To discuss American religion in 1968 from the perches of the academy was to reckon with crisis. A sense of crisis runs through the essays that make up The Religious Situation: 1968, and crisis takes center stage in Thomas O'Dea's contribution on the Catholic Church. In his chapter, titled “The Catholic Crisis: A Second Chance for Western Christianity,” the sociologist O'Dea proceeds from the premise that Christianity is engulfed in a crisis of meaning vis-à-vis the technologies, ideologies, and economic and scientific pursuits of the modern world, and he uses his essay to develop the cautious proposition that the Catholic Church is the last best hope for Christianity, in its varied denominational forms, to find relevance in that world while preserving its “deeper character and basic identity” (295). Catholicism, O'Dea writes, “stands as a … surrogate for Christianity” in this consequential enterprise (295).

O'Dea's hopefulness about the Catholic Church's ability to navigate the Christian crisis at midcentury was hitched to the aggiornamento, or updating, project of its Second Vatican Council: “The Catholic attempt at aggiornamento … represent[s] a great and indeed probably final opportunity for Christianity” (297). Indeed, for most professional observers of the Church in the 1960s, Vatican II felt like an epochal event. During the Council, which lasted from 1962 to 1965, more than two thousand bishops from around the world, including 240 from the United States, met in Rome with the purpose of charting the Church's path forward in relation to modernity. For O'Dea, Catholicism's unique potential for finding this way forward came from its existence as “an unbroken community of faith,” which in turn preserved a space for intraecclesial dialogue between reformers on one hand and guardians of tradition on the other. “Only a unified body can provide the setting for genuine dialogue among … various … perspectives,” he argued (294). Although O'Dea wasn't commenting as a Catholic, his essay echoes with a triumphalism—a confidence in Catholicism's achievements—that was common among midcentury Catholic (and sometimes non-Catholic) accounts of Vatican II.

Catholic triumphalism has not aged well. We know now, with the hindsight afforded us by half a century, that church attendance and religious vocations plummeted during the late 1960s. We know that 1968 was also the year of Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, and that American Catholics largely ignored its prohibition on artificial contraception. We also know that Vatican II's legacy remains contested today, not only among bishops and theologians—the men (and they were all men) O'Dea highlighted in his piece—but also among folks who remain in the pews. In 2018, the Catholic Church retains a structure that might suggest “unbroken community,” but as evidenced by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó’s recent and very public letter calling for the current pope's resignation, its so-called liberal and conservative factions hardly appear to be rising to O'Dea's call for dialogue at “the highest possible intellectual level” (294).

For the last decade and a half, the Catholic Church in the United States and globally has also faced another crisis, in the onslaught of revelations of clerical sexual violence against young people, and of cover-ups of that violence by bishops. This “new” crisis (which is really no longer new at all) arguably began in 2002, when the Boston Globe broke its investigation of clerical sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston, and it reached its most catastrophic stage thus far this past year, with the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the removal from public ministry of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and similar developments. Given recent events, it would be all but impossible to read O'Dea's reflections on 1968 without making the connection between his “Catholic crisis” and the language of a “Catholic crisis” spilling out of newspapers and newsfeeds in our own moment.

So to read O'Dea's essay in 2018 is to move between two Catholic crises separated by fifty years. Doing so raises questions, not only about the historical relationship between these events, but also, and, I think, more interestingly, about the hermeneutics of religious crisis, and about how centering crises in scholarship intersects with other critical possibilities for approaching the history of Catholicism in the United States. Here I consider Vatican II as an episode in a Catholic crisis (one recognized at the time by O'Dea and by many others in and out of the Church); over against episodes of clerical sexual violence, which also happened during the second half of the twentieth century, but which were not publicly recognized as components of a crisis until decades later. This juxtaposition reveals a need for movement away from a hermeneutics of crisis as we reckon with the history of clerical sexual abuse, and it suggests a different hermeneutics—a hermeneutics of silence—as one resource that might help us approach the study of sexual violence differently.

Speculation about a cause-and-effect relationship between the Catholic crisis of 1968 and the most recent Catholic crisis is easy to locate. Prominent “conservative” voices in the U.S. Church have drawn fire for suggesting that it was Catholicism's capitulation to the modern world during the late 1960s and 1970s, in the form of its embrace of the sexual revolution, and homosexual subcultures specifically, that fomented clerical sexual abuse during that period. Catholic “liberals” also participate in such speculation, but are more likely to point to the Church's failure to engage the modern world sufficiently, and to cite, for example, its slowness to respect lay forms of authority at the parish and diocesan levels, and its retention of mandatory celibacy for clergy.

