American Spirituality?

There’s a summertime exhibit on display at the Library of Congress right now. It’s called “88 Books That Shaped America.” It includes everything from Tom Paine’s Common Sense (with its famous line “These are the times that try men’s souls”) to Dr Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. It’s an intriguing list as much as for what it excludes as what it includes.

Missing from the list are any books about faith or religion.

In a country where religion has played a pivotal role, where Puritans and Anglicans carried their English rivalry into the New World, where the fundamentalist movement with all its oddities was born and Mormonism was invented, the librarians of the Library of Congress don’t see religion as an essential part of American history and culture.

Roberta Shaffer, the Librarian in charge of the exhibit, did an interview explaining how they decided which 88 books they chose. During the course of the interview she was asked about why there were no religious books included. “A lot of the books we chose have a moralistic or ‘do-good’ tone to them, and that is more representative of America and our values. That is the spiritual ‘persona’ of America rather than religion per se.”

She went on to say that books like Ida Tarbell’s The History of Standard Oil and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle expressed American spirituality more profoundly than books on religion.

We’ve moved a long way from the Founding Fathers’ refusal to establish any particular religion to our modern excision of religion and faith from our history and culture. We’re cutting religion out of our past, which cuts it out of our present. We have such an anemic understanding of “spirituality” that The History of Standard Oil is being touted by the most prestigious library in the country as an American spiritual classic.

Is this an indictment of the LOC as a liberal pawn? That’s to misunderstand what’s going on in our society, and how our view of spirituality is being fundamentally re-shaped.

It’s not liberalism but secularism which poses the great threat to the Church. We are at war with “the devil, the world and the flesh” as the Baptismal Office in the Prayer Book tells us. Secularism replaces God with “the world and the flesh.” The secularist won’t discover till it’s too late that the devil (who he’s too smart to believe in) was hiding in the world and the flesh all along, and the hook has been swallowed with the lure.

Christians are at war with the world. We always have been and always will be. The temptations of the devil, the world and the flesh will attack us as long as we live here on earth (and that, as the matter of fact, is what spirituality is really about).

Roberta Shaffer and the Library of Congress aren’t enemies of God; they’re simply secularists. What they believe to be spirituality is a kind of spirituality; it’s just not very deep and doesn’t answer the real spiritual needs of men and women. But it’s the coming thing in our increasingly secular society and we as Christians must be aware of it. In our personal spiritual lives, we need to be constantly on guard. The devil, the world and the flesh are the enemies of God, and they’re our enemies, too. We are at war—it can be a joyful, exhilarating warfare—but if we forget that basic spiritual reality, if we forget our High Calling to be “Christ’s faithful soldier” (as the Baptismal Office names us), we just become a sad part of the problem.

God has made you for much more than the world promises you can be. The “spirituality” of the world, with its “moralistic and ‘do-good’ tone,” ends with the world. God has made you for eternity.—Fr Gregory Wilcox