Promises & Pitfalls

These are all important dimensions of Civil Religion, but one dimension of American Civil Religion that I think has been left unexplored by scholars is the dimension whereby ideas are translated into character.  In theology we would call this field of inquiry “practical theology.” Similarly, I am suggesting that we attend not only to beliefs or rituals in American Civil Religion, but also to those practical activities which are undertaken to form those who participate in a religion.   

In order to explore this practical dimension of American Civil Religion, I propose a turn to an archeology of the practice of non-military service.  In other words, for the remainder of this talk, I want to look not at speeches or rituals or stories, but rather at some of the places where the conception of what America is has been inscribed in practices of service.  I want to emphasize that I am not being naïve here: I know very well that I am looking at a very small slice of US history and that what I am describing here is historically subordinate to, for example, the military role of the US.  But I think this emphasis on service as a reflection of and model for a particular kind of American character is growing in importance.

Some scholars might say that this strand of practical activity is a relatively recent phenomenon, but I would suggests that its roots go back far into American history.  The early 20th century essay by William James, The Moral Equivalent of War, is often understood as the foundational essay arguing that Americans should inculcate virtues through a national service work program.  In that essay, James, who was a both an anti-imperialist, specifically with regard to the Philippine war, and a pacifist, argued that for all of its bad characteristics, war did inculcate valuable virtues, including courage and bravery, self-sacrifice, teamwork, ingenuity and resilience.  The national service program he proposed was to be a morally formative experience equivalent to war; in other words, James rejected war as immoral, but he thought we still needed a functional equivalent to form youth to the positive moral qualities inspired by war.  His essay is widely regarded as the touchstone for many future service programs, including the US Peace Corps.   

James may have been the most well-known person to propose a national service program, but I think the timing and impetus for his suggestion can be traced back to four strands of history that come together at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century: in one way or another, all of these strands emphasized either the need to form, through particular activities, an American youth that was losing its character, OR the value of extending American values through practical work in the world that would also create wholesome American character.   

The first strand can be found in a religious and theological movement generally known as the Social Gospel movement, or alternatively as the Third Great Awakening.  Led by leaders like Josiah Strong, Walter Rauschenbusch and Charles Monroe Sheldon, this group sought to enact the Gospel message in service to others, particularly in America’s growing cities and particularly with regard to social issues like education, urban decay and alcoholism.  The Social Gospel movement was a progressive movement in the sense that it sought a cure to social ills through activity in the name of Jesus, and it believed that human beings were empowered to do so.  Sheldon, for example, coined the phrase, “What would Jesus do?” in his book In His Steps, where it was meant as a prompt for Christians to use in thinking about social issues.  Although the movement was not at its core bellicose or imperialistic, some of the key promoters of the movement, such as Josiah Strong or Senator Albert Beveridge, did promote the social gospel in racial and ethnocentric terms, and when it came to American activity abroad, Strong and his supporters advocated something akin to a “white man’s burden” to spread what they understood to be Anglo-Saxon values and democracy to the rest of the world.

At roughly the same time as the Social Gospel, a related strand, known as muscular Christianity, sought to rescue Christianity from what it perceived to be an over-sentimentalized and feminized Victorian Christianity.  Since at least the time of Schleiermacher at the start of the 19th century, Protestant Christianity had focused on feeling and emotion as the core of the Christian connection to God.  In reaction, Muscular Christianity sought the connection to God in an active life, and as part of that active life subscribers to muscular Christianity sought to inculcate in individuals what they understood to be the Christian notions of virtue, including the idea of sportsmanship and fair play, through gender specific physical activity.  It is to this movement which we owe the widespread growth and popularity of the YMCA organization, not to mention the engineered sports which made that growth possible, such as basketball and volleyball.  While it too is a movement that brought many benefits, it is important to note that it also emerged from a milieu particularly concerned with the loss of American vitality that it saw taking place in American cities.  Not only was life in the cities understood to limit physically the activity and growth of children, and thus leave them physically and morally stunted, but cities were also the location of immigrant groups, Roman Catholics in particular, that were perceived to threaten the Protestant foundations of America.  Insofar as mainline American Protestantism at this time saw Roman Catholicism as corrupt and over-sentimentalized, muscular Christianity sought to advance what they understood to be countervailing virtues of strength, self-reliance, honesty and toughness.

