A Nation of Behavers

Martin E. Marty

February 14, 1997

Chicago Press ISBN 0-226-50891-9

Sometime in 1996 I heard Martin E. Marty interviewed on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He seemed to be a person I could identify with: a theological academic who, in the end (now in his 70s), was searching for his own faith surrounded by the maelstrom of modernity. I resolved to look into some of his books. All I could find at the Library was a preface to some words of Luther (he is a Lutheran) and a book interpreting the results of a religious survey along with other writers of different views. I've reported on this last in another book review.

In browsing the amazon.com listings for Marty, it became more and more clear that he was an academic. He's written lots of books that list for $120 and that have titles indicating that they are historical studies of the faith in various places. These are clearly graduate texts used in his seminaries. I was searching for a title that looked more readable, and affordable. Finally I settled on A Nation of Behavers.

The basic thesis here is that the religious flavor of the nation can be mapped not along denominational lines but along cultural lines. He wants to classify people's faith as by behaviors rather than stated beliefs. So far, I don't see anything that's non-obvious; he seems to be in a friendly academic struggle to make his fellow academicians see things in a slightly different way. It took me from December 1, 1996 to February 9, 1997 to wade through this short book, and none of it left enough impression to really make a cohesive statement of breadth here.

From the perspective of 1975 he looks at mainline religious labels, fundamentalism and pentacostalism and evangelicalism and throws in notes about behavior here and there. Fairly often he mentions the Catholic Kennedy presidency as something new, a turning point in civilization. Today we look back on the phenomena of a first Catholic president of a country that thought it was Protestant as "so what? Who would care if the President was Hindu?" (People would care, but that’s another discussion, another book.) The book does start to warm a bit when he starts into religions outside of the Judeo-Christian / Church-Synagogue mold. The new religions coming from the east, are they a flash in the pan? Are they a major threat? A minor threat? For some reason, in 1997, these are either accepted enough or have cooled enough that at least I don't hear or think much about them anymore. Still, it was apparently something outside of the traditional realm for theologians. It's a big world these days. Maybe I'm thinking that this material is a bit dated?

Then, he gets into ethnic or native religions and makes some distinctions and some alterations of thinking as to where various religious forms come from and what their real heritage within the context of a nominal Christian nation is. I found it much more compelling to read of Balmer's visit to an Episcopalean Church mixed with Native American heritage than to read here how African tribalism had more effect on the Christianity of blacks than white man's faith. Both are, however, useful new points of view.

He ends with Civil Religion, that is, nationalism. It is a religion of behavior with a couple of important differences. It is not theistic but it is mandatory for the citizens. What brings it to mind apparently is that it has religious features like pledges, initiations, duties, and the like and it subsumes the declared religions around it, for the most part.

In the epilogue, he addresses what is essentially, "how do we keep American religious patterns mapped in the future?" By this point, I'm saying, "who cares? Other academics? Is the world of theology this removed from life?"

The book is written like a well-researched and well-fashioned term paper. Lots of quotations that are made to flow into the text, occasionally putting in a thought of his own but mostly sailing along, weaving the thoughts and conjectures of others into a new material that is supposed to add something clarifying to the body of knowledge. At the end there are twenty pages of references. I never quite caught onto this form of writing or its purpose. And, it can be quite dry. The fact that there are parts of the text that are readable without wandering attention attributes excellence to Marty's intelligence, devotion and style, but he is no novelist.

There are those who say it is the right of a reader not to read every word of a work they take up. I'm getting too old now not to take this sort of advice more seriously. Still, if were I to have done that with this book, it would have made most sense to have started at the end and worked backwards until I got into the boredom. I'll have to be more careful with the Table of Contents in the future too, I suppose.