Rita Byrne Tull continues her series of Dabbler letters from America with a look at the thorny issue of Church and State…
I could not have chosen a more eventful time for my first visit to America than the summer of 1969. Americans were still reeling from the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the disastrous Democratic Convention the year before. Richard Nixon was President and the word “quagmire” was being used about the Vietnam War. There was an edge of danger in the air. I felt as though I had departed a world of smudgy grays and entered a vivid Technicolor movie. Los Angeles was all bright, searing light and straight lines dissolving into a yellowish smog. Everywhere enormous, garish plastic creatures loomed, the icons of consumer culture, making the city seem one vast Disneyland. Baking heat left me feeling wilted and immobile as though suspended in a thick, viscous liquid. Crouched by an air conditioning unit I read the complete works of Raymond Chandler, another Brit once exiled in paradise.
That summer Americans landed on the moon and I watched it on a television dragged outside onto a sweltering patio in a garden with a lemon tree. My earthly surroundings were no less strange to me than the surface of the moon. I saw my first gun, bulging black and menacing from the belt of an LA cop. One afternoon we drove through Benedict Canyon, the road twisting through a deep cleft in the hills linking the city to the San Fernando valley. I glimpsed luxurious villas behind ornamental gates and exotic foliage. Later that night, in one of those villas, five people including pregnant actress Sharon Tate were knifed to death by the followers of Charles Manson. Intimations of danger were now made flesh.
But none of these was the most shocking sight of the summer. That was reserved for my visit to church. I was completely scandalized when I attended Sunday mass at a Catholic church in the valley and saw, inside the communion rail, a large American flag. This was my introduction to the thorny issue of Church and State in America. The presence of the flag was particularly potent at a time when its display was seen as an endorsement of the Vietnam War, a war that many now deemed immoral. What was the Catholic Church in America doing flying this symbol in its most sacred space? I came away from the church seething with outrage but unaware that I had caused a scandal of my own by wearing a miniskirt to mass. Well, miniskirts were just normal attire in England at the time, indeed most girls didn’t own any other clothes, except blue jeans which I thought unsuitable to wear to Mass. I did have standards. But the fashion had not yet reached California, skirts were still knee length, and I was told “you’re not in Swinging London now you know” as though London was a den of iniquity. With youthful self-righteousness I couldn’t understand all this fuss over a skirt when the symbol of murderous imperialism was brazenly displayed in the inner sanctum of the house of God. Skirt and flag, two scraps of cloth symbolizing the cultural divide I faced that summer.
In time American hemlines climbed to match their British cousins and, by a slow process of osmosis, I absorbed American political culture. I came to understand the presence of that flag by the altar. This was not so many years since Catholic presidential candidate John Kennedy had to assure American voters that if elected he would not do the Pope’s bidding. Successive waves of Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants had to prove that their religious duty to obey the Pope was no impediment to being true, loyal Americans. It is an irony of American history that the children of immigrants have greeted each new influx with the same suspicion and prejudice that their own parents encountered. Displaying the flag in a Catholic Church was a means of saying “I, too, am American.” Today it is Muslims whose loyalty is in question. Perhaps they should follow Catholic example and fly the Stars and Stripes from the minaret of every mosque? But these are more poisonous times, and with the Republican presidential candidates falling over each other to deny evolution and blame a hurricane on God’s wrath, I no longer have much faith in the separation of Church and State.
not sure which is worse, flags on churches or big vinyl banners advertising ‘The Alpha Course’
Can’t help wondering if they aren’t two stages of the same thing, Worm. A Church that puts a flag at the altar in the 60s is one that has begun the process of reconnecting with the world, one that’s finally realized that the world is no longer prioritizing connecting with IT.
When the church looked and sounded old-fashioned, so did the teaching. Go into one of those churches with the (modern) vinyl banner and you’ll probably find it unnervingly UNcharged with difference, somewhere deliberately placed halfway between a large seminar room and a lounge. The kind of place that, on the one hand, inspires some to decry change and the modern world, but which on the other hand is in reality far more comfortable and familiar to most people than pews and stone flags. Especially to the many who never stepped foot in churches as a child.
