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Thomas Merton and the Religion of the Bomb

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

James J. Farrell
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Extract

In 1958, C. Wright Mills delivered his “Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy,” a piece in which he challenged American churches to consider their complicity in the coming of World War III. Mills complained that “the verbal Christian belief in the sanctity of human life… does not itself enter decisively into the plans now being readied for World War III.… Total war ought indeed be difficult for the Christian conscience to confront, but the Christian way out makes it easy; war is defended morally and Christians easily fall into line—as they are led to justify it—in each nation in terms of Christian faith itself.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 77 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1995

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References

Notes

1. Mills, C. Wright, “Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy,” in The Causes of World War Three (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 166-73.Google Scholar

2. The best biography of Merton is Mott, Michael's The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).Google Scholar For the quotation, see Merton, Thomas, “In Acceptance of the PAX Medal, 1963,” in The Nonviolent Alternative, ed. Zahn, Gordon C. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 257.Google Scholar For an account of Merton's emergence from the snail's shell and of his famous 1957 “epiphany,” see Woodcock, George, Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet: A Critical Study (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 104-7Google Scholar; or Merton, Thomas, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 156-58.Google Scholar

3. Stone, I. F., The Haunted Fifties, 1953-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 120.Google Scholar For provocative interpretations of the religious dimensions of Bomb culture, see Chernus, Ira, Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Chernus, Ira and Linenthal, Edward Tabor, eds., A Shuddering Dawn: Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).Google Scholar

4. Laurence, William L., “Drama of the Atomic Bomb Found Climax in July 16 Test,” New York Times, September 16, 1945, 16 Google Scholar; Kistiakowsky, George, “Trinity—A Reminiscence,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 36, no. 6 (June 1980): 22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 211.Google Scholar Boyer's book is unparalleled in its treatment of the pervasiveness of the Bomb in American culture. For more on the “language of birth and apocalypse,” see also Weart, Spencer R., Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 77–102.Google Scholar

5. Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 59, 91-92Google Scholar. See also Adler, Les K. and Paterson, Thomas G., “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism,” American Historical Review 75 (1970): 1046-64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. For an excellent account, see Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).Google Scholar For Thomas Merton's response to this popular religion, see Seeds of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), 247-48.

7. Whitfield, , Culture of the Cold War, 81, 88–89.Google Scholar

8. Wright, Lawrence, In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties (New York: Vintage, 1987), 55;Google Scholar Whitfield, , Culture of the Cold War, 87.Google Scholar

9. Miller, Douglas T. and Nowack, Marion, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 91.Google Scholar On Dulles' development as Christian statesman, see Toulouse, Mark G., The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985).Google Scholar Dulles had always believed in the importance of moral law in international relations, but, after 1946, he identified the United States as the exceptionalist exemplar of moral law to the world. “In an important way,” Toulouse suggests, “the Cold War acted as a revelatory event for America. Dulles’ reaction to it exemplifies its impact. He saw in its development a new incarnation of the will of God for the world” (253). See also Dulles, John Foster, The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles: Selections from His Articles and Addresses, ed. Van Dusen, Henry P. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and Miller, William Lee, Piety along the Potomac: Notes on Politics and Morals in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).Google Scholar

10. Whitfield, , The Culture of the Cold War, 77–82.Google Scholar

11. For a Catholic defense of American nuclear weapons policy, as well as an attack on the nuclear pacifists, see Dougherty, James E., “The Christian and Nuclear Pacifism,” Catholic World no. 198 (March 1964): 336-46.Google Scholar

12. Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 123.Google Scholar

13. For an excellent discussion of just war theory, see Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).Google Scholar

14. Weigel, George, Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 123.Google Scholar

15. See Powaski, Ronald E., Thomas Merton on Nuclear Weapons (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988), 11.Google Scholar

16. See Weigel, , Tranquillitas Ordinis, 148-53Google Scholar; Holsworth, Robert, Let Your Life Speak: A Study of Politics, Religion, and Antinuclear Weapons Activism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 7–9 Google Scholar; and Woodcock, , Thomas Merton, 106.Google Scholar

17. For a nuanced discussion of the “postwar contract” that separated private and public life, see Flacks, Richard, “Making Life, Not History,” in Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 25–67.Google Scholar