I am uninterested in joining cause-and-effect speculation, but I do want to consider these crises together. Today's Catholic crisis is changing the way that both U.S. Catholics and historians of U.S. Catholicism think about the Vatican II era. The triumphalism is gone. We are acutely aware now that tens of thousands of episodes of assault—in other words, the violent acts that are the “raw material” of this crisis—occurred more or less concurrently with the ecclesial dialogue O'Dea celebrates in his piece. According to the 2004 John Jay College report on the nature and scope of the violence, clerical sex abuse in the U.S. Church peaked between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, during the immediate “post-conciliar” era O'Dea wrote optimistically about. Moreover, we know now that U.S. bishops played special roles not only in Vatican II and its implementation, but also in the scourge of sexual violence that accompanied it (but went unremarked) in their home dioceses. In fact, sometimes the same men celebrated for their standout work implementing conciliar reforms did especially consequential things to perpetuate that violence. Consider (to cite only the most notorious example) Cardinal Bernard Law, who developed a reputation for his work on behalf of Christian ecumenism and interreligious dialogue while a rising bishop during the 1970s, only to later become the face of the sex abuse crisis, amid revelations of his extensive work sheltering and reassigning predatory priests in the Archdiocese of Boston.

But thinking about these crises together also presents a further opportunity; it encourages reflection on the decades that separate the two temporally, and on the silences—all the forms of “not speaking it”—that successfully deferred sex abuse as a public catastrophe until the twenty-first century. Because if Vatican II was an episode in a Catholic crisis, acknowledged and navigated as such by bishops, both in Rome and back in the United States, we see now (from our vantage point amid the present crisis) that the clerical culture those bishops lived in was a collectively and strenuously maintained state of calm. The forms of silence that made and kept this calm, that ensconced these men as they committed themselves to the “dialogue” that would become the hallmark of Catholicism's response to modernity, are suddenly striking. Where do we find ourselves once we move outside a hermeneutics of crisis, to interrogate varieties of “not speaking” as integrally Catholic practices—practices that sustained violence, even as they also sustained a culture, and that existed with dialogue as remarkable attributes of twentieth-century U.S. Catholicism?

From monastic vows to the seal of confession, silence has long played different and important roles in clerical and religious Catholic life. Keeping this in mind, we might employ a hermeneutics of silence to consider anew the culture of clerical Catholicism in the United States during the Vatican II era. Fifty years later, the U.S. bishops appear both as a religious body that acted with clear-eyed purpose traveling back and forth to Rome, and as a group of men who moved through their own Catholic worlds via habits and techniques of nonrecognition, especially when it came to sexual violence perpetrated on young people by their brothers (or, more rarely, sisters) in the cloth. A Catholic culture celebrated for its willingness to confront difficult topics was also a Catholic culture constituted—held together—by unanswered correspondences and cut-off conversations, by acrobatic dancings around and brusque passings over. Catholics of different sorts (lay, religious, and clerical; perpetrators, victims, and bystanders) all participated in constitutive forms of nonrecognition during the twentieth century; there were many varieties of “not speaking” sexual violence, which came to be from many different places. But when bishops did it, it had devastating consequences.

If the texts produced by the Second Vatican Council (including Gaudium et Spes, or the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” which O'Dea centers in his essay) are testaments to a midcentury Catholicism engaged in dialogue, the documents of the sexual abuse crisis have come to constitute a counterarchive of the era—a repository of the silences, the practices of quiescence, that were just as integral to the constitution of Catholicism in the modern world. In the 2018 Pennsylvania report, for example, the grand jury excoriates bishops for their use of “euphemisms”; it cites euphemisms as the first rule in what it calls the Church's “playbook for concealing the truth.” “Make sure to use euphemisms rather than real words to describe the sexual assaults,” the jury imagines Church leaders prescribing; never say “rape”; say “inappropriate contact” or “boundary issues.” The grand jury's easy distinction between “euphemisms” and “real words” is probably insufficient for, and even at odds with, any project that aims to access the lived modes of nonrecognition that ensured sexual violence would remain a noncrisis for the duration of the twentieth century. But language like this still offers us a place to start.

