Book Review, 14 September 2006
Reviewed by Gerard Baker

Still angry puritans at heart

God Won’t Save America
George Walden
Gibson Square, ££16.99
Tablet bookshop price ££15.30 Tel 01420 592974

For a country as open and transparent as the United States, whose literature, language and culture are as accessible as any nation's in human history, and whose people have demonstrated a tireless willingness to submit themselves to the world's critical scrutiny, America remains a curiously misunderstood place.

These days, the clichés of American society and politics, recounted lovingly by the liberals at the BBC and The Guardian, and increasingly too these days by their conservative counterparts at the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, may be largely the products of intellectual and journalistic indolence, but they constitute nonetheless the authorised anthropological anatomy of the despised superpower.

The usual picture is one of a nation of religious fanatics, crusading for the imposition of their Christian theology around the world. A population so credulous that it is prepared to believe everything it is told - from the claim that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks to the idea that an intelligent creator made the universe. A nation steeped in selfishness and hypocrisy, where poor blacks are left to die in the wake of a hurricane's wrath, while the rich pray smugly inside their gated communities.

The problem is not simply that this is false, which it is. It is also that in America - a vast and diverse continental empire full of baffling and contradictory complexity - you can, if you're of a certain mindset and sufficiently incurious, always find something to back up your prejudices. The true America, a confusing whirl of cross-currents and eddies and ever-changing constellations of political and social attitudes and realities, is a rather different place, but one that is still distinctively, uniquely, absorbingly and occasionally infuriatingly, American in character.

George Walden has written a much-needed corrective to the popular clichés. A former diplomat and Tory minister, he writes cleverly and entertainingly and with real knowledge and experience of the nuances of American life. In one sentence early on, he captures concisely the contradictions. "America [is] more religious and more materialistic, more politically correct and more laissez-faire, more moralistic and more ruthlessly capitalistic, more hedonistic and more repressed, more tolerant and more judgmental, more selfish and more generous, more introverted and more globally active than any other nation."

Walden's thesis - more controversial than his pellucid observations - is that this fundamental dichotomy in the American character owes much to what he terms a "psychic disorder" that grew directly out of the nation's Puritan beginnings. Culled from an impressive command of traditional and modern popular culture, from the sermons of the seventeenth-century divine Increase Mather, to television shows like The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives, Walden's argument is provocative.

Much of what confuses us about America today - the enthusiastic and simultaneous pursuit of God and Mammon, the prominence of religion in political life in a nation that observes the most paranoid Church-State separation of any free country in the world, the curious brand of licentious prudishness in matters of sex, drink and personal responsibility - are direct legacies of the Puritan mindset, he says.

The analysis is a bit too Freudian in parts for this reader's tastes. Indeed much of the book reflects not Americans' but the author's slightly unsettling fixation on matters sexual. The Clinton-Lewinsky affair is, as usual, cited as the gravest example of Americans' puritanism and prurience. But the author forgets that most Americans remained, politically at least, greatly unmoved by the whole sordid tale, never once telling pollsters that they thought Clinton should quit as President, despite the frenzy in Washington. And it is a bit rich for the English to sneer at Americans' supposed obsession with sex. If you took the sex lives of politicians and third-rate celebrities out of most British newspapers there would be little left.

But sex aside, Walden's observations don't often miss the mark. His assessment that trends in modern American food (largely tasteless), fashion (ultra-conservative) and even architecture and literature (traditional and literal) can all be traced back to the Puritan legacy is funny but also troublingly accurate.

He doesn't deviate much from the standard criticism of the current American political climate. He clearly has no use for President Bush's religiosity and laments the advances made by religious conservatives in general. Like most commentators, he probably overdoes this. The evangelical Christians are not everybody's cup of tea (certainly not mine) but their so-called ascendancy does need to be put into some sort of context.

Their electoral success in the last 30 years has not been matched by a significant change in the legislative or broader social environment in which most Americans live. Despite their best efforts, abortion is more freely available in America than in most other Western liberal countries, gay rights have advanced steadily, as has euthanasia, and Church-State divisions remain as rigid as ever.

The religious Right looks less in fact like some giant inundation, spreading its ideology across the American heartland, and more like a kind of battered dam, failing to hold back the advance of liberal progressivism.

Walden, the former diplomat, is at his sharpest when observing America's relations with the world. He is scathing about the rise in anti-American sentiment, brilliantly skewering the hypocrisy of those who attacked America in the 1990s for being insufficiently engaged in the world's problems and now attacking it for being too interventionist.

He rightly condemns the moral equivalence that sees America as not superior to Islamism in general or Iran in particular. And he offers a timely reminder that, whatever the blunders in Iraq and elsewhere, America remains the best hope for the continuation of liberty in a dangerous world.

But he has a warning for America too. While its religious heritage may be indistinguishable from its modern sense of self- identity and its belief in the universal appeal of human liberty, it would be well advised to leave religious sentiment out of its diplomacy. A bit less messianic fervour and moral idealism and a bit more cold political calculation and hard-nosed realism might have served America rather well these last five years.

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