18. Woodcock, , Thomas Merton, 115 Google Scholar; Merton, Thomas, “The Root of War Is Fear,” Catholic Worker 28 (October 1961).Google Scholar In addition to the Catholic Worker article, one can find Merton's thoughts on the issue of the post-Christian era in Thomas Merton, “Peace in the Post-Christian Era” (unpublished mimeograph, 1962); and in Merton, Thomas, “Peace: Christian Duties and Perspectives,” in The Nonviolent Alternative, 13–14.Google Scholar

19. Manoff, Robert Karl, “Covering the Bomb: The Nuclear Story and the News,” Working Papers for a New Society (May-June 1983): 20–21.Google Scholar

20. Foucault as quoted in Skelly, James, “Power/Knowledge: The Problems of Peace Research and the Peace Movement” (paper prepared for presentation at the International Peace Research Association annual meeting, Sussex, England, 1986), 6–9 Google Scholar; Smith, Jeff, Unthinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and Western Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 17.Google Scholar Smith also notes that this process is ideological and Claims that “ideology in the deepest sense is the mistaking of history and politics for metaphysics,” assuming that one way of seeing is the way things are. Smith, , Unthinking, 135.Google Scholar The concept of “subjugated knowledge” is akin to the concept of a “second language,” used by Bellah, Robert and others in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).Google Scholar In many ways, Merton revived the second language of “biblical republicanism” in the moral discourse on nuclear weapons.

21. Merton, Thomas, A Vow of Conversation: Journal, 1964-1965, ed. Stone, Naomi Burton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), 23, 128.Google Scholar See also 67-68, 92, 103, and the intrusion recounted in Merton, Thomas, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” in Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), 14.Google Scholar The idea of “political intrusion” comes from a January 1987 lecture by Terence Des Pres at Amherst College. An account of how Merton learned about Hiroshima and nudear issues can be found in Mott, Seven Mountains, 307.

22. Thomas Merton to Dorothy Day, December 20, 1961, in Merton, Thomas, The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. Shannon, William H. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985), 141.Google Scholar

23. Merton, , A Vow of Conversation, 49–50.Google Scholar

24. Merton, , Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 81–82.Google Scholar

25. Thomas Merton to John Tracy Ellis, December 7, 1961, in Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, 175. Merton deals with the same issues in a second letter to Ellis and in a letter to Dorothy Day. See Thomas Merton to John Tracy Ellis, February 4, 1962, and Thomas Merton to Dorothy Day, April 9, 1962, in Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, 176, 145.

26. Merton, “Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” quoted in Powaski, , Thomas Merton on Nuclear Weapons, 68–69.Google Scholar On the consecration and deification of the Bomb, see Chernus, Dr. Strangegod, and Chernus and Linenthal, A Shuddering Dawn.

27. Thomas Merton to James Douglass, May 26, 1965; Thomas Merton to Dorothy Day, September 22, 1961, in Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, 140, 160.

28. Merton, , A Vow of Conversation, 175.Google Scholar

29. Merton, “Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” quoted in Powaski, , Thomas Merton on Nuclear Weapons, 81, 85-86.Google Scholar

30. Woodcock, , Thomas Merton, 117.Google Scholar

31. Merton, , Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 219, 100.Google Scholar

32. Merton, , Seeds of Destruction, 107.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., 14-15. Merton felt that American racial policy belied American assertions of concern for persons. He claimed that Americans had “little genuine interest in human liberty and in the human person. What we are interested in, on the contrary, is the unlimited freedom of the Corporation. When we call ourselves the ‘free world’ we mean first of all the world in which business is free.” Au, William A., The Cross, the Flag, and the Bomb: American Catholics Debate War and Peace, 1960-1983 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 120-21Google Scholar; Merton, , Seeds of Destruction, 22–23.Google Scholar

34. Mott, , Seven Mountains, 380-81.Google Scholar

35. Merton, Thomas, “War and the Crisis of Language,” in The Nonviolent Alternative, 235, 241.Google Scholar

36. Merton, , “Peace and Revolution: A Footnote from Ulysses,” in The Nonviolent Alternative, 74–75.Google Scholar

37. Mott, , Seven Mountains, 374-75.Google Scholar Although Merton seems to have been a principled pacifist, he sometimes argued from the just war theory, even though he considered it seriously flawed in the nuclear age.