In “Beyond Accountability: The Queer Archive of Catholic Sexual Abuse,” Anthony Petro rightly foregrounds the stories that the sex abuse archive makes available. His own emphasis is on speaking. “Breaking silence,” Petro writes, “becomes a key political act … for survivors” (166). But where might accompanying attention to silence take us? How might unpacking the silences preserved within that same archive lead us, for example, to consider anew the affective dimensions of priestly fraternity, or clerical embodiments of sexual taboo, or the disciplines of self-censorship that have driven Catholic bureaucracy and preserved institutional unity? And how might paying attention to these themes within U.S. Catholic history help us to parse those archived silences?

Stepping away from the hermeneutics of crisis, to interrogate supporting silence, is also a step toward a historical methodology that attends not only to episodes of violence, but also to the structures and processes by which religious institutions and actors come to inflict violence on certain people. During the twentieth century, Catholic clerical sexual violence disproportionately affected people who—by virtue of their age and their nonordained status, but also often (and in addition) by virtue of their poverty, their race, or their colonized status—occupied layered positions of marginality both in the U.S. Church and in relation to white Catholic culture. As Robert Orsi suggests in his work on children, precarious positioning was often produced—made real—via Catholic forms of theology and devotionalism, as much as by the muscle of ecclesial authority. With this in mind, we might ask: What assessments about personhood (theological, political, or otherwise) underlay those instances of Catholic violence that remained silences, unspoken by perpetrators and by their superiors? How do figures of the twentieth-century clerical imagination, like the “promiscuous” Indian girl, for example, or other varieties of “delinquent” youth (many of whom populate the archive of Catholic sexual abuse), help us to analyze the forms of power vested in these silences?

The power in and of these silences is more striking still amid the urgency of the U.S. bishops’ mission in Rome during the 1960s, to engage the modern moment in a way that honored above all the dignity of the human person. “In this difficult, distraught, but developing world,” O'Dea tells us, the Council identified itself “with the human aspiration to establish a political, social, and economic order which will … help individuals as well as groups to affirm and develop the dignity proper to them” (313). Here the silences around sexual violence create a space to ask questions about this Catholic model of human dignity, as its historical life has happened via theological tomes, papal encyclicals, and conciliar constitutions. Amid the bishops’ urgent discussions of dignity, what human problems went un-engaged? Whose human pain remained unremarked? And how did the Council's talk of dignity translate, or fail to translate, not only in public venues, but also in intimate, day-to-day relationships that compose mission, parish, and diocesan life in the United States and around the world?

Finally, the relationship between silence and marginality presses us to think differently about the Catholic crisis of our own time—to ask questions about its contours, to consider whether some forms of violence remain under-recognized amid its urgent exchanges. For example, the current casting of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis in the United States—particularly by the national media—is delineated by East Coast geography, and populated by white Catholic perpetrators and victims. In this way, its widespread reporting has had the effect of obscuring extraordinary rates of clerical sexual violence within Indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities, and in lands colonized over the last century and a half by the United States. Where I live in New Mexico, the per capita rate of clerical sex abuse during the twentieth century was astronomical—substantially higher even than in the dioceses detailed in the Pennsylvania report. And yet the faces of the current “Catholic crisis” are not those of New Mexican priests or of Nuevomexicano children. In our own time, albeit in different ways, silences continue to accompany Catholic crises, as they do public crises of many sorts, and those silences will continue to require our attention. It is only through this attention that we can develop adequate accounts of the “religious situation” of 1968, or of 2018, or of any moment in U.S. religious history.

I am writing this piece two weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, in which I had hoped to be a candidate to represent Illinois's thirteenth congressional district in the House of Representatives. The fact that I filed candidacy papers with the Federal Election Commission, gathered the signatures necessary to appear on the ballot in Illinois; raised enough money to run a serious campaign; and devoted countless hours to traveling, meeting, greeting, canvassing, organizing, marching, dialing, and asking family, friends, and volunteers to do the same should not be seen as an entirely rational choice. I did what I did because of what I felt and because those feelings would not let me go. I first felt them on November 9, 2016. From that day on, those feelings followed me around, distracted me in nearly every situation, and ultimately convinced me that I would not be able to live with myself if I didn't try to bring to Congress some of the integrity, compassion, and intellectual curiosity that define my district. To react to those feelings was to turn my life and the life of my family upside down. It was also to acknowledge the real power of civil religious affect in twenty-first century America.

