Wilfred Mark McClay

The compulsive jokiness with which so many modern Americans deflect the subject of aging can get pretty tiresome. But it is perhaps not the worst way to handle the matter. It at least avoids the undignified excesses of self-pity and despair by making light of an admittedly unwelcome condition, even while implicitly confessing one’s susceptibility to an all-too-human vanity. That was the approach taken by the great comedian Jack Benny, whose trademark shtick included the comic pretense that he was perpetually thirty-nine. There was irony built into the joke, a self-mockery that was at least honest enough to acknowledge itself.

As with so much else in American society at the outset of the 21st century, what one thinks about the present and future status of religion in American life depends a great deal on what interpretive stance or narrative framework one brings to the subject. Who would have imagined, even two decades ago, the kinds of debates we would see roiling the post-9/11 world, at a moment when the immense motivational power of religion has roared back into view, as potent as a force of nature? At the dawning of the 21st century, the secular worldview, whose triumph once seemed so inevitable, now seems stalled, and even to be losing ground, or being superseded. Religion, in forms both traditional and novel, both quietly civil and wildly revolutionary, seems resurgent. The dream of a fully secularised public life, a condition that Richard John Neuhaus memorably labelled as ‘the naked public square’, seems to have lost whatever slender claims it may have had on the American imagination.To provide a full account of the range of reasons for this ‘post-secular’ direction in American religious sensibility and commitment would take us far beyond the concerns of this essay. It should be stated, however, that for many western European observers the continuing American commitment to religion is a matter of great perplexity, running counter to so many of the most powerful secularising trends around the world.