[Originally Posted on the old Fluid Imagination site]

Tom Robbins, the New York Times best-selling novelist, writes in his novel Skinny Legs And All: “[R]eligion was an improper response to the Divine.”[1] He continues:

“Religion was an attempt to pin down the Divine. The Divine was eternally in flux, forever moving, shifting shape. That was its nature. The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren’t content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine.

“The Divine was expansive, but religion was reductive. Religion attempted to reduce the Divine to a knowable quantity with which mortals might efficiently deal, to pigeonhole once and for all so that we never had to reevaluate it. With hammers of cant and spikes of dogma, we crucified and crucified again, trying to nail to our stationary altars the migratory light of the world.

“Thus, since religion bore false witness to the Divine, religion was a blasphemy.”[2]

In this paper, I will explore the idea of religion and spirituality as understood and accepted by the postmodern mind. I posit that while the typical understanding of postmodernism equates it with atheism, it is best understood as relating to an open-minded spirituality, a searching, not for truth, but for sustenance for the soul.

Before I begin, however, it seems appropriate to define my terms, especially terms as malleable as religion, spirituality, and postmodernism.

For this paper, I will define religion as a particular institutionalized system of beliefs and practices relating to the divine. Religion, in this sense, is intimately linked to official dogma and to symbolic and ordained ritual. It is an institutionalized spirituality. Spirituality, on the other hand, is a felt connection to something mysterious, relating to the concept of the soul and immortality, what Robbins calls “the Divine.”

This leaves us with postmodernism, an infamously difficult word to define. Ihab Hassan, a research professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, traced the difficulties in defining the term:

1. The word postmodernism…evokes what it wishes to suppress, modernism itself. The term thus contains its enemy within, as the terms romanticism and classicism, baroque and rococo, do not.
2. [It] suffers from semantic instability…compounded by two factors: (a) the relative youth, indeed brash adolescence, of the term…and (b) its semantic kinship to more current terms, themselves equally unstable.
3. A related difficulty concerns the historical instability of many literary concepts, their openness to change…There is already some evidence that postmodernism, and modernism even more, are beginning to slip and slide in time, threatening to make any diacritical distinction between them desperate.
4. Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or a Chinese Wall…We are all…a little Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern, at once.
5. Postmodernism engages a double view: [continuity and discontinuity,] sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be honored if we are to attend to history, apprehend change both as a spatial, mental structure and as a temporal, physical process, both as pattern and as unique event.
6. [With no definitive postmodern "period", it becomes "a diachronic and synchronic construct...It requires both historical and theoretical definition] Thus we continually discover “antecedents” of postmodernism.
7. A definition of the concept also requires a dialectical vision, for defining traits are often antithetical…Thus we can not rest…on the assumption that postmodernism is antiformal, anarchic, or decreative; for though it is indeed all these…it also contains the need to discover a “unitary sensibility” (Sontag), to “cross the border and close the gap” (Fiedler), and to attain…an immanence of discourse…a “neo-gnostic immediacy of the mind.”
8. The concept of postmodernism implies some theory of innovation, renovation, novation, or simply change. But which one? Heraclitean? Viconian? Darwinian? Marxist? Freudian? Kuhnian? Derridean? Eclectic? Or…should postmodernism…be left - at least for the moment - unconceptualized, a kind of literary-historical “difference” or “trace”?
9. Is it only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon, perhaps even a mutation in Western humanism?
10. Finally, is postmodernism an honorific term, used insidiously to…hail trends, however discordant, which we somehow approve? Or is it, on the contrary, a term of opprobrium and objurgation? Or does it belong, as Charles Altieri notes, to that category of “essentially contested concepts” in philosophy that never wholly exhaust their constitutive confusions?[3]

Though difficulties exist with any concrete definition, this paper will go nowhere if one of its three major terms remains an untraceable string of letters. Therefore, we must investigate the generalities of the concept of postmodernism.