To the question of whether Robert Bellah's arguments in “Civil Religion in America” remain valid in 2018, my response is a strong, if qualified, yes. To my eye he makes four arguments in his essay. The first is that there is, in America, “an elaborate and well institutionalized civil religion … [that] has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.” His second argument is that “there are … certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share,” and that our civil religion is the stuff of this consensus. A third argument, connected to the trials of Vietnam, then thickening the air Bellah was breathing, is that if America weathered the crisis of the Vietnam War and did not succumb to its basest temptations the result could be “a major new set of symbolic forms,” perhaps “a new civil religion of the world,” which “could be accepted as a fulfillment and not a denial of American civil religion.” His fourth argument, slipped in under the wire but suffusing the entire essay, is for the ongoing normative relevance of American civil religion. Bellah's final sentence reads, “But it is a heritage of moral and religious experience from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead.”

“Civil Religion in America,” although not Bellah's last word on the topic of civil religion, has held up well over five decades. His arguments for the existence of civil religion, for its ability to connect and reflect connection, and for its ability to impart moral lessons and shape understandings of ethical action seem quite solid—that is, as long as we agree that “common elements of religious orientation” and a shared “heritage of moral and religious experience” don't equate to identical conclusions about how America ought to act in the world and what Americans owe and are owed by their nation. From Broadway's Hamilton: An American Musical to the churning streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, Americans’ relationships to the trials of the Revolution, the Civil War, and Vietnam differ among themselves today and surely diverge from the relationships of Americans fifty years ago to those same trials. But if we were to compare the reactions of Democratic supporters of Barack Obama and Republican supporters of Donald Trump to the inaugural addresses of 2008 and 2016 respectively, my sense is that the substrate logics would be very similar. One candidate's words would be described as representing a near perfect expression of what America means and what God intended this nation to be. The other's words would be described as misguided at best, heretical at worst, and the speaker seen as an affront to the true America. I do not doubt that voices on both sides would frame their support or resistance in language, ideas, and symbols drawn from the repository of American civil religion. The anti-Obama Tea Party and anti-Trump Indivisible are but two examples. There is a powerful set of ambiguities in American civil religion. Bellah did not describe them fully, but he developed a language and a framework to help analyze them.

This brings me to the second question: What is the status of civil religion in America in 2018? The most pertinent consideration here seems to be whether differences over how to live American civil religion elicit responses so divergent, so contentiously opposite, that we now despair of something like a lived consensus. Ethicist John Carlson argued in his September 2017 essay “Losing Our Civil Religion” that the unceasing divisiveness of Donald J. Trump is pushing us in that direction. He writes, “[A]s the face of the Republican Party, President Trump now represents the greatest threat to American civil religion. Unlike the left, the new right is cynical, calling forth the darker angels of our nature.” I agree with Carlson that we are in the midst of what Bellah might call a fourth time of trial—and how ironic, given Bellah's attention to presidential inaugurals, that a president would be the cause this trial. This state of crisis is the status of my subject in 2018, a year in which otherwise sober-minded academics do crazy civil religious things like run for Congress, fundraise for other candidates, and march in parades that aren't related to commencement. Formerly staid folk from all corners of the country are doing these things because they believe it may all be falling apart. And by “it” they mean America as a nation aspiring to righteousness, sensitive to the moral burdens we bear as beneficiaries of a remarkable set of blessings, a place where laws and truth and loyalty and service and fidelity and compassion matter, not simply as window dressing or as road kill en route to greater wealth and power.

So this is what a civil religious trial feels like. It is different from electoral defeat, from outrage at a use or misuse of military force, or the shock of a housing market collapse. It's even different than four crashing planes, two falling towers, and three thousand dead Americans. It's not knowing if the nation will come out of the darkness. It's wondering—not hyperbolically—if democracy will die on our watch. It's caring deeply that the nation will shine forth again and feeling heartbreak with every dimming of the light. And so the things that Bellah wrote about fifty years ago come around to hit us in the gut. The pain and bewilderment that one feels—that I feel—when watching the latest rally or hearing the latest interview with our current president? That's civil religion doing its work. Those are emotions derived from a long-developing, ever-evolving, and often deliberately catechized sense of what this republic is morally, what it stands for today, and what we ought to be doing to make these morals and those truths active in this moment.

