Spiritual Slenderella?

One of Protestantism's bright young men, Martin Emil Marty, 30, minister of the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in suburban Elk Grove Village, Ill., characterizes his life as "typically grey flannel: station wagon, barbecue pit, and all that goes with it." Nebraska-born "Marty" Marty is also an associate editor of the nondenominational Christian Century, and in last week's issue he winds up a six-installment series on religion in America that, clotted though it is with the fashionable jargon of the social analysts, is a perceptive young man's view of what he seems to regard as grey-flannel faith.

Religion-in-General. In the U.S., says Marty, these are "post-Protestant times." The particularism that once typified American church life has given way to what he calls "religion-in-general." The social and technological environment of the 20th century has acted "as a sort of cosmic Slenderella to polish the edges and smooth the roughness of religious particularity." Puritanism once dominated the U.S. attitude to religion, but "God is now offered in packaged, post-Calvinist, highly marketable forms. He is expected to baptize what is 'expedient' for man, to concur with man's reason and will."

Protestant, Catholic and Jew, as Will Herberg pointed out (TIME, Sept. 26, 1955), now form a spiritual tripod on which the U.S. conception of religion rests, and, says Marty, "the old concept of a 'Protestant' America is as obsolete as the side-wheel showboat, the cigar-store Indian or the Fourth of July oration. We all think of these things as part of 'our' culture--but where do we go to find them?" Marty suggests that Protestantism is insecure because it senses itself to be a minority (although statistically it is not), while Roman Catholicism has assumed a "quasi-majority responsibility" and Judaism continues its "quest for definition." All three are confused in "the presence of the secular, natural, national humanistic religion."

Hope. Critic Marty sees hope in the local parish, with its possibilities of maintaining the values of personality against mass society. "If the parish can be relieved of many pressures which it cannot sustain, it offers the most hopeful front for taking post-Protestant America and helping shape it as newly Christian America. It must be informed from the theological centers as it is not at present. As denominations and parishes 'take upon themselves the form of the servant' and . . . sacrificial living ... we shall see the liberation of God, the repersonalization of man, the judgment of a proud society and the quiet but more effective religious impulse unmoved by obsessive revivalizing. Such movement is likely to occur in the only way it ever has, within a creative minority and through--in the Biblical sense--the Remnant."

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