Believing in Literature

L EADING THE 1953 inaugural parade for President Eisenhower was a fl oat known to its builders as " God's Float. " Added to the parade lineup at the last moment, when a parade offi cial noticed that the event might fail to represent the idea that " this was a nation whose people believed in God, " the fl oat was constructed to make that abstract point concrete. It was built around a " central edifi ce denoting a place of worship " with " side aprons " carrying " greatly enlarged photographs of churches and other scenes of worship. In Gothic script on the sides and ends of the fl oat [appeared] the legends, 'Freedom of Worship' and 'In God We Trust.' " 1 The journalist William Lee Miller, observing the inauguration in a 1954 essay for The Reporter titled " Piety along the Potomac, " suggested that " the object of devotion for this fl oat is 'religion.' The faith is not in God but in faith; we worship our own worshipping. " 2 The Episcopal Churchnews shared this view of the fl oat, adding an aesthetic critique as well: " Standing for all religions, it had the symbols of none, and it looked like nothing whatsoever in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath, except possibly an oversized model of a deformed molar " : A tooth for a toothless religion. 3 This feature of contemporary religion was widely observed in the fi fties. A year later in his now-classic study of American religion, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955), Will Herberg refl ected on the same phenomenon in more academic fashion. Examining the upsurge of religious activity in 1950s America, Herberg found little evidence of specifi c, deeply held religious Copyrighted Material