To contemporary historians, the term refers to the cultural, political, and technological upheavals ranging from 1960 right up to the present day: “the Cold War and its decline, the increasing heterogeneity, the predominance of television as a cultural medium, and the rise of the computer.”[4]

To philosophers and critical theorists, postmodern refers to the interplay, confusion, and paradox of what is real and what is unreal: “the constructedness of meaning, truth, and history: and the complexities of subjectivity and identity.”[5]

In the creative world, postmodernism is the subversion of all arts, the deconstruction of its basic assumptions, standing in opposition to modernism, which uses Art as its only reliable foundation.

Regardless of the detailed differences between these usages, it is safe to say that the one thing they all share, and this paper’s definition of postmodernism, is a “thoroughgoing skepticism toward the foundations and structures of knowledge.”[6] It is a denial of a central Truth or true narrative, supporting its argument with the plurality, subjectivity, and relativity of experience.

This may sound an awful lot like atheism, which is the disbelief in the existence of God or deities. After all, if postmodernism is the denial of a central Truth, and religion uses a deity as the central pillar in all of its philosophical constructions, it seems to follow that postmodernism denies God.

I argue, however, that this semantic leap from postmodernism to atheism is miscalculated. Postmodernism may refuse to accept that any single religion understands the Truth, or has access to a true deity, but that refusal to accept a single idea of God is not a refusal of God. It is, simply put, a refusal of your god. Postmodernism does not seem to stand on its own as a philosophical solution; to do so would be contradictory. The concept does not replace any single philosophy or religion; instead, it subverts all of them. Postmodernism says to any philosophy, “I don’t know what is right. But I know that you’re wrong.”

Along with being incorrectly labeled atheistic, one can imagine postmodernism, with its “playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist” nature and its recollections of the “irreverent spirit of the avant-garde,”[7] being labeled sacrilegious. Again, I argue that this is a mistake. Sacrilege is the disrespectful or irreverent treatment of something others consider worthy of respect or reverence. Postmodernism, as its main function, deconstructs any foundation of knowledge. To do so requires a careful accounting and thorough analysis of the foundation’s building materials: before postmodernism can deconstruct a philosophy, it has to have a complete understanding of that philosophy; to do otherwise, to attack a philosophy without “getting it,” would be to simply set off bombs in the basement, a futile attempt to piss people off. What is needed is an analysis of the blueprints, and then a targeted attack on the pillar’s central weakness, using whatever projectile is available, even something as irreverent as an airline named Pun Am.

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traces the formative years of Stephen Dedalus. Throughout most of the novel, Dedalus, a budding poet, is a pious and devout Catholic, even earning himself an invitation to become a priest from the director of his parochial school; Dedalus, however, realizes that he does not hear God’s call; instead, he responds to the call of his muse. As the novel comes to its conclusion, Dedalus has a conversation with a friend in which they discuss Dedalus’ faith (or lack thereof):

- Do you believe in the eucharist? Cranly asked.
- I do not, Stephen said.
- Do you disbelieve then?
- I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it, Stephen answered.
- Many persons have doubts, even religious persons, yet they overcome them or put them aside, Cranly said. Are your doubts on that point too strong?
- I do not wish to overcome them, Stephen answered.[8]

- And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you feel that the host too may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?
- Yes, Stephen said quietly. I feel that and I also fear it.[9]

- But why do you fear a bit of bread?
- I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.
- Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?
- The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical reaction which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.[10]

Somewhere else in the same conversation, Dedalus says, “I tried to love God; it seems now I failed. It is very difficult. I tried to unite my will with the will of God instant by instant. In that I did not always fail. I could perhaps do that still.”[11]

Stephen Dedalus gives us a good example of the postmodern method of disbelief. He refuses to take the eucharist because some part of him believes in it, and that part of him believes that to take the host without purity of heart and soul is sacrilegious. It is not an irreverent rebellion against the authority of his mother and church. It is a carefully decided action based on the tranquility of his soul.

