion.
But there was a price to pay. The specifics of each of the Big Three faiths, the beliefs and practices that made each unique, had to agree tacitly to go underground, to be restricted to family circle or place of worship. It was simply not seemly to probe another man’s religion for details. Any American was free to join or leave any faith she chose. And yet, and yet. One was still born a Jew if he had a Jewish mother. A baby was a Christian if it was baptized. Religion was still in large measure inherited, initially, at least, not optional.
Cuddihy regards the compromises that led to America’s civil religion at some level a missionary triumph for Calvinist Protestantism. Calvinists (Presbyterians, Baptists) therefore feel more at home in the civil religion than do Protestants and Jews. Civil religion is their creation.
Surprisingly few Americans were able to sense what was happening to them while it was happening. Fewer yet could articulate the changes. Among Catholics Father John Courtney Murray was able to baptize the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution and sing the praises of separation of church and state on natural law grounds. But his Jesuit confrere Leonard Edward Feeney would not accept the neo-Protestant civil religion. Both Murray and Feeney believed to their dying day that there was only one true religion and that God intended it for all men: papal Catholicism.
But Murray was able to think his way to compromise while Feeney scorned selling out to the civil religion. For 7 1/2 years he and 80 followers thundered every Sunday afternoon in Boston Common, “There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church.” For his pains he was silenced, stripped of his priestly faculties and for 19 years excommunicated. Similar things happened to Jews and Protestants who continued to assert their faith’s uniqueness and superiority. The civil religion had quietly, politely but ruthlessly swept its competitors into public insignificance.
REVIEW: “Cuddihy rides again, rumbling through the china shop of academic sociology. This lively, controversial thinker, whose Ordeal of Civility (1974) claimed that the thought of Marx, Freud, and Levi-Strauss was rooted in Jewish “”resentment”” of modernity, returns to study the conflict between religious communities and secularist society–this time in America. Cuddihy approaches the problem through the life and work of three major figures, Reinhold Niebuhr, Father John Courtney Murray, and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. His thesis, briefly, is that European religion and politics too, though he treats this as an afterthought–undergoes a transformation, a “”taming and assimilation,”” beneath American skies. Our pluralist consensus rejects the idea of a supreme church or a chosen people, and insists that theologians accept denominational status for the groups they represent. The “”self-effacing modesty of puritan good taste”” makes religion a basically private affair, cloaking all our ethnic and doctrinal diversity with bland public “”civility.”” This is no Substitute for brotherhood, but how else can we manage the centrifugal forces of an open society? Cuddihy is a dynamic, if messy, writer. His book overflows with quotations (too many), references, and gossipy stories. He has done a phenomenal amount of reading and digested almost all of it. He has a finely honed sensitivity to the religious mind and a refreshingly blunt way with ticklish issues, such as Zionism. Many critics ignored or tiptoed around Cuddihy’s last book, but they’ll have to come to terms with him now. An original, stimulating contribution.”