This crisis could be no deeper than an impossibly shallow man. But I would not count on it. Professor Susan Schreiner of the University of Chicago, a historian of early modern Christianity, has argued that the Protestant Reformation was the result (and the proliferator) of a persistent and pervasive concern about certainty. This time of trial feels analogous. A perfect storm born at the confluence of new technologies, dramatic social and economic changes, widespread feelings of disempowerment, conspiratorial thought, and amoral demagogues may already have changed our epistemological and political landscape forever. The certainties bequeathed us by centuries of scientific striving, a developing sense of human inter-connectedness, the growth of the bureaucratic state, and international alliances built for economic and geopolitical stability, may well have been bargained away for a square mile of prime real estate in downtown Moscow and a quarter-baked theory about the malign intentions of a “deep state.” Whether and how to rebuild what has been torn down are the questions we will face as we assimilate the lessons of this moment.

In the rebuilding, we would do well to consider the consensus that Bellah described in the 1960s and the injustices covered over by it. John Carlson writes, “Viewed appropriately, civil religion … presumes a preferential option for the marginalized: a path for people of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds to join and expand the American consensus. The urgent challenge today is whether civil religion can absorb the populist forces left behind by globalization.” Agreed. I would add that we have at least two other urgent challenges. The first is to combat the civil religious heresy that “American” is an ethnicity, a genetic inheritance, an identity gained only by birth. The second is to address the structures of privilege and oppression that authorize police shootings of unarmed black men, the unmaking of migrant families seeking asylum, and sexual violence perpetrated against women and children and proleptically forgiven by (white) men. A consensus that still makes room for and often encourages these injustices is a consensus that is, to say the least, in dire need of reform.

I want to close by offering a provisional response to this journal's perennial question, which has to do with the relationship of religion to other aspects of culture, and what my answers to questions one and two illuminate of it. Civil religion in America—the thing, not the essay—has grown in force and malignancy. Or, rather, its practitioners have grown more comfortable being forceful and malignant. But this isn't really a transformation as much as it is a mode of civil religion that has long been present. It is “the evening redness in the west” described so vividly and horrifically by Cormack McCarthy. It is the Blood Meridian that we often miss because we want McCarthy's “Kid” to get clean, to live, to escape the Judge and find some redemption. We miss it because civil religious doctrine has encouraged us to believe, with Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda's duet “Dear Theodosia,” that the most meaningful blowing away that happens on American soil involves children impressing their doting, patriotic parents, and that parents and kids and future generations will endure and progress if they do not throw away their shot.

Of course, Bellah's own words may also have perpetuated this blindness. I would like to return to paragraph one of his essay, to his first argument, his argument that civil religion in America is. Here he also leaves clues as to what he believes religion is. “[T]here actually exists alongside of and rather clearly distinguished from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion … [that] has its own seriousness and integrity.” I doubt that Bellah meant this as an exhaustive list of criteria for “religion,” but it is telling that he peppers his argument with words like elaborate, seriousness, and integrity, and that he tells readers that this well-institutionalized civil religion exists alongside, but “rather clearly” differentiated from the churches. He seems to be writing to a quaintly decorous world, a world in which people could be stung by charges of heresy. He is at least writing for an audience that wants its heavenly religion and its civil religion to be unmixed, an audience that prefers that both be religions of the head—clear, intellectual, and unsullied by the passions of the heart and of the body.

Bellah believed that scholarly attention would bear out this comforting categorization. If the past handful of years have taught us anything, it is that, for better and for worse, American civil religion functions below the neck line, too, and that it taps emotions, generates feelings, and moves bodies regardless of where one stands on twenty-first-century America's political spectrum.

For every reformation there is a counter-reformation, and history does not often look on those kindly. In contrast to reformations, which bring lasting change, counter-reformations tend to be the last gasps of institutions threatened to their core by the revolutions occurring around them. Counter-reformations are about preserving and redefining the status quo, not welcoming a new world order. They are, as sociologist David L. Brewer observes in his piece on Mormonism in 1968, the desperate ghost dances of societies that fear their own impending obsolescence. As America engaged in tumultuous political and social change in the 1960s, liberalizing its stances on race, gender, and sexuality, some groups responded to the reformation happening around them by defining themselves in contrast to it, energetically hardening their opposition.

Although he never uses the term counter-reformation, that is the lens through which Brewer views Mormonism in 1968. He presents the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an “anti-modern” institution that has, he says, come “so completely to terms with American middle-class mores that it is frozen there.” After an early history of economic communitarianism, the church had by the 1960s allied itself with capitalism and a rugged individualist spirit; it had also become entrenched in its racist policy of denying priesthood ordination and temple entrance to anyone of African descent.