There is an argument to be made, however, that Dedalus is a modern character, and not a postmodern one. This argument is difficult to dispute, seeing as Joyce is a member — if not the leader — of the modernist pantheon. This argument continues that Stephen’s continuing reverence for the host is a modernist example of disbelief, and it’s a reverence that later finds its object in poetry, in words. And unfortunately for me, it is a valid argument.

My counterargument is simple, and yet, at the same time, invalid; however, it will serve my purpose. The key to the counterargument lies in Joyce’s title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As a “young man,” Dedalus is decidedly modern. I invalidly posit that in a fictional fictional-novel titled, A Portrait of the Artist at Middle Age, Dedalus would become post-modern. Through the same method in which he lost his faith in religion - i.e., throwing himself with abandon into its dogmatic abyss - he would lose faith in art, poetry, and words. His deep exploration of religion led him to an unstable center, just as his spelunking of Cavern Art would lead him into a dark bottomless hole where the signifier and signified echo endlessly off unseen walls, destroying all semblance of originality. At the end of this fictional fictional-novel, Dedalus would shun art in favor of - nothing. The key to the book would be the way in which the reader understands that while Dedalus favors nothing, he does not believe in Nothing.

The point I’m struggling vaingloriously to make is that postmodernism is not irreverent at its heart. It is a careful consideration of a philosophy, followed by a careful deconstruction of it. While that careful deconstruction might utilize irreverent tools, the process is wholly reverent, if not holy reverent. It retains its spirituality while at the same time playing with the sacredness of religion.

The question is, how did the United States, a country “founded” by Puritans, designed by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and currently run by what some European countries are calling a “theocracy,” become a bastion for postmodernist thought?

Though the United States of America claims to be a country governed “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” the exact opposite is the more accurate rendering: of the privileged, for the privileged, and by the privileged. The first election in the United States took place in the same colony and in the same year as the first arrival of a slave ship, “and from that time forward,” wrote Sydney Ahlstrom, who was a Professor of Church History and American History and Chairman of the American Studies Program at Yale, “the rhetoric of American democracy has been falsified by the actualities of racism and bondage.”[12] That bigotry included actions against Catholics, Jews, Native Americans, and African-Americans.

“During the [20th century], however, the social structures, legal arrangements, values, and power relationships that supported the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) establishment have been gradually undermined.”[13] One of the major factors of this social change was the original make-up of the country’s population: “the future United States was settled, and to a large degree shaped, by those who brought with them [from Europe] a very special form of radical Protestantism which combined a strong moral precisionism, a deep commitment to evangelical experientialism, and a determination to make the state responsible for the support of these moral and religious ideas.”[14] This religious philosophy slowed down the academic freedom of the country, preventing the United States from experiencing the intellectual modernization that occurred in continental Europe during the first half of the century.

Writing about the magnificent social change of the 1960’s, Ahlstrom attributes the outbreak of the revolutions to five phenomenons:

1. Rampant, unregulated urban growth leading to crises of crime, medical care, education, sanitation, communication, housing, pollution, and transportation, not to mention increased racial tension.
2. Technological developments in agriculture and industry, producing migrations of people that led the national electorate to repudiate many of the arrangements that had long maintained the WASP establishment; for example, in 1961, true pluralism helped elect a Roman Catholic to the presidency.
3. Rapid technological development and widely publicized advancements in science aroused the popular imagination. The technical capabilities of humans seemed to have no conceivable bounds. Transcendent reality faded from view.
4. Less benign achievements, such as the Cuban missile crisis, continued nuclear testing, the proposal of an ABM defense system, the knowledge of the Nazi extermination camps, and America’s use of the atomic bomb, inaugurated a new era in human history - a time in which humanity is devoid of assurance of living on as a species.
5. And finally, President Johnson’s drastic escalation of an unpopular war, effectively preventing an assault on the nation’s domestic problem, and leading to an unprecedented loss of confidence in American institutions: the entire system became suspect.[15]

