Drunk on pop-culture holiness, it’s easy to forget the nation’s first noble truth: America is not a religious metaphor.

By Peter Manseau

Six years ago I lived in the chi-chi wilds of Western Massachusetts, in a town whose population increased fivefold every June and in which the biggest houses around were left vacant nine months out of the year. It was the kind of place where summer people liked to invite the hired help to garden parties to mingle with their city friends. As long as the keg was full of microbrew, everyone was eager to believe this social equality was real, that Appalachian-style poverty didn’t exist in the Berkshires, that the men who fixed the gutters, mowed the lawns, and laid down the ceramic tile floors were satisfied country craftsmen able to support their families on eight dollars an hour. The beer, in fact, rarely ran out (I’ve never seen excess like Tanglewood-afterparty excess), but the working stiffs would usually head home early anyway — handymen know no weekends.

I was working at the time on a house building crew, as an under-the-table, uninsured roofer, gopher, and nail-puller. I was never much of a carpenter but I was glad for the chance to work outside and I liked my crewmates well enough — mainly I appreciated the fact that three or four of them were bluegrass musicians. I was learning to play the music myself, so I enjoyed nothing more than the occasions when a fiddle or a mandolin would come out at lunchtime and in the middle of a half-built house we’d eat our sandwiches to the haunted sounds of Civil War ballads and century-old mountain reels.

It was just around this time that Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet and I began a correspondence about religion in America that eventually led to the creation ofKillingTheBuddha.com. Jeff had been writing about a movement in Anglican theology called Radical Orthodoxy for The Chronicle of Higher Education; in my hours away from the construction site, I had been chipping away at a novel about a 14th century convent. Somehow through our research into these two subjects we came to the same conclusion: that religion was not being written about in a way that acknowledged its importance or influence in the world.

Looking back now on the kind of things we were talking about then, it seems the idea common to medieval nuns and Radical Orthodoxy was the notion of religion’s pervasiveness, its ubiquity. Why separate religion from all the other categories of living? Pop culture, politics, history, family, sports –- it’s all religion, we decided.

Life becomes a bit more interesting when you believe even the small things we do are a reflection of how we think about the Big Things, about Life, God, Death, etc. Naturally this excitement followed me to work from time to time. So it was that one afternoon when I was on break with my housebuilding crew and we got to talking about music, I said that what I liked best about bluegrass was that it was religious even when it didn’t mean to be. All the songs, I said, were about crossing the Jordan, getting to Canaan, answering when Jesus calls. Bluegrass was like taking the Bible and making it the soundtrack to Bonanza, I preached; it laid bare the fundamentally — if not fundamentalist — religious character of American culture.

“If you say so,” one of my crewmates said. He picked up his fiddle, gave a wink to a fellow with a guitar, and together they launched into a rousing rendition of a moonshiner’s anthem: “Hot Corn, Cold Corn, Get yourself a demijohn…”

They didn’t say it, but I could hear a denial in the irreligious joy they took in the singing that day. It’s not about God, asshole. It’s about whiskey. I could make all the claims I wanted, in other other words, but, like the phony egalitarian vibe of those Berkshire parties, saying it didn’t make it so.

I was reminded of this humbling lesson many times while reading David Dark’s new book, The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea. The latest (and, from what I’ve seen, the most ambitious) of what might be called Christian-revelance literature, it is a longform essay that attempts to lay bare, as I tried in my bluegrass exegesis, the basically religious character of American culture. Our cultural heritage, Dark writes, “might have more wisdom and insight concerning our place in history and our relationship to the coming kingdom of God than we usually assume.”

This is no book about the faith of the founding fathers, however. Dark, a teacher at a Christian high school in Nashville, locates the spirit of the nation in its subversive, harshly self-assessing elements. In moments as different as Elvis Presley’s shoot-out with his television and the “uniquely American anti-rhetoric” of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, Dark sees “the salvific power of self-doubt.”