A third strand is found in the notion of the Strenuous Life, as promulgated by the President of the US, Theodore Roosevelt.  Along with muscular Christianity, the Strenuous Life put forth the idea that hard work, especially physical work, was the foundation for a good life.  In the US we owe our wonderful national parks to this idea, for Roosevelt specifically wanted to preserve wilderness as a place where the American identity was formed. But the Strenuous Life had its negative consequences too.  The Strenuous Life argued that what was true for the individual life was also especially true for the national life.  In his collection of essays titled The Strenuous Life, Roosevelt singles out the role of US in the Philippines for special consideration.  For him, it would have been a sign of cowardice, weakness and infirmity of the US had shrunk from involvement in the Philippines, and instead he argued for a full engagement, starting with establishing the sovereignty of the American flag on Philippine territory. 

A fourth strand that contributes to the emergence of voluntary service at the end of the 19th and 20th century, and which lies behind the other strands, is best represented in the famous Turner Thesis articulated by Fredrick Jackson Turner.  The Turner thesis famously announced the American frontier was closed.  Turner argued that the American character was formed in large part through encounter with the frontier, thus the closing of the frontier meant that a new American Character would come forth.  Many scholars have pointed out that with the end of the continental frontier, America increasingly saw its mission abroad.

These strands all contribute to a growing importance being placed on practical activity as a way of forming youth, projecting and articulating a sense of Americanness.  Clearly there is no one single instant where service comes to the fore as part of the American Civil religion, but here I want to turn to the three points which I think are indicative of how service has functioned: the Thomasites, the Peace Corps, and the growth of the service-learning movement.

At the turn of the 20th century, in the midst of the Philippine-American War, and even before James’ essay, the United States sponsored what, as far as I can tell, was the first US non-military service mission abroad.  I am sure that the history of the Thomasites is well-known to you.  Named after the USS Thomas, the transport ship on which the majority of the Thomasites arrived, the Thomasites were a group of US educators recruited by the US government to implement the ideal of the American public education and American virtues in the Philippines.   The commissioner of the Islands, and future President of the United States, William Henry Taft, was clear that the educational mission was an extension of the military mission and, in fact, the first teachers were soldiers.   But conquest was not the sole goal of the mission.  The goal was to civilize through education.

The Thomasites were recruited from over a hundred colleges in the United States, and at their peak there were over 1,000 Thomasites in the Philippines.  Part of the mission of the Thomasites was to “work themselves out of a job” by training Filipino teachers, and to a large extent they were successful.  The Thomasites had a formal curriculum and formal duties, though the curriculum changed dramatically as the education system was modified to local needs, but perhaps more important than the classes that the Thomasites taught were the values that they were supposed to display and model.  Thomasites were not supposed to respect the status system that had grown during Spanish occupation, and equality, through shared work in projects like school gardens, was also one of the virtues that Thomasites were supposed to display.  It has been interesting to me as I have travelled past many schools in the Philippines to see that these values are still prominent in Philippine education: often schools have sayings and slogans written into their mission statements that make clear that education is not just about knowledge, but is also about inculcating moral values such as thrift, honesty, and hard work. 