All of these social phenomenons led to increased apprehension in the Protestant populous. For many religious Americans, disillusionment with a dogmatic deity occurred because “not only did the universe seem unmindful of man’s plight, but man’s very achievements - even the educative measures on which so much effort and money were lavished - rather suddenly began to produce an intellectual atmosphere in which traditional belief did not flourish. There seemed to be no place under the sun, or beyond the sun, for a ‘God who acts.’”[16]

This loss of faith in God led to increased participation in Americanized versions of Eastern religions (Zen Buddhism and transcendental meditation, which was brought to the public consciousness by the Beatles); increased involvement with psychedelics such as LSD and Psilocybin mushrooms; a flourishing of occultism (astrology); and a surge of zealous secular movements, such as Black Militantism, Radical Feminism, and Deep Ecologicalism. In an infamous 1966 Time magazine article - provocatively titled, “Is God Dead?” - there is mention of a “death-of-God group” that “believes that God is absolutely dead, but proposes to carry on and write a theology without the theos, with God.”[17]

For all of this movement away from organized religion, the American populace still believes. Between 1944 and 1994, in a traditionally held Gallup poll, the number of citizens acknowledging that they have a belief in “God, or a universal spirit” remained at 94 percent.[18] The consistency of the number prompted George Gallup, Jr. to remark that the results are so predictable as to warrant never taking the poll again. It is this consistent outcome that allows newspapers and magazines to suggest that America’s faith in God is unwavering.

This editorial rhetoric, however, belies the accuracy of the claim. As the pollsters’ questions “go beyond measuring the simple presence or absence of belief,” the results suggest that Americans differ in their definition of ‘God.’[19] Between 1964 and 1994, the number of respondents in a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) poll who answered that they “‘don’t believe in a personal God,’ but rather in ‘a higher power of some kind’” doubled from 5 percent to 10 percent.[20] In other surveys, similar questions were asked but with different wording, such as a belief in “some sort of spirit or life force” or “a governing source in the universe who maintains the balance of nature,” indicating that “the nature of what Americans believe about God thus depends, like so many other things, on how the question is worded.”[21] Even more surveys reveal that the belief of Americans in the God of the Bible is declining, and that, as mentioned above, the New Age conception of God as “a state of higher consciousness that a person may reach” or “the total realization of personal human potential” is gaining philosophical favor. “To put it succinctly, when Americans say they believe in God - as 95 percent plus do so regularly in the Gallup pools - they may not be wide agreement among them in what they mean by ‘God’ nor in how certain they are of what they believe.”[22]

These statistics support my argument that Americans in this postmodern age are not losing their spirituality as much as losing their religion. During the twentieth century, America “evolved” from practicing their spirituality within a Judeo-Christian framework to a society where “growing numbers of Americans piece together their faith like a patchwork quilt. Spirituality has become a vastly complex quest in which each person seeks his or her own way.”[23] Again, while the newspapers heralded America’s faith, scholars bemoaned the decline of the sacred. Both of them got it wrong. Americans didn’t lose anything and nothing declined: Americans simply changed their definitions of the Divine. Whether they knew it or not, Americans were embracing a key tenet of postmodernism, i.e. they rejected your divine for their own individualized interpretation of it.

Robert Wuthrow, for his e-book After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since The 1950s, interviewed over two hundred people “who talked in detail - often for as long as five to seven hours - about their spirituality;” examined several decades of existing studies and scholarly interpretations of U.S. religion and culture; and investigated several dozen large-scale opinion surveys.[24] His conclusions generate an argument that traditional spirituality, what he calls “a spirituality of dwelling,” which is analogous to “temple religion,” has given way to “a spirituality of seeking,” which, in contrast, is a “tabernacle religion, the faith of pilgrims and sojourners; it clings to the Diaspora and to prophets and judges, rather than to priests and kings.”[25] For Wuthrow, this shift is similar to the shift in the country’s economy: what was once a population employed primarily by producing durable goods became a service and knowledge based citizenship. He continues:

