Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,
Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars…
–Walt Whitman
Perhaps it’s fitting that our most important poet and cultural ancestor, who built America almost from scratch, named his sole book: Leaves of Grass. In it, Whitman laid out, in the very title, what the agenda of American artists would be for the next 150 years: The ground, not the sky. The small, not the big. The individual, not the god. Our heroes are destroyed not by fate, but their own imperfections; our enemies are not Satan or his demons, but politicians and businessmen, corrupt priests and crooks.
While the great writers and poets of Western Europe (and Asia to some degree) have asked much bigger questions: The meaning of god, the meaning of existence, the meaning of fate; Americans have, for the most part, stuck to the meaning of the person who lives next door. An American couldn’t have written Paradise Lost, but I doubt a European could’ve written Huckleberry Finn. Compare Waiting For Godot with Death of a Salesman, or Blake and Thomas with Dickinson and Frost. The Existentialists, as far as I know, never counted an American among them. While, on the international stage of late, our European cousins have been the champions of secularism and we have been overtaken with rampant religiosity, when it comes to art (which I hope we can agree helps best to define a people) it is those across the Atlantic who obsess over the deity and it is us who are most heretical.
Of course there are several reasons for this. Europeans have a long religious tradition which has effected, for better or worse, their societies. The great European philosophers, even those who were strident atheists, are derived from this tradition, a tradition that looks for answers in the supernatural and tries to find the fires outside the cave. Americans settlers, though obviously descendants of the former, were both severely uneducated and quite eager to cast away–and forget–what they saw as the decadence of their motherland’s beliefs. Thus, the sky is replaced by earth, knowledge of the abstract replaced with knowledge of the land, spiritualism replaced with naturalism.
So despite some of our citizens claims that America is something of a ‘favored nation’ with the Lord, it’s seemed that we haven’t had much use for him. When it comes to the American Dream, and the dreams of Americans, our country is godless.
Have you considered Subscribing to all of this madness?
A fine observation and one that’s been clanging in my brain since you posted this. I have a few (scattered) thoughts to share. Not as well made as your post… but hells bells, this is a comment. The standards for comments are lower.
The dreams of Americans are godless. That may be true of godless Americans, but it’s certainly not true of all Americans.
A European couldn’t have written “The Late Great Planet Earth.” American Hal Lindsay wrote it and sold 15 million copies.
A European couldn’t have written the “Left Behind” series. Americans Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins wrote it and sold over 65 milllion copies.
Okay. Not art. (As judged by the arty folk.) But they are haunting the dreams of many.
I can point to two intertwined factors that set the European philosophical and artistic traditions apart from America and account for the distinctions you note— the middle ages and established churches. For centuries in Europe there was no space (or money) for art apart from the church, no theme apart from Christianity. The great universities all grew up around theological schools.
Fast forward to the enlightenment and new themes appear, but many of them are engaged with escaping the dominance of the Church. You are either inside the Church or explaining why you are outside.
The European experience in America was largely founded by people who sought to escape established churches. (remember there was a centuries old civilzation here before with its own spiritual heartbeat). The Declaration of Independence looks to the Creator—but the Creator in the Declaration does not found a church or annoint a king. Instead, the Creator endows all people (okay, “men”) with individual rights. And it is the men who confer legitimacy to the government. By the time the Constitution is written, the Creator is altogether omitted, and it is “We the people…” (okay, property-owning white men) who establish the government.
The middle ages was long dead when the United States was founded. We never had an established Church.
Maybe that explains why the right wing fundamentalists like to kvetch so much that they are persecuted. They want the government to embrace them. They work endlessly to breach the Church-state wall. But their vehicle is the tract not art. Art is too subltle and mysterious. They preach a doctrine without mystery. It’s cut and dried. And not conducive to art. It’s medium is the tract not the novel.
[brain lurching in a new direction and arguing with self, producing]
Hey, wait a minute here, binky. The U.S. does too have great religious art. Gospel music nurtured within and, in turn, nurturing the black church. It’s not the European settlers who fled old Europe that produced it, but the African captives who were brought here against there will. The irony, of course, we owe the existence of the black Gospel tradition to an untintended consequence of the white slave owners who sought to civilize, subdue, and save their captives by converting them to Christianity.
The artistic counter force to the godless white American dream comes from the African American church.
Can I get an Amen?
Good thoughts, Michael. As a almost political addendum to the post, I’d add that the irony is: Those who speak of ‘culture’ the most (the culture warriors), are the most inept at producing it. The heathens are America’s most distinguished bards and even those with religious backgrounds, James Baldwin for instance, usually use their knowledge to launch institutional criticisms of the church itself, but not to offer any spiritual guidance. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule, but none which come to mind (excepting ‘Left Behind’). But speaking of the forementioned, you’re right that most artistic expressions of religion in America are flat tracts and not masterworks, easily forgotten and quickly disposed.