What I’m getting at is that a lot of churches, if not all, have been very successful in closing the aesthetic gap between themselves and their potential members. The music has assimilated, the service language has assimilated, and the buildings have assimilated. Even the books look a bit like airport thrillers. It’s one way of succeeding, but you have to go the whole hog with it.
(The other way of succeeding is to run hard in the opposite direction – bells, smells, liturgical uniform, long hard services and the Latin Mass/BCP/Hymns A&M route. But that’s extraordinarily expensive and hard to pull off.)
Close the aesthetic gap, and you are most of the way to making religious belief look, not like something from the past, but like a real option when it comes to surfing modern life. In the UK, these are the churches that fill up. On the whole, they tend not to be Anglican ones..
(In the US, it’s had the effect of rendering the politics of a Bachman, Perry or Palin (which to British eyes can seem backward) new and fresh in a way that mixed-economy liberalism and Big Society Democrat politics aren’t. Politics is unpopular across the western world and has been since the mid-60s, but American Christianity seems capable of lending it some of Christianity’s hard-won aesthetic relevance in the States in a way it can’t in the UK).
The accusation for the mainstream CofE is that it has assimilated rather too much – ie. it is quite possible to be an Anglican vicar and disbelieve not only in the literal truth of Genesis, but also in the virgin birth, the resurrection, hell, heaven, and, um, God probably.
Absolutely possible – exhibit one, Don Cupitt at Cambridge! (It does get my goat, ever so slightly, when CoE characters and their supporters make out that there is, somewhere out there, this awfully sophisticated theology that blows e.g. Richard Dawkins out of the water. What DOES exist is a theology which essentially accepts (sub vocally) the non-existence of God by all traditional definitions but then proceeds to reuse the old terminology to create a combined psychology/politics. I can recall, from my own Christian days, such hunger for a decisive, high-academic-level argument for God, one that would deal with the problem of evil, incorporate Copernicus and Darwin etc. AND be convincing that there really was someone out there. Pace Richard Swinburne’s efforts in the 1980s, that never came. My most intelligent priests used to just bat the question away: it could be so frustrating).
I have heard a rumour that The Great Beardy Rowan Williams is itching to make a public announcement that he no longer believes in God, but has been muffled by the efficient PR bods at Lambeth Palace.
A rumour, as I say, but the fact that it sounds wholly credible (to me, at least) is telling.
what a strange fact that the supposedly omnipotent and all seeing deity who created the entire universe and every single one of us in his image has to rely on ‘books that look a bit like airport thrillers’ in order to get his message out there
That was a heck of a year you chose for your first visit to America, Rita. I’m just a little surprised a young girl from England, mini skirt and all, didn’t seek release from the tension with a three-day visit to Woodstock: Joplin, Hendrix, Baez, The Who, Crosby Stills and Nash, The Band, Jefferson Airplane etc etc.
Apologies for this deviation from the essence of your post, but I suppose those who attended the Festival might maintain that for all the rain and mud and massive overcrowding it was a time of peace and love, a glorious distraction from the seeming futility of the War, recent political assassinations, the Manson murders, the arrival in the White House of Nixon; and all beautifully experienced through a religious/spiritual cannabis haze.
I love your spiky posts – long may they continue.
The number of people who claim to have attended Woodstock is estimated to be at least 100 times more than could possibly fit into that farmer’s field. I promise that my posts, though “spiky,” will be true!
In 1969, I was 14 yrs. old and living in LA. Your description pretty much nails it.
Today it is Muslims whose loyalty is in question. Perhaps they should follow Catholic example and fly the Stars and Stripes from the minaret of every mosque? But these are more poisonous times, and with the Republican presidential candidates falling over each other to deny evolution and blame a hurricane on God’s wrath, I no longer have much faith in the separation of Church and State.
Virtually all Americans don’t give a damn about anyone’s religion, unless given a reason to. Islam does, unlike almost all American Muslims; the distinction is important.
Republican candidates have to get voters, so they say things voters want to hear. I’m much less worried about the separation of Church and State than I am about Religion (Warmenism) and State.