In their faith, they once relied heavily on bricks and mortar, on altars, and on gods who were likened to physical beings and who called them to dwell eternally in sacred places. Now they concentrate on information flows - ideas that may help with the particular needs that have at the moment but that do not require permanent investments of resources.[26]

As may be expected, such ideas of spirituality are frightening. Seeking, for many, is synonymous with homelessness and directionlessness. The people have lost their religion, and they have yet to find something with which to replace it. With the increased access to unfiltered information, there is confusion about how to best connect with one’s sense of the divine: global awareness makes “particular religious traditions seem increasingly local and historically contingent.”[27]

Traditionally, increased knowledge results in an increased sense of secularism. The downside to a secular world is that it insults the seemingly innate sense of the Divine; I say “innate” because I think there has to be something inside us that desires a higher consciousness, otherwise the idea would not have survived throughout the centuries. I believe that, among other things, it is this unconsciously felt insult that has led to the increased popularity of Fundamentalism in America.[28]

Fundamentalism is the religious (and increasingly political) movement based on a literal interpretation of and strict adherence to religious doctrine (in American Fundamentalism, the doctrine is Biblical; in the Muslim version, the Koran serves as the divine text); more importantly to this paper, however, is the definition of Fundamentalism as a “global religious impulse that seeks to recover and publicly institutionalize aspects of the past that modern life has obscured [italics mine].”[29] The American Fundamentalists, frightened by the country’s spiritual wandering, have chosen to return to the temple.

In their battle to return to a spirituality of dwelling, the Fundamentalists mounted (are mounting) a brutal defense of their beliefs by challenging science and history, using the Bible as their sole source of argument. Their ardor stemmed from the social changes of the twentieth century. Non-Protestant immigrants from countries such as Ireland and Italy in the latter half of the 19th century, and Latin America and the former Soviet Bloc in the latter half of the 20th century displaced the WASPs who make up the American Fundamentalist movement. They resented the teaching of evolution in public schools, the absence of the Ten Commandments in those same classrooms, and the intellectual and secular elitism of the teachers in front of those classrooms and who seemed to scorn the deeply felt values of traditional Christian families. Their resentment has led to an increasingly influential grassroots effort to claim power in Washington D.C. This resentment resulted in the impeachment of President Clinton at the end of the last century. In his soon to be published memoir, The Clinton Wars, Sydney Blumenthal, a senior member of President Clinton’s White House staff, recounts the impeachment of the president. He suggests that the behind-the-scenes ringleader of the impeachment was the Republican House Whip, Tom DeLay, a man who believed himself divinely inspired to impeach the president:

In 2002, DeLay preached to the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, that God was using him to promote “a biblical worldview” in politics, and that he had pushed for Clinton’s impeachment because the president held “the wrong worldview.”[30]

As we are all aware, the impeachment failed, largely due to President Clinton’s rising popularity in the face of the scandal. The American public wasn’t interested in the zeal of the religious right, at least on a level any greater than a soap-opera-like fascination with the sexual peccadilloes of a married famous person. It is the failure to evict President Clinton from the Oval Office that convinces me that Fundamentalism is merely the death rattle of traditional religion in the U.S.

Such optimism may be unwarranted, of course, especially in the face of President Bush’s popularity, and the domestic popularity of his aggressive foreign policy. I’m not alone, however, in suggesting that the president’s popularity is due solely to an angry and grieving nation’s love of an American institution and not to any mandate for the man inhabiting that institution.

The central source of my optimism relates to the anachronistic tenets of Fundamentalism. The movement seeks to erase most of the knowledge acquired by the human species over the last 2000 years. It is the knee-jerk reaction to a rapidly changing world; while such reactions may prove popular for a time (the popularity of the British Luddite revolt against the industrial revolution in the early 1800’s serves as an example), no such movement has actually achieved its goal of turning back the clock.