He also sees the Bible’s inescapable shadow. The heroes of our national mythology, Dark says, “viewed America through 1 Corinthians 13-colored glasses.” In this telling, Elvis, Lincoln, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dylan, and a fraternity of minor prophets saw, “through a glass, darkly,” the land and its people for what they were and could be. Moved by such vision, they have expressed “a uniquely American mysticsm… comprehensive and curious but confident at nobody’s expense.”

It’s worth noting that “uniquely American” is a descriptor Dark favors; before its several appearances in this book the only time I can remember hearing the phrase was during one of George W. Bush’s recent forums on social security. A single mother explained that she was having a hard time raising her three children because she works three jobs and is rarely at home. “You work three jobs?” the president asked, obviously taken aback. “Uniquely American, isn’t it?”

Dark’s “uniquely American” is just as hopeful, but more romantic than naïve. He is filled with an awed reverence for this nation of people who “have committed themselves to something either entirely heroic or completely insane.” It is a description that has a lot in common with the challenge, made famous by C.S. Lewis, that Jesus Christ was either lying, insane, or the Son of God.

And therein lies the purpose and the problem of the book. Tugging the glove of scripture onto the hand of America, Dark intends to use one set of ideas to explain and complement the other. Trouble is, it’s not an exact fit. Either the hand has too many fingers or the glove not enough.

As both a committed Christian and an enthusiastic participant in what some Christians refer to as “the culture,” Dark hopes this book will be one that builds bridges — between the right and the left, between the religious and the secular, between those who disdain popular music, film, literature, etc, and those who revere it, and most of all between notions of what it means to be Christian and what it means to be American. He contends that the “biblical witness” evident in our shared history can overcome the “weird moment” in which we live, a moment in which opposite sides no longer respect each other and everyone believes they own the whole truth.

In other words, Dark just wants us all to get along. As a proof that this is possible, he sets out to reconcile American culture and biblical tradition. To say he hears echoes of scripture everywhere would be an overstatement, but to judge from the many figures he corrals into service, it does seem almost inescapable. He packs his pages so full with allusions you can almost see him writing in a swivel chair, spinning from his desk to his CDs to his DVDs to his bookshelf, looking for the perfect reference. In just 166 pages, he cites:

Allen Ginsburg
Arthur Miller
Beck
Billy Wilder
Billy Bragg
Bruce Springsteen
Clint Eastwood
David Lynch
John Lennon
Johnny Cash
Kris Kristofferson
Kurt Vonnegut
Martin Scorcese
Patti Smith
Pearl Jam
Philip K. Dick
Ray Bradbury
Richard Pryor
R.E.M.
Robert Altman
Rod Serling
Roy Orbison
Sonic Youth
Stanley Kubrick
The Pixies
The Violent Femmes
Tom Waits
Trent Reznor
Walker Percy
Wilco

And those are merely the names that jump immediately to mind (mostly a man’s world, it should be noted). It’s quite a list, and some would consider the author’s ability to stitch all this together with scripture to be the book’s real strength. No doubt as a teacher Dark earns points with the cool kids by being able to talk about Beck. But this endless waving of the relevance flag made me wonder if a working title for this book might have been “The Gospel According to David Dark’s Record Collection.” It’s a list full of my favorites, too, but the sheer number of questionable examples dilutes the grand statement Dark is trying to make. I loved Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as much as the next guy, but is the “American aquarium drinker” who narrates Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” a biblical witness simply because he sings “I want to hold you in the Bible-black predawn”? Similarly, I came of age listening to R.E.M. with what could only be called a religious fervor, but, given the vast catalog of truly challenging American voices to consider as prophetic, devoting even a sentence to “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” seems downright blasphemous.

If all of these are modern versions of biblical witness, in other words, it seems to me it makes the Bible not more relevant and important but less. If religion is everywhere, when does it matter most?

