Nostalgia Leads Nowhere

In this over-analyzed, talked-to-death political season, it’s hard to find insightful discussion of current affairs by people who know what they are talking about. Once in a while, however, I’m pleasantly surprised. This morning, I was listening to the car radio and was intrigued by an exchange between seasoned political observers about the presidential election. Here’s the gist of their conversation: The portion of the “white” American electorate that has become so energized this election cycle is primarily motivated by anger over forty years of economic stagnation. Since the 1970s, wages for people with less than a college degree has declined. In the decades following World War II, when college degrees were not required for upward mobility, the American economy boomed. Wages steadily increased, unemployment was consistently low, home prices rose and interest rates were low. The great suburban build-out created a lot of new jobs in construction and retail. Factory jobs spiked to keep up with rising consumer demand, and an increase in huge government defense contracts provided additional long-term employment opportunities.

People who lived through those boom days, or whose parents and grandparents still fondly remember the 1950s, want to turn back the clock, and are searching for scapegoats to explain why the economy is not as robust today as it was then. Trouble is, those post-war years were the exception in American economic history, not the norm. From colonial days up until World War II, the American economy bumped along between growth and decline. About every two decades, there was a “panic” when huge amounts of wealth were lost, and of course the economy collapsed in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Despite this history, many people today regard the upward mobility of the 1950s and early 60s as a sort of entitlement, as though every generation of Americans up through that time had gotten wealthier than their parents.

As I listened to this discussion about nostalgia for the 1950s, I thought immediately about how churches within the formerly “mainline” American denominations have suffered from a similar misreading of history, mistakenly

believing that the high church attendance following World War II had been normative in American religion since before the birth of the nation. But that is simply not the case. The 1950s were the first time in American history that church attendance approached 50%. Through most of the nineteenth century, between 20 and 35% of Americans attended church regularly. Through much of the colonial era, as well as the decades right after the Revolution, church attendance was below 10%. The decline in church attendance in the last twenty years is actually a return to rates that were normal before World War II. But people who remember the heady days of large, downtown Protestant churches erroneously assume that what they experienced then was the way “it had always been.” They can’t understand why church is not as important to people as it used to be. “People know we’re here,” I remember an elderly woman from another congregation saying to me. “Why don’t they show up?” That kind of attitude has plagued a lot of Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and UCC congregations who are now just barely surviving or closing their doors. And this is a shame, because (as many of us are happily discovering) churches of these historic denominations are well-equipped to engage the spiritual yearnings of our time by combining the best practices of Christian tradition with radical hospitality.

When are we finally going to stick a fork in the 1950s and move on?

Yes, churches boomed in that decade. Yes, lots of people bought nice homes in nice, new neighborhoods. Yes, many people were able to remain with the same company for forty years and retire with a gold watch and a great pension. But it wasn’t all sweetness and light. For one thing, the economic benefits of those post-war years were not shared by all Americans. Blacks were suffering the worst effects of a century-old system of apartheid. The emergence of suburbs wasn’t only the result of a good economy. It was also fueled by racism as upwardly mobile white families sought distance from black neighborhoods. A shameful number of suburban homeowners associations actually prevented people of color from moving in. (This is why nostalgia for the 1950s is limited to white people.) For another, women were largely prevented from entering the workforce, except in a few professions (like teaching, secretarial, and nursing) where they were underpaid and overworked. Furthermore, the economy was being fueled in no small measure by the nuclear arms race and the development of what President Eisenhower ominously called “the military-industrial complex.” Those were the days of Civil Defense drills when students folded themselves under their desks to prepare for a nuclear attack (as if that would actually make you any safer). A lot of jobs were either directly or indirectly related to the construction of enough nuclear warheads to destroy the world fifty times over. Do we really want to return to that state of affairs?

And while lots of people were in church, many of those folks attended more out of social pressure that true conviction. (Going to church was a matter of Cold War public policy. It was one way Americans distinguished themselves from the godless Communist Soviet Union.) In fact, I doubt that any greater percentage of people were in church then because they wanted to be than is the case now. Additionally, the rapid growth of churches between 1945 and 1965 unfortunately led to institutional hubris that encouraged Christian denominations to display an appalling level of intolerance toward each other. Intoxicated with their own success, churches were tempted to regard themselves as, not only superior to other churches, but also exclusive keepers of the truth.

More to the point, the post-war era, even in its most positive light, was a blip. What happened then had never happened before and hasn’t happened since. It’s not coming back, and on balance, that’s a good thing. Instead of placing blame for why we’re no longer living in the 1950s, why not focus on the blessings of the time we are in now, and look for signs of a hopeful future? Even though there are lots of problems in our world today, I have no desire to live in any other time, because it is now in this time that God calls me to serve. Looking backward has never been a fruitful enterprise. Nostalgia glosses the truth and blinds us to the goodness that is all around us. It engenders anger rather than hope. It causes people to feel aggrieved rather than thankful. In both politics and religion, the way to the past is always a dead end. The only way that ever leads to life is forward.

©2016 by J. Mark Lawson