Technically, the Thomasites were part of the civil service, but I am including them as a moment in American service for two reasons.  First,  they received low pay, were expected to live with the people whom they served, and were often alone in their posts.  The Thomasites’ main duty was teaching, but given the circumstances in the provinces, their duties also extended to areas like health care and sanitation, especially in the smallpox and cholera outbreaks at the turn of the century.  They were encouraged to volunteer their services as needed.  Many of the Thomasites were profoundly religious, and some even had missionary ambitions, but as a work of the US government, proselytization was strictly forbidden, thus again, whatever missionary activity that they did had to be done through modeling.  Secondly, the Thomasites are generally understood to be forerunners of the main 1960s US voluntary service, the Peace Corps.  Interestingly, the 50th anniversary commemorative book of US Peace Corps in the Philippines even starts with a chapter on the Thomasites and the legacy they left for the Peace Corps.

Other service opportunities followed the Thomasites, though most foreign programs, such as the American Red Cross and the American Field Service were associated with war, and domestic programs were tied to jobs programs during the Great Depression.  The 1940s were an interruption in the growth of service opportunities largely because of the Second World War, which mobilized the entire country.

The next major growth in non-military service in the US happened in 1960, when Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy picked up on a proposal that had been circulating for several years and, at an impromptu speech at the University of Michigan proposed the creation of a volunteer corps to serve overseas as part of his New Frontier program.  The Peace Corps was founded fewer than 100 days into John F. Kennedy’s presidency.  By 1963, only two years into the program, there were 7,300 volunteers, a number that rose to 15,000 in 1966, the high-water mark for volunteers in the field.  Since that time the numbers have varied from 5,380 in 1982 to about 8,000 today.  At this point nearly one quarter of a million Americans have served in the Peace Corps.

The official mission of the Peace Corps was articulated in three goals which have guided the program from its start.  These goals are (quote):

1)  To help the people of interested countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower

2)  To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

3)  To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Although it has always been important for Peace Corps volunteers to provide technical assistance where they serve, the last two goals make it clear that the Peace Corps was also a sort of cultural exchange program, attempting to introduce other peoples to Americans who were not part of the official diplomatic corps.  In this sense, the Peace Corps marked a sharp shift from the diplomacy of the 1950s and earlier, which shocked and horrified the nation when it was presented in the extremely popular 1958 novel The Ugly American.    Perhaps more significantly, the Peace Corps marked a generational shift from the World War Two generation into Kennedy’s vision of the “New Frontier,” a frontier beyond the American West and into which America would push in an effort to spread its wealth and well-being.   The new Peace Corps volunteers were the new pioneers, not intending to conquer the rest of the world, but intending to serve it by bringing American ingenuity and practical know-how and showing the world the pragmatic pioneer spirit of the real America.  The early Peace Corps training reflected the clean-cut rugged individualism that the government wanted in volunteers: extensive psychological testing to eliminate volunteers with communist tendencies, hands on technical training to augment the volunteer’s practical skills, rigorous physical training and survival training, including solo survival expeditions, to make sure volunteers could be independent, and the most thorough language training programs that had existed up to that time in the US.

As I said at the outset of my talk, I think it would be a mistake to see programs like the Thomasite program and the Peace Corps cynically as simple attempts to curry domestic and international favor.  They are complicated endeavors, reflections of their time and efforts to create a particular sort of America, and we can certainly criticize them for being narrowly conceived or inadequate to the tasks set for them.  But precisely because of what they attempt to do, they show us something about American Civil Religion that we don’t see when we look at speeches or national rituals: in an effort to introduce others to American values and so-called real Americans, these programs must articulate a sense of what a real American is.  Even more importantly, in describing what a real American is, they also proclaim and then create Americans in that same image. 