Brewer correctly identifies the latter issue as the defining antimodern characteristic of 1968 Mormonism, “blatantly out of tune with America's emerging social conscience.” What's more, he correctly predicts what did, in fact, happen: that what was then called the “Negro policy” was “unlikely to change in the near future.” (It would not be reversed for another ten years, in June of 1978, after the furor of the Civil Rights movement had died down. As Mormonism expanded internationally, its leaders discovered that the racial policy was an impediment to the religion's numeric growth. When a religion is in the vanguard of a counter-reformation, it hunkers down by expanding its missionary program, Ignatian-style.)

How do Brewer's other claims about Mormonism bear up fifty years later? Overall, surprisingly well. Here I highlight three areas in which Brewer's assessment proved prescient—and two others where history shows him to have missed the mark.

First, Brewer foresees the problems inherent in Mormonism's gerontocratic leadership structure, in which only the most senior male leaders come to rule—often in their seventies, eighties, or even nineties, as was the case in early 2018, when ninety-three-year-old Russell M. Nelson took the reins. As of this writing he is ninety-four, and his two counselors in the First Presidency are eight-six and eighty-five, respectively. Brewer recognizes the challenge any religion would have in responding to change when its top leaders came of age a lifetime ago, in a different era entirely.

In fact, since Brewer wrote this essay in 1968, the age divide between Mormonism's leaders and its adherents has widened still further. In the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—the body from which the most senior member will become the prophet and president of the Church—it has become the norm for men not to be called until they are generally in their sixties. Their children are grown; they have slowly risen through the ranks of LDS leadership; they bring with them decades of experience running different programs and committees of the Church. This is a different situation than the one that pertained in 1968. For example, when Thomas S. Monson joined the Quorum in 1963, he was just thirty-six. In other words, in 1968, the gerontocracy problem was mitigated by the presence of a few much younger men in the highest ranks of leadership; even though the Church's president in 1968, David O. McKay, was in his nineties, the quorum also contained a few men two or even three generations younger. That is no longer the case, meaning that the gerontocracy problem Brewer identified in his assessment of Mormonism has worsened. Today's First Presidency, with its average age of 88.5, is the oldest in nearly two centuries of LDS history. Meanwhile, according to 2014 Pew data, only 16 percent of Mormon adults in the U.S. are older than sixty-five.

Brewer's assessment is also spot-on in his identification of U.S. Mormons’ increasing political conservatism as a trend to watch. Citing a Mormon distrust of the federal government that began more than a century earlier, but was compounded by the polygamy crisis of the late nineteenth century, Brewer briefly discusses Mormons’ dread of big government. He quotes then-apostle Ezra Taft Benson, who warned in 1965 about the dangers of Communism and the “civil rights agitation” taking place in Mississippi at that time. Benson's own allegiance with the Republican Party was well known; he had in the 1950s served as the Secretary of Agriculture in Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration, and repeatedly sounded the drum of conservative politics as the only righteous option for Latter-day Saints.

Brewer's claim that Mormonism was becoming politically conservative obviously struck a nerve with the essay's sole respondent, University of Utah sociologist Lowell Bennion, who claims that Brewer unfairly views the whole of Mormonism through the lens of his own “particular emphases.” Bennion's critique bears quoting:

Bennion was correct that Utah's voting patterns largely mirrored the nation's in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Brewer was prophetic in expecting that this would not be the case much longer, and that the “arch conservatist” strain would eclipse all others. Indeed, it was already happening. In 1968, Mormons had the pride of seeing one of their own native sons run for the presidency—Michigan's Republican governor, George Romney. Although Romney did not win the GOP primary and advance to the general election, Mormons’ allegiance to the GOP became a hallmark of their public image. After voting for the occasional Democrat (including Lyndon Johnson in 1964), Utah went thoroughly Republican in 1968, and it has never looked back. With the exception of Donald Trump in 2016, GOP candidates have won easy majorities, in some cases garnering three-quarters of the vote. (Trump did not crack the 50 percent barrier, but still won the state.) In retrospect, Lowell Bennion's optimism that Mormon-majority Utah would continue to follow national political trends regardless of the political views expressed by LDS leaders seems naïve.