A possible reason for the failure of anachronistic philosophies such as Fundamentalism is the growing interconnectedness of the planet, and the increased awareness of foreign culture. With the rise of the Internet throughout the final decades of the twentieth century, and the omnipresence of the World Wide Web in the twenty-first century, it is more and more difficult to build cultural walls between individuals. The mainstream acknowledgement of the plurality of experience - one of the key effects/causes of postmodernity - forces each person to recognize that no one culture has complete access to Truth. This plurality leads to Wuthrow’s spirituality of seeking: If we don’t know the Truth, maybe we should go looking for it. This spiritual search reveals the falsity, arrogance, and cultural-centrism of Fundamentalism, resulting in the philosophy’s deconstruction. And once humanity acknowledges the downsides to this out-of-date worldview, it will refuse to kowtow to the radical evangelicals. To put it succinctly, cultural interconnectedness opens minds.

This celebration of the mind’s opening created by the deconstruction of a firmly held belief is one of the hallmarks of postmodernity. Quoting noted deconstructionist scholar John Caputo in his article, “Post-modernism and its secrets: religion without religion,” Clayton Crockett writes that “the ultimate truth of deconstructive postmodernism reads: “the secret…is that there is no Secret.”[31] He continues:

Caputo argues that [the philosophy of deconstructionism's founder, Jacques Derrida] opens the space for an affirmative faith to occur and be professed. The secret is the structure of faith, a ‘passion of unknowing’ (Caputo) whose blindness regarding the fundamental insight into the Secret allows faith to live and grow. The secret without a Secret is at the same time a religion without religion, because [as Caputo suggests] the deconstruction of modernity’s scientific certainties and rational dogmas leads not to atheism but a situation ‘in which we see a certain recuperation or repetition of the pre-metaphysical situation of faith’ (Caputo).[32]

I argue that the “pre-metaphysical situation of faith” is separate from a religion, but analogous to what I’ve been calling spirituality. A return to this situation of faith demands a re-evaluation of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, modernism’s precursor, emphasized reason and science in philosophy and in the study of human culture and the natural world. Its reverence for reason replaced religion’s reverence for God. Where religion attempts to fulfill the need for “the warm and moral meaning offered by community,”[33] the Enlightenment tried to reveal the fundamental individuality of each person. The downside of the Enlightenment’s attempt to strip away the “web of prejudices or socially-constructed belief and habits” of humanity is that it “reveal[ed] a hollow core underneath.”[34] Modernism tried to fill that hole with Art, but postmodernism suggests we can only free ourselves from the negativity of the Enlightenment by not taking our selves so seriously, “for such seriousness predisposes us to find some nature to ourselves which, once accepted, limits our freedom. Not work, but play shall make us free.”[35]

As we’ve learned above, such ideas cause fear in the hearts of many, and justifiably so. Ultimately, postmodernism fails for many people because it does not satisfy the seemingly-innate need for the immortality of the soul; and it increases it reputation as the devil’s philosophy by succeeding in its goal of toppling religion: it succeeds in its goals of deconstructing belief, but fails to satisfy the believers need to believe.

In his essay, “Odysseus and the Possibility of Enlightenment,” Richard Ruderman suggests that the story of Odysseus “points the way to the freedom from myth or convention sought by postmodernism.”[36] Ruderman summarizes the accepted notion of the Enlightenment as a search for “a complete conquest of nature lest any mysterious province remain into which human beings can project their still unchecked transcendent longing.”[37] He goes on to refute this understanding of it by suggesting that Homer, in The Odyssey, attempted to convey that:

enlightenment requires that one admit to and confront the longings that are reflected in the mythological world and that one then attempt to think them through. Odysseus denies that one can simply ‘outgrow’ the concern with just gods as though it were a form of ’self-imposed immaturity;’ unless this question can be settled, there can be no enlightenment.[38]

By “playing” with this need to satisfy the soul and failing to, well, satisfy it, postmodernism seems to be a dead end on the long road out of the Enlightenment. That is not to say that postmodernism is a failure; it is to do the opposite, in fact. Because postmodernism is an antithetical philosophy, standing in contrast to modernism, it succeeds by revealing the facade of modernism. Recasting the metaphor, while it may seem so, postmodernism is not the dead-end, but is instead the Day-Glo map we read to show us that the road we’re currently traveling results in an apathetic dead-end of atheism. Many have simply mistaken the map for the territory.