It matters most, I would argue, not when it is building bridges, but when it is drawing lines. Wilco and the R.E.M. are great, of course (that few would disagree seems to be one reason they are cited), but such nice-young-man music doesn’t nearly answer the fire of the prophets in whose tradition Dark would have them stand. I would have been impressed if Dark had presented voices that are not just edgy but actually offensive to his audience. How about the grandfather of hiphop, Gil Scott Heron, rapping a rebuke of one of the nation’s proudest moments:

A rat done bit my sister Nell
And whitey’s on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon…

Or maybe Mel Lyman, a largely forgotten icon who was something of shadow Dylan in his day. He embraced his fame on the folk scene and within a couple of years transformed himself from a regular at Cambridge coffee houses to a hippie-guru-god, leading a commune of followers on the edge of Boston. If anyone ever sounded like a cross between a biblical prophet and the poet laureate of the counterculture, it was him:

I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone
I am going to shove hope up your ass
I am going to turn ideals to shit
I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe someone will be able to see something as it really is

Uniquely American, isn’t it? My point is not that Dark should know, care, or write about Gil Scott Heron or Mel Lyman, but simply that America is bigger, rougher, and more difficult to classify than anything that will fit in The Gospel According to America’s bridge-building scriptural bag.

Dark writes very well, makes his argument with an excitement suggestive of his love for Americana in all its forms, and seems to have read and listened to almost everything in the pop-culture canon. Elsewhere I have seen The Gospel According to America praised an exercise in “faithful patriotism,” but to me this phrase points to what is unsettling about the book. Dark is so intent on making the case that his faith and the culture he loves can coexist peacefully that at times it seems he believes that that which is most American is that which is most Christian, and vice versa. Though he writes strongly in favor of democracy and against theocracy, to Dark it is all leading nonetheless to “the coming kingdom of God.” To me that kind of thinking spells trouble if taken to its logical end. Dark’s conception of what the kingdom of God might be is wholly benign and admirably based on social justice, but nevertheless it begs a rebuttal: America is not a religious metaphor.

Of course, I say this having spent a large part of the last three years writing and then talking about a book that self-consciously weaves American stories with new takes on scripture. In my own misgivings about Dark’s mostly compelling work, I see reflections of the resistance I’ve run into many times. Since I am not without sin in this regard, I will only toss this final stone in the air and see which one of us it hits.

Around this time last year, Jeff Sharlet and I revisited one of the sites we had written about in Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible with Jason DeRose, a producer from NPR. He wanted to see our theology road show in action, and as it happened the strip club with which we end the book was only an hour’s drive from his Chicago studio. The three of us rode out to Club Exotica, riffing on the theology of the land, what the cold flat landscape around us said about the Bible, what the temple of flesh waiting at the end of our pilgrimage said about the spiritual needs of the souls inside. Jason’s digital recorder was rolling and Jeff and I preached a Killing the Buddha religion-is-everywhere-gospel that by then we could recite in our sleep. When we arrived at Club Exotica we kept it up, adding a little beer to our fervor to get into the spirit of the place, reading aloud from the book about the sexy prophet-strippers we had met there the first time around.

One of the girls working the floor saw we weren’t watching the show and came over to see if any of us might like some of her private attention. “No thank you,” we told, “but we would like to chat if you a have a minute.”

“Sure,” she said.

We were there to see the religion hidden in such a place, we explained, to see the ways in which, as we wrote in our book’s introduction, “the Bible is in your bones before you crack its binding.”

“A place like this is kind of like a church,” we said. “Its low lights and loud music carve out a sacred area that allows for the performance of rituals of desire and gratification…”

The roll of her eyes was exactly like the one I’d seen the fiddle-playing carpenter make years before. And it made me wonder: Who really knew the soul of this place, a woman who spent her daylight hours in Club Exotica’s dim neon glow, or we outsiders who’d come to survey the place in our religion-colored glasses, confident of what we’d find?

“If you say so,” she said.

Peter Manseau is co-author of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible and author ofVows: The Story of a Nun, a Priest, and Their Son, forthcoming from Free Press this fall. The Revealer is delighted to congratulate Peter on his marriage, this past Saturday, to the lovely and talented Gwen Seznec.