Third, Brewer puts his finger on a major development within Mormon theology and culture that began happening after World War II: the rise of the nuclear family. “The Mormon family has become central in the defense of individualism and traditional moral values,” Brewer writes. “It is to the family, more and more, that the church directs its attention, in the attempt to keep its young people ‘unspotted from the world.’” Although family had always been a concern in Mormonism, the Mormon definition of family had once diverged sharply from the nation's; the Latter-day Saints’ unusual practice of polygamy drove a wedge between them and the government of the United States. By World War II, polygamy had been disavowed by Mormon leaders for more than half a century, and a new configuration of the family became paramount: a middle-class ideal with a working father, stay-at-home mother, and a large number of children. Social science research into General Conference topics through the decades reveals that the family was discussed only about five hundred times in the entire decade of the 1930s; in the first half of this decade, by contrast (2010–2015), it was mentioned more than three thousand times. The decade of the 1960s saw the institutionalization of this new emphasis; in 1965, for example, the Church introduced its first manual for the new tradition of “Family Home Evening,” when Mormon families dedicated one evening a week to learning their religion at home together. In 1970, Monday night was designated as the official and Church-approved evening for families to do this. Also in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Church pioneered the concept of the “family to family” Book of Mormon evangelism program and the “Family: Isn't It About … Time?” media campaign, presenting the nuclear family as its calling card to the world.

Brewer's language goes deeper, however. He's not just arguing that the concept of the nuclear family became central to Mormonism, but that it did so specifically in the “defense” of individualism and “traditional moral values.” This has proven exactly right. As the nation has become more accepting of, for example, LGBT rights and same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders have often taken a hardline stance. In the 1970s through the beginning of the twenty-first century, they condemned homosexuality as a sinful choice and homosexuals as depraved. As apostle Boyd K. Packer preached in 1978, homosexuality “is not desirable; it is unnatural; it is abnormal; it is an affliction.” He also taught that anyone who believed it was an inborn trait was preaching “false doctrine.” Throughout the 1970s, LDS censure of homosexuality increased in its public discourse and its internal discipline of members; in 1976, the Church Handbook made it an excommunicable offense merely to be gay, even if one was living a celibate life. It has since changed this position, and also cautiously allowed for the idea that homosexual orientation is not a moral failing but an innate or genetic predisposition. In 2018, for example, the FAQ page of the church's official website for LGBT members noted that “the intensity of same-sex attraction is not a measure of your faithfulness. Many people pray for years and do all they can to be obedient in an effort to reduce same-sex attraction, yet find they are still attracted to the same sex.” Gone is the old advice to “pray the gay away.”

Yet, church leaders have not budged an inch on same-sex marriage. Marriage between a man and a woman has become a standard-bearing issue for Mormon leaders in the defensive manner predicted by Brewer fifty years ago. In 2018, in fact, President Dallin H. Oaks of the First Presidency reiterated the church's opposition to same-sex marriage, stating that “our knowledge of God's revealed plan of salvation requires us to oppose current social and legal pressures to retreat from traditional marriage.” On the official church website quoted previously, the softened tone about same-sex attraction is followed directly by a statement about the institution's ongoing opposition to same-sex marriage. The FAQ asks, “Will the church ever change its doctrine and sanction same-sex marriage?” In a word: No. The church continues to cling to a very specific definition of the nuclear family.

In these three areas—the challenges of gerontocracy, the turn toward conservative politics, and the fixation on a particular definition of the family—Brewer's essay points the way toward understanding major themes of Mormonism fifty years later. On the other hand, his analysis is hampered by two shortcomings. The first is his tendency to paint everything about 1968 Mormonism as antimodern. He chronicles the rise of “Correlation,” the massive internal move to centralize and bureaucratize the LDS Church in the 1960s, but fails to recognize the ways in which Correlation was a thoroughly modern project. Mormonism in 1968 was becoming a religion overseen by professional businessmen, and it showed: Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the Church endeavored to run itself like a corporation, with all programs and curriculum “correlated” by a central authority and a focus on measurable growth. It was antimodern in its rejection of doctrinal innovation, but thoroughly modern in its embrace of cutting-edge marketing, international expansion, and worldly progress. Such efforts were successful in ensuring the quantifiable growth the LDS Church had come to value; the religion grew by an average of 5.7% a year in the 1960s. It took the religion 117 years to reach its first million members, in 1947, but it exploded thereafter. By 1967, it had grown to 2.61 million members. In this sense, Mormonism was certainly not mid-ghost dance, as Brewer oversimplifies it to be. It instead was finding a willing audience of people eager for its unusual combination of antimodern theological certainty with programs and methods that were positively avant-garde.