If postmodernism forces us to re-think our path from the Enlightenment, is there such a thing as post-postmodernism? I don’t think so. Postmodernism argues against modernism; to argue against postmodernism is to argue in favor of modernism, leading to a cyclic and unsatisfying conversation. I suggest that what will come next is a new road leading directly out of the Enlightenment. We’ve exhausted the current road and exposed its dead end. Now we must head back and take another road. Our ability to do so, however, is a direct result of the abilities acquired through postmodernism, namely the recognition that all we have is subjective. Now that we’ve acknowledged objective experience and truth as a falsity, we can attempt to create a community of respected individuals, a religion whose God is neither your God or my God, but something else instead.

End Notes

1. Robbins, p. 407
2. Robbins, p. 407
3. Hassan, p. 588-590
4. Geyh, Leebron, & Levy, p. x
5. Geyh, Leebron, & Levy, p. x
6. Geyh, Leebron, & Levy, p. x
7. Hassan, p. 591
8. Joyce, p. 216
9. Joyce, p. 219
10. Joyce, p. 219
11. Joyce, p. 217
12. Ahlstrom, p. 10
13. Ahlstrom, p. 10
14. Ahlstrom, p. 10
15. Ahlstrom, pp. 11-12
16. Ahlstrom, p. 13
17. McCord, p. 82
18. Bishop, p. 422
19. Bishop, p. 425
20. Bishop, p. 425
21. Bishop, p. 425
22. Bishop, p. 426
23. Wuthrow, p. 2
24. Wuthrow, p. viii
25. Wuthrow, pp. 3-4
26. Wuthrow, p. 7
27. Wuthrow, p. 11
28. In an AP release of an ABC-Washington Post poll taken April 27-30, 2003, President Bush, arguably categorized as a Fundamentalist, leads his presidential contenders in the Democratic party by a factor of 2:1, even though those polled said “the economy was worse now than when the president took office,” and that “he doesn’t understand the problems of the average people.”
29. Wacker
30. Blumenthal
31. Crockett, p. 499
32. Crockett, pp. 499-500
33. Ruderman, p. 138
34. Ruderman, p. 138
35. Ruderman, p. 139
36. Ruderman, p. 140
37. Ruderman, p. 146
38. Ruderman, p. 148

Bibliography

• Ahlstrom, Sydney E.; “The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why It Occurred in the 1960’s,” The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, Lambert, Richard D. ed. New York: The American Academy of Political and Social Science (1970): 1-13.
• Bishop, George; “Trends: Americans’ Belief in God (in The Polls)”
  Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 3 (1999) : 421-434.
• Crockett, Clayton; “Post-modernism and its secrets: religion without religion” Cross Currents, Wntr 2003, Vol. 52, No. 4 (2003): 499-517.
• Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds. Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 1998.
• Hassan, Ihab; “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds. New York: Norton, 1998.
• Joyce, James; A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, St. Albans: Triad/Panther, 1977
• Blumenthal, Sydney; “God’s Whip Hand,” excerpted from The Clinton Wars, Salon.com < http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/05/08/blumenthal4/index.html> (2003)
• McCord, James; “Toward a Hidden God,” TIME Magazine, (April 8, 1966): 82-87
• Robbins, Tom; Skinny Legs and All, New York: Bantam, 1990.
• Ruderman, Richard S.; “Odysseus and the Possibility of Enlightenment”
  American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 43, No. 1 (1999) : 138-161.
• Wacker, Grant; “The Rise of Fundamentalism,” National Humanities Center < http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/fundam.htm>
• Wuthrow, Robert; After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s Berkeley University of California Press, 1998.