Football fills the void
William Dean's book begins ominously. A "distinctive spiritual culture" guided Americans in the past by speaking "for a truth, even a reality, greater than America." But "there are signs" today that this culture is dying. If it dies, then "so, in most important respects, will the American nation." All, thankfully, is not yet lost. A vibrant "common culture" can still be reborn on the foundation of a revived spiritual culture.
This trope--an impending cultural breakdown can still be averted if Americans will only wake up--is a familiar literary and homiletic device going back to early New England. Such now-classic works as Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown (1929), David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1978) and Robert Bellah and colleagues' Habits of the Heart (1985) have become lasting monuments because they play original variations on this standard theme. Dean's effort is modest when put in that company. He does make some intriguing claims about theology and culture in America, past and present. But he never enters fully into the ongoing debate about how to conceive or build a common culture. And he doesn't say enough about jazz, football or the movies to establish their significance for his vision of a vital spiritual culture.
Dean summarizes his argument as a series of propositions about spiritual culture in general and American culture in particular. Americans from the start were a "displaced people." White Americans, cut off from their European roots, shared that condition of alienation with Native Americans and African-Americans. Like ancient Israelites, Americans coped with their unmoored existence by positing "something greater than themselves who worked within that culture." The person they called God "worked" in the sense that he functioned as an effective "sacred social convention."
