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NOT UNDER GOD MEANS NO NATION

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hen I go back to the Pennsylvania county where I grew up, it is always bittersweet for me, as I pass by places where there used to be something good, but now it is all gone, apparently never to return. There was the small family-owned grocery store where I picked up my afternoon newspapers to deliver, the street side portion of a two-story house where the family lived. There was the quaint old miniature golf course, next to the driving range on the bare side of a mountain, where you could take your high school date for innocent amusement outdoors, away from anything screeching at you. There was the family-owned movie theater, which the kids in town could walk to and catch the latest Jerry Lewis comedy on the screen. On most evenings in the summer, from Monday through Friday, you could go to the baseball fields to watch the Little League game, or maybe an American Legion game, or men’s softball. There was, then, though it was fading faster than any of us knew, a strong common life, expressed in various ways, and bound by tradition, a common moral code you could take for granted in others, and a common religious faith, strong in some, tenuous in others, but not far to seek.

At that time, it would have seemed quite mad to suppose that half the nation hated the other half, suspecting it of treason.

Herbert Hoover was still alive when I was a small boy. Since I taught myself to read when I was three, I have a memory of his death, as I have a memory of John F. Kennedy’s assassination the year before. We did not know we were entering a period of assassinations, or that much of what we loved in our way of life would be turned inside-out and made the object of contempt.

Hoover was a case in point. Until his failed presidency, when he confronted the Great Depression and was at a loss as to how to meet the emergency, just as everybody else in the world was, the man was a national hero. He and a small cadre of brave, scrupulously honest, and neutral subordinates managed to get food and medical aid to suffering Europeans behind enemy lines during the last year of World War I. He was also tireless in his relief efforts after the war. No one knew whether he was a Democrat or a Republican; both parties solicited him during the election year of 1920. He declared himself to be a Republican, and later he became a very effective Secretary of Commerce under President Coolidge. His competence, his energy, his intelligence, and his courage had been well known long before the war. In 1900, he and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, were in China, directing mining operations – both he and she were mining engineers – when the Boxer Rebellion broke out. They were on the spot during the Siege of Tientsin. Hoover, a Quaker, would not take up arms against the insurgents, who had them bottled up in a fortress-like redoubt, but it was he who directed the actions of all the civilians inside. They believed they owed their survival to him.

So in 1928, Hoover, a Republican of broad experience in business, science, and government, faced off against Al Smith, “the Happy Warrior,” a Democrat, governor of New York, erstwhile beneficiary of the Tammany Hall political machine, and a Roman Catholic. There was still considerable prejudice against Catholics, but World War II and the courage and faithfulness and sacrifice of Italians, Poles, and other Catholic ethnic groups would settle most of it—at least until the “culture,” for want of a better word to describe the phenomena of the masses, turned sharply against what everyone once held was true in matters regarding sex, marriage, and the raising of children. Hoover won in a landslide, only to be defeated by Franklin Roosevelt, his successor as governor of New York, four years later. Hoover and Smith differed sharply as to how to preserve and to promote the economic, cultural, and moral wealth of the nation, but in their love for America, they did not differ. Their broad similarities make the Republican today and his neighbor, the Democrat next door, appear to be aliens from separate and antagonistic planets.

How much, too, did the commonalities help to fortify the American heart! In the Oscar-winning film Marty (1955), it’s taken for granted that the lonely butcher Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine, who won an Oscar for his lead performance) goes to Mass on Sunday with his mother, as does his cousin Thomas with his wife and mother. When he meets a lonely girl at a dance hall, Clara (Betsy Blair), and they leave the place to get some coffee and to talk, and it’s clear that they like each other. He says at least twice that he’s a Catholic and asks her if she’s a Catholic too. The author of the screenplay, Paddy Chayefsky, was Jewish, not Catholic, but his play is in part about the fraying of that general moral code. Marty’s bachelor friends are portrayed as losers, on the make, interested not in marriage but in whatever shallow sexual triumphs will flatter their frail masculinity. This was a time, after all, when Bishop Fulton Sheen was one of the top personalities on television, for his show Life is Worth Living; Sheen had been a star student at the University of Louvain and was a moral and theological philosopher of prodigious learning and considerable force. It is impossible to imagine him doing the same thing in the 1970s, as it is impossible to imagine Marty then, too.

And now it is impossible to imagine a Herbert Hoover and an Al Smith nominated for the presidency by their respective parties. It is impossible to imagine the social trust and cohesion and common moral values that made for all kinds of practical liberty when I was young, though, as I say, it was fading fast. You could take your girlfriend on a date to the bowling alley, picking her up at 7:30 and taking her home by 11:00, and nobody worried. Parents could drop their children off at the local movie house and go home, knowing that they need not worry about anything on the screen or anybody in the theater.

Such trust was independent of politics. I did not know how my girlfriend’s parents voted, nor was I curious about it. What would have been the point? My grandfather used to praise Roosevelt, while my father, who thought Roosevelt was an upper-class fraud, liked Truman better. But the Fifes, husband and wife, used to visit my grandparents all the time, as they were old family friends, though George Fife was a Republican, regularly nominated for mayor of my town and regularly trounced. That did not matter to our friendship.

However we got to where we are now, here we are. We must acknowledge that strife and discord are the default for mankind; unity is what requires explanation and a powerful cause to make it possible. People are united by a common vision of, and devotion to, what transcends them. They are united from above, by the Divine. I am not saying that fractious mankind will always and without trouble be united by a common religious faith. I am saying that without some common devotion, they will not be united. It is not a sufficient condition. But it is necessary. Its absence is a sufficient condition for strife, civic hatreds, and treachery, evils that are always present, like stray cancer cells in the blood, ready to increase and multiply and riddle the body politic. Expect it to happen when people turn from the worship of God to the elevation of the nearest gigantic idol. In our time, the ghastliest of them all is politics.

When I was a boy, people would assume that all Americans loved America. That is no longer so. We have politicians who detest America, and our schools are packed with teachers whose contempt for American history is confirmed by the textbooks they teach from. The false god of politics affords no mercy. If you are on the “right” side, you may do as you please, intoxicated with hatred and careless of the consequences. It appears, from what people tell me, that analogous collapses are occurring in other nations where religious faith has faded away. Some smallish nations are protected by a high degree of ethnic homogeneity. But even that protection is growing frail, as such people no longer have any heartfelt stake in their nation, not so much as might induce them to replace themselves with children. Such lassitude—spiritual, moral, intellectual—is a slow, relatively peaceful, and somnolent form of suicide.

We cannot preach belief in God as the cure for national breakdown, because God is not to be subordinated to political exigency, nor is it clear to me that there is a strong desire for union. Failing a miraculous spiritual renewal—I use the word “miraculous” advisedly—I see only two possibilities. Both are bad. One is a breakup. The other is that we become a nation in name only, held together functionally by inertia, while the ogres of mass control obliterate cultures everywhere.

So when I return home, and I see banners on the telephone poles, celebrating men from my father’s generation for their military service, I approve, but I feel the clutch in my throat. Those men are gone & so is the America they loved. ✪