38. Merton, Thomas, Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to Be Scratched on the Walls of a Cave (New York: New Directions, 1962)Google Scholar; Merton, Thomas, ed., Breakthrough to Peace: Twelve Views on the Threat of Thermonuclear Extermination (New York: New Directions, 1962).Google Scholar

39. Thomas Merton to Catherine de Hueck Doherty, December 28, 1957, in Merton, , The Hidden Ground of Love, 15.Google Scholar

40. Merton, , A Vow of Conversation, 28.Google Scholar

41. Merton, Thomas, “A Devout Meditation in Honor of Adolf Eichmann,” in Raids on the Unspeakable, 45–49.Google Scholar

42. Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, Volume I/Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 4.Google Scholar

43. Nash, Henry T., “The Bureaucratization of Homicide,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 36 (April 1980): 22–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peattie, Lisa, “Normalizing the Unthinkable,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 40 (March 1984): 32–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Merton, , “Devout Meditation,” 45–46.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., 46-47. For more on the issue of sanity in nuclear discourse, see James J. Farrell, “The Sanity of Madness in Nuclear Discourse, 1945-1965” (unpublished MS, 1991).

46. Merton's “madness” may have come, in part, from reading Mad magazine, as odd as that may seem. Mad, in fact, was one of the topics of the first conversation between Merton and the late love of his life. He also appreciated the black humor of Lenny Bruce and the music of Bob Dylan. Mott, , Seven Mountains, 435, 457, 459.Google Scholar

47. Forest, James H., “Thomas Merton's Struggle with Peacemaking,” in Thomas Merton: Prophet in the Belly of a Paradox, ed. Twomey, Gerald (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 26–32 Google Scholar; Mott, , Seven Mountains, 379, 394.Google Scholar

48. Heyer, Robert, ed., Nuclear Disarmament: Key Statements of Popes, Bishops, Councils and Churches (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 4–7.Google Scholar

49. Merton, , “In Acceptance of the Pax Medal, 1963,” 258.Google Scholar

50. Forest, James H., Merton, by Those Who Knew Hirn Best, ed. Wilkes, Paul (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 55.Google Scholar

51. Thomas Merton to Catherine de Huyck Doherty, November 12, 1962, in Merton, , The Hidden Ground of Love, 20.Google Scholar

52. Au, The Cross, the Plag, and the Bomb, 116. For Merton's notes on the retreat, see The Nonviolent Alternative, 259-60. For an account of “The Catholic Resistance Movement,” see Au, The Cross, the Flag, and the Bomb, 141-62.

53. DeBenedetti, Charles, “On the Significance of Citizen Peace Activism,” Peace and Change 9 (Summer 1983): 11 Google Scholar; for one student's thoughts about Germany and “Amerika,” see Wright, , In the New World, 162-64.Google Scholar For a comparison of American nuclear weapons policy to the German policy of exterminating Jews, see Goodman, Paul, Like a Conquered Province: The Moral Ambiguity of America (New York: Random House, 1967), 7.Google Scholar

54. Thomas Merton, “Letter to an Innocent Bystander,” in Raids on the Unspeakable, 55.

55. Holsworth, , Let Your Life Speak, 97.Google Scholar

56. Evans, Sara, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1979), 212 Google Scholar; Holsworth, , Let Your Life Speak, 95.Google Scholar For an elaboration of the personalism of feminism, see Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).Google Scholar

57. Boyte, Harry C., The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).Google Scholar See also Hollender, Jeffrey A., How to Make the World a Better Place: A Guide to Doing Good (New York: William Morrow, 1990)Google Scholar, and the many other environmental publications proposing personal responses to ecological crises.

58. Weigel, , Tranquillitas Ordinis, 265, 284-85Google Scholar; Au, The Cross, the Flag, and the Bomb, 237; Holsworth, , Let Your Life Speak, 25–27.Google Scholar

59. Holsworth, , Let Your Life Speak, 27.Google Scholar

60. Au, The Cross, the flag, and the Bomb, 259. On culture wars, see Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).Google Scholar