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Article Excerpt
WILL Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology was originally published in 1955. It is a classic work in the sociology of religion, once described by the noted historian of American religion Martin E. Marty as "the most honored discussion of American religion in mid-twentieth-century times." But shortly after making this favorable judgment, Marty went on to assert that Herberg "failed to anticipate almost every important turn in subsequent American life."
In fairness to Herberg, he did not claim that his book predicted the American future or propounded timeless truths about America's religion and society. Instead, he modestly declared that he hoped only that it would "contribute to a better understanding of both religion and society in mid-twentieth-century America." Nor could Herberg reasonably have been expected to provide an accurate forecast. He wrote as a champion of religion and biblical prophecy, but he did not claim that he himself was a prophet.
In many important respects, American religion today departs significantly from the depiction offered by Herberg. On the other hand, in notable respects, his depiction continues to ring true. It is accordingly useful to reconsider Protestant-Catholic-Jew a half-century after its initial appearance, as an aid to determining what has changed and what remains the same after that span of time. To understand the book, however, we must first comprehend the intellectual trajectory that led Herberg to write it.
Confession of faith
Born in Russia to atheist socialist parents in 1901, Herberg immigrated to the United States along with them in 1904. He became a communist, figuring prominently as a young man in intraparty political and intellectual debates. Around 1940, however, Herberg became one of the many who rejected the communist god that failed.
Influenced by reading and meeting with Reinhold Niebuhr, and then--at Niebuhr's instigation--by reading the existentialist Jewish thinkers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Herberg instead became a passionate and articulate proponent of biblical religion--devoting himself to serving the God who, Herberg believed, does not fail. He affirmed this in his first book, Judaism and Modern Man, which he published in 1951. There he asserted that man's existence is "self-transcending," pointing beyond itself to "something larger, in which the self attempts to ground itself and establish its security. Man, we may say, is always searching for a 'god.'"
But "the 'god' that man finds as long as he relies simply on himself," Herberg observed, "is never the true God; it is always some idol constructed after his own heart." In his "confession of faith" (as he described his book), Herberg argued for the need to reject man-made idolatries such as ethical systems, cosmic principles, or social utopias, and instead turn to belief in the truly transcendent God:
As the misery of existence is, at bottom, due to our alienation from God, so our "return" to him opens the way for the validation of life, individual and collective. The "return" to God is faith; it is faith that restores the wholeness of life and reorients our total existence in a new direction, toward the Living God who is the source and end of our being.
Herberg's passionate belief was unmistakable. But were other American believers as serious about religion as he? In a sense, that was the question Herberg asked and answered in Protestant-Catholic-Jew.
Religion and secularism in America
In Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Herberg contended that Americans were at once a religious and a secular people. On the one hand, surveys found that upwards of 95 percent of Americans professed to believe in God, and that 75 percent regarded themselves as members of churches or synagogues. But on the other hand, Americans were overwhelmingly ignorant of the religions in which they expressed belief, and they also gave little indication that their religious beliefs affected their conduct in any serious way. More than half of Americans could not name one of the four gospels, and more than half maintained that their religious beliefs had no effect on their ideas about politics and business. How, then, were Americans' professions of religious belief to be understood?
Herberg answered that question by asserting that religious affiliation gave Americans a place in society and helped them understand it. Making a claim that was to be refuted a few years later with the publication of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot, Herberg posited that "the perpetuation of ethnic differences in any serious way is altogether out of line with the logic of American reality." Immigrants and their descendants were expected to assimilate, but Americanization did not entail religious conversion. Instead, the descendants of immigrants almost always maintained their ancestral religious allegiances. Thus "it was largely in and through ... religion that [the immigrant], or rather his children and grandchildren, found an identifiable place in American life."
Herberg cited data showing that 68 percent of Americans were Protestant, 23 percent Catholic, and 4 percent Jewish. (The remaining 5 percent expressed no religious preference.) He therefore concluded:
By and large, to be an American today means to be either a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew, because all other forms of self-identification and social location are either (like regional background) peripheral and obsolescent, or else (like ethnic diversity) subsumed under the broader head of religious community. Not to be a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Jew today is, for increasing numbers of American people, not to be anything.
Adhering to their ancestors' religion enabled the children of immigrants "to define their place in American society in a way that would sustain their Americanness and yet confirm the tie that bound them to their forebears." Thus Herberg noted that, as of 1955, 96 percent of Americans continued to belong to the religious community in which they were raised, hardly ever converting to or intermarrying with a member of another faith. This led him to speak of a "triple melting pot."
The three great American religious communities had much in common. All identified equally with the "American...
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