Britons Will Understand

The field of American life is as bare of the Church as a billiard table of a centerpiece. . . .

So wrote scornful Expatriate Henry James in The American Scene (1907). To him, as to most Englishmen, "the Church" meant the state-established Church of England; he was appalled by the ecclesiastical chaos of competing U.S. denominations.*

To explain America's unique religious situation in a book for British consumption, the Cambridge University Press picked the dean of Harvard's liberal, 300-year-old Divinity School, a New England Congregationalist with a B.A. from Oxford. Published last week, Dean Willard L. Sperry's Religion in America (Macmillan; $2.50) gets its points across in a manner Britons will understand--emphasis-by-understatement, damnation-by-faint-praise, denunciation-in-a-soft-voice.

Dean Sperry's understatement on the U.S. separation of church & state: "We [Americans] may have saved ourselves . . . from the public and often unedifying conflicts between church and state which have so often marked the history of the Old World. . . . But the reference of all such matters back from the religious body to the individual believer denies to our churches as a whole anything like effective corporate influence upon the course of national events."

Dean Sperry's faint praise of America's profuse denominationalism: "The prodigality of our American denominations is itself the sign of a widespread confidence among us in the religious possibilities of the 'everlasting here and now.' . . . If it be admitted, as it must be admitted, that such a faith is peculiarly liable to the perils of self-deception and the excesses of fanaticism, with the sad tragedies and the moral scandals which so often ensue, it still remains true that the principle is valid."

Dean Sperry's soft-voiced denunciation of non-liturgical sloppiness in the U.S.: "The Prayer Book, with its implicit pledge that . . . the offices shall be read decently and in order, is probably the greatest single source of attraction to non-Episcopalians. In the worship of the non-liturgical churches far too many of our transactions are accomplished in disorder, and occasionally approach aesthetic indecency. Popular taste in America has improved appreciably in recent years. . . . This improved taste penalizes churches, particularly in the great cities, which persist in the cults of ugliness, untidiness and sentimentalism."

* Current count: over 200 Protestant, three Catholic denominations.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.