Before turning to the last historical point in the development of service as a dimension of American Civil Religion, I want to point out two common traits that the Thomasites and Peace Corps volunteers share.  First, both groups serve voluntarily.  Second, both required relatively long term commitments (3 years for Thomasites, 2 minimum for Peace Corps volunteers).  Those long term commitments meant that the volunteers were ready from the start for difficulties and for working through them.  When one reads the first person narratives produced by the volunteers, one is impressed with how quickly those who came to serve are receiving aid from others.  In the course of living in a new place for an extended period of time, they became vulnerable and needed help from others.  Thomasites and Peace Corps volunteers both became sick; both found themselves at the mercy of those around them, for housing, for food, for local-knowledge, for credit, for health care, for companionship.  This moment, in which the server is served and in which the supposedly more powerful finds him or herself needing the help of the supposedly less powerful, is one of the distinctive traits of these sorts of long term service programs.  Ironically, then, the very traits of intrepid and rugged individualism, mission to others, and know-how, are what got overturned in these service experiences.  Yes, the Thomasites and the Peace Corps Volunteers brought (and bring) assistance and help to others; but they were also helped and cared for by others, and in both cases soon learned that on their own, they could accomplish nothing.  With Reinhold Niebuhr, I would call this an ironic moment because, unlike the tragic moment, where the server’s power becomes the source of his or her downfall, the undermining of irony provokes a wry smile, as the one being served sees the broader truth that is included in mutuality.  As I will mention again below, I think this ironic moment in service is at risk of being lost in some of the current service programs that are used American higher education. Instead of irony, these sometimes produce cynicism.

If the Thomasites and the Peace Corps are two of the historical points through which we can see the development of this sacred sense of character in things like an intrepid spirit, physical vigor, and a sense of American mission, then I think it has reached a new level in the current service and service-learning movement in American education.  Not surprisingly, some of the key founders the service-learning movement in the United States were returned Peace Corps volunteers or VISTA volunteers (VISTA is a domestic version of Peace Corps) who were motivated by their own service experience to include service oriented activities in their own classrooms.  An even greater number of the leaders of service-learning became interested in the movement after already having strong religious commitments to service. 

Presently, service-learning in the United States has grown in leaps and bounds to be de rigor in many schools.  The idea behind it is that by asking students to conduct service as part of the educational experience, students can gain practical experience that they would not gain in the usual classroom setting and at the same time help others who can benefit from their assistance.  Sometimes the service activities are clearly related to economic or political issues, such as poverty or unequal access to health care.  In my University, where many students are from a more privileged background, the hope is that by serving in an impoverished community, they will become connected to and concerned with issues of poverty at a real level rather than just through textbook examples.  To give a less political example, we have in my department a course called Death and Dying which explores end of life issues as they are considered in multiple religious traditions.  In that class, students are simply asked to spend a couple of hours each week visiting the elderly at a local home for the elderly.  Since many of the students do not know anyone who has been seriously ill or who has died – not even members of their family – this is an opportunity for them to see aging and the end of life process.  And, of course, whatever the students are asked to do in the community that they are serving is meant to be helpful.   

This call to service in the classroom setting follows a call to service in other educational arenas also.  I would agree with Adams that this proliferation of service experiences in the US began in the 1980s, was made more visible with Ronald Reagan’s call to service, and has been institutionalized in groups such as Campus Compact, a national organization of College and University presidents dedicated to bringing the resources of University campuses to bear on local communities through service activities.  Speaking of my university, our students arrive having completed many hours of required service in order to graduate from their secondary schools; furthermore, they are told that a record of service is necessary for admission to top universities; they know that a record of service helps gain internships and employment.  A record of service is so much a part of a successful high school and college career, that it has become obligatory.   The vast majority of my students have multiple experiences of service, including short term service abroad.  And herein lies the biggest potential pitfall of service, for when I ask my students to think deeply about service, they are often either at a loss or they answer with memorized answers that they have been told in school.  Some see service as a hoop to jump through on the way to personal success.  Others become cynical about service and alienated by an experience which they feel is forced on them or designed to make them feel guilty for the circumstances of their own lives. 

Here again I think a turn to theological language can be helpful in both describing the problem and suggesting avenues to explore to maintain moral virtues of service.

First, I think it is fair to describe what has happened to service, when it is at its worst, as a perversion.  That is, in the technical sense, when service becomes obligatory, or is done by rote, and then even more when it becomes something that is done because of the status or material benefits it brings to the person who does it, the ends of service have become twisted.  Instead of allowing people to see one another more fully, as service is supposed to do, service becomes a means/end relationship. 

