Since its inception, America has always seen itself as a player upon the grand stage of history. Poised as a "city on a hill" between promise and peril, we have pursued our Manifest Destiny ever since the arrival of our Puritan forebears upon these lush, Edenic shores. Even in the early centuries before becoming globally significant, American cultural consciousness has included a sense that in our politics, our conquest, our growth and prosperity we were creating a new way of living in the world’an experiment in righteousness allegedly shaped by an understanding of divine election and vocation.
If Americans have always had this flair for the dramatic, Peter Bacon Hales suggests in his monumental new study in American cultural history, Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now, then two images in particular provide the major set-pieces for that drama from World War II to the present: first, Hiroshima's mushroom cloud reaching to the heavens, grimly hinting at the hellish devastation below; and second, the new American heaven-on-earth promised in the tidy box-houses of Levittown.
Beginning with the end of the war, Hales maps the uncertain steps that our American consciousness has taken throughout the last seventy years, from newsreels to television programs to the simulated reality of today's video game world. His thesis is that we produce cultural artifacts that either directly, or mostly indirectly, try to face up to the