Second, Brewer is entirely missing any attention to women or gender. A cursory glance through the table of contents of The Religious Situation: 1968 makes it clear that this deficit was hardly unique to the chapter on Mormonism; of the more than four dozen contributors and respondents to the volume, not a single one was female, and the topic of gender was not a concern. The oversight is also entirely par for the course in much of the scholarship about Mormonism up to that time; for Thomas O'Dea's groundbreaking (and, in 1968, still definitive) sociological study, The Mormons, he did not interview a single woman.

Brewer's neglect of women, although typical of the 1960s (and still typical of the LDS leaders who came of age in that era and are now occupying the highest positions of leadership in the Church), is unfortunate in that he missed what would become a tremendously important theme that could only have strengthened his own thesis about the Church's present and future difficulties in American culture. In the 1970s, not long after Brewer's essay was published, the women's movement and specifically the Equal Rights Amendment emerged as major challenges to Mormonism's postwar emphasis on traditional roles for women. In the late 1970s, the LDS Church began publishing strongly worded pieces that opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and women working outside the home. The ERA, which had enjoyed two-thirds majority support among Mormons in Utah in 1975, was soundly defeated in the Utah legislature after the LDS Church announced its opposition. In stridently opposing the ERA—even to the point of excommunicating a Mormon feminist, Sonia Johnson, in 1979—the Church publicly retrenched its position on women's roles. The issue has not died, however, with some twenty-first century members continuing to question why women are excluded from almost all decision making in the now-sixteen-million-member denomination.

In the end, Brewer's main point is prescient: The LDS Church's commitment to a very particular configuration of society and of white, middle-class values would eventually become a stumbling block of its own making. Even as it rescinded its racist policy in 1978, it was doubling down on its objections to women's rights and gay rights. My own research, based on a national survey and discussed in the book The Next Mormons, explores these and other issues to ask how Millennials, the youngest generation of Latter-day Saint adults, are responding to issues like gender, sexuality, and race in the Church. In many ways, they are not their parents and grandparents. Although Mormon Millennials are more theologically conservative than their peers outside the Church, they are sometimes markedly more progressive than their elders within it. What's more, approximately half of them appear to be leaving, which is a considerable drop from the retention rate of just two generations ago, when three-quarters of them stayed.

The question now is what the Church will do, what kind of ghost dance it will fashion in response to the crisis. So far, its tools of counter-reformation have centered on a particular vision of the patriarchal nuclear family that was an American cultural icon when Mormon leaders were themselves young adults. What happens, though, when such a response not only fails to resolve the problem of disaffected young people, but actually exacerbates it, alienating them still further?

First published in 1966, “Religion as a Cultural System” remains a sturdy classic in religious studies. In the opening of his essay, Clifford Geertz characterizes the anthropology of religion as a field that had plunged into a state of stagnation and self-provincialization since World War II. The damning diagnosis only foretold his ambition at the grandest tiers of theoretical innovation. Geertz's bold pitch for the uniqueness of religion was no less than a wager for essentialism that ended up serving as the raison d’être for the academic study of religion for decades, far beyond the purview of anthropology. If any figure gifted religious studies with its new lease on life, and at a moment in American history when Time magazine's cover asked, “Is God Dead?” (April 1966), Geertz is certainly a contending candidate. To the extent that we inquire after the nature and category of religion, Geertz's foundational concerns continue to reverberate widely in our writings and classrooms.

Timeless as it has become, “Religion as a Cultural System” also emerged within a specific context definitive of Cold War America. It is the Americanness of Geertz's theory of religion that I broach here (and suitably, I think, in a journal whose very name pays homage to his influence on the study of American religion). In the aftermath of World War II, the United States began to envision a new imperial frontier in an era of freshly decolonized nation-states. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, moreover, opened U.S. borders to future generations of American citizens with origins outside Europe, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Cold War raged on in the 1960s and 1970s, advancing soul-searching anxieties over secularization and combating the global encroachment of atheist communism. Systems of equality, pluralism, and freedom were paramount to envisioning a changing America at home and abroad. Geertz's essay is, therefore, as much an historical document of its time, as it is an inaugural proposal for new directions of scholarly inquiry. Reflecting on its arguments about religion as culture allows us to probe where the American social sciences meet American history, and the extent to which Geertz's durable presence in our current curriculum is, in fact, distinctively American in nature.