I certainly do not want to say that service or service-learning is universally a bad thing.  It clearly helps many people, and it can be a transformative experience.  But looking at service theologically, I am aware that it can be perverted or twisted from its original ends.  This is the pitfall of moral formation through service in American Civil Religion:  that transformative experience, or what we might call in theology a “conversion” experience insofar as it turns us towards others, towards our true selves, and towards God, is not substantially nurtured or sustained by American Civil Religion.  In fact, American Civil Religion can augment alienation.  If some of the virtues that American Civil Religion seeks to inscribe are qualities of independence and self-reliance, entrepreneurship and rugged individualism, then when these are the lenses through which students see the Other, they sometimes ask “Why don’t these people help themselves?” or “What is wrong with these people?” or “Why do they never change?” Worse again, it can even lead students to a sort of moral and material superiority in which they think that the privilege they hold is a privilege deserved on merit.  And, worst of all, since service has become obligatory, forced upon students by those who are in positions of power over them, the moments of doubt, the outrageous statements of privilege, the secret thoughts of moral superiority, cannot be voiced by these students.  In religious terms, there is no moment of confession available.  So the thoughts fester, or they are voiced in secret to other cynical students who affirm them.  Again, as a Christian and as a scholar of Christianity, this is a perfect example of sin insofar as it separates people from one another, from themselves, and from God.  There is no ironic moment here, no moment of reversal: superiority is affirmed.  Students who dip into service are free to return to their everyday lives with a confirmation of what they thought before.

I do not think it would be fair to end my talk here without suggesting at least some options to explore so that we may avoid this pitfall.  One option is to look to other religious traditions to see how they handle cynicism. 

I think that when we see it in its proper light, Christianity not only deals with the problem of cynicism, but makes the problem of cynicism one of its central concerns.  All too often people think of Christianity as a set of propositions to be believed, but as we know, it is meant as “a way.” Conversion, marked by Baptism, is an entry into “the way,” but the “way” is, as hymn after hymn tells us, a journey that we walk as a people, as a church, or, in Greek, as an ecclesia.  We draw each other along, open in our doubts and fears, exploring, chastising, questioning.   Beliefs may be part of that way, but they are secondary to the way itself.  To quote in a different context: Lex orendi, lex credendi — worship and prayer come first, and doctrines emerge to help us make sense of our experience of the way.

Let me make my point very clear here at the end: to avoid the pitfalls of service in American Civil Religion, we need a spirituality that allows for doubt, for exploration, and for the ironic moments of service to be made clear.  Christianity might help, but unlike Stephen Prothero, I do not think that a historical view of Christianity or a view of the Bible as literature will do much to introduce students to Christianity.  Instead, students need exposure to something like the spirituality dimension of Christianity.

Now, there are two obvious questions here.  First, is Christianity the only spirituality that will work?  I do not think so.  Christianity is the tradition I am familiar with, it is the language of spirituality that I speak, and it opens doors for me.  But I certainly see the deep spirituality of other religious traditions.  When I think, for example, of the intersection of the Christian spirituality of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Buddhist spirituality, rooted in mindfulness, of Thich Nat Hahn, I certainly think there is a deep well-spring of spirituality to be gained.  Dr. King took found tremendous insight from Gandhi, and Gandhi was profoundly moved by Tolstoy’s Russian Orthodox.  BUT, I say this with a caution: in a market driven world, we must be on guard against the danger of spiritu*]}*al dabbling.  What I mean is that spirituality is not a buffet in which we can choose bits and pieces that we like, yet a market driven world tells us precisely that we should choose our spirituality based on immediate desires.  I have not worked this out fully, but my intuition is that spirituality requires a certain commitment to a way, and that commitment means that we commit to what we do not like either.  We can ask about what we don’t like, we can question it, we can even change it slowly and with others, but commitment requires that we face it and not simply ignore it or turn away.