Getting Religion: Faith, Culture & Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama by Kenneth L. Woodward
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Oh for the Days

Going very deeply into the surface of things is what journalists are paid to do. When journalists publish their memoirs, therefore, no matter what their favourite 'beat', the result is most often a very smooth, very flat skating-rink of a book with a depth measurable only by micrometer.

Getting Religion skates over 60 years or so of the professional life of Kenneth Woodward. For most of that time, Woodward was the Religious Affairs man for the magazine Newsweek. The book is billed as an analysis of religious change in the United States. It is actually a memoir of religious war-stories (mostly Catholic) punctuated by some rather well-known sociological data and personal anecdotes. There is much about the good old days of uniform religious education and second generation immigrant culture in the American Mid-West. Interesting opinion, much less analysis, is simply absent.

There is, therefore, a great deal in Getting Religion to jog the memories of those of us old enough, but not yet senile, about the days of 'parochial' primary schools, nuns in starched linen, lily-white, post-war, suburban neighbourhoods in which children romped without supervision and without fear of molestation or abduction. Clergy were sacred; Catholic clergy were close to divine. Religion was terribly important but not at all serious from the President on down.

Then came Vatican II, the American Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and the Beatles. The smug world of American civil religion crumbled much faster than the Roman Empire. Familial religious tradition went into meltdown. By the end of the 1960's Christianity, as it had been known in 1950, was dead. It was replaced by a vague sort of non-sectarian background spiritual radiation and a militant evangelicalism of Pentecostals, Mormons, and Baptists. The former constitutes today's politically liberal America; the latter has become the heart of American Republicanism. Guess which one is better organised.

There isn't much more than this level of insight in Woodward's book. But if you're craving a bit of cultural nostalgia, he could be your man.

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