Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II.

• Author: McKibben, Bill

Why Journalists Can't Write About Religion

By my best count, Mark Silk's new history of religion and politics in postwar America(*), which mentions the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. by name 21 times, refers to the Reverend James Albert Pike, flaky Episcopal bishop of California, 30 times. This is a little like writing a 400-page cookbook and devoting 150 pages to recipes requiring potato chips. And it is symptomatic of the disease that infects Silk's book and much of what is written about religion. The meaning of religion is ignored. I am afraid that, like the liver man seeing a really good case of hepatitis, I'm more interested in the disease than the patient, which at any rate will soon die in the bookstores.

To return to our original example, Bishop Pike was ordained into the Episcopal Church in 1946 and hired as chaplain at Columbia in 1949. He gave jazzy sermons, hosted a Sunday morning TV show, and was elected Bishop of California, where he was fashionably liberal (building a cathedral with stained glass windows of Thurgood Marshall) and dabbled in mild heresy, "hint[ing] at doubts about the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and Salvation Through Christ Alone." He later participated in a televised seance and promoted parapsychology before dying in the desert of the Holy Land where he was wandering around in the sun looking for a spiritual breakthrough. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led a nonviolent "civil rights" campaign that won an end to segregation and voting rights for black people. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So why is Pike more prominent in Silk's book than King?

The first answer seems to be that Pike wrote for The Christian Century, one of a half-dozen or so publications that Silk, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, constantly cites. (The others include the Jesuit weekly, America, the Partisan Review, Politics, and the New Yorker.) And he showed up posthumously on the literati radar screen, thanks to an "eviscerating" essay by Joan Didion. This probably compensated for his never having been actually connected to Harvard University, though that would certainly have been even better. Father Leonard Feeney, a heretic priest who operated for several years from that university's unofficial Catholic student center is mentioned by name 43 times, and his followers, the Feeneyites, five times. Both Feeney and Pike are, in their limited way, interesting--were Silk to write a history of modern American heresy he would have two chapters in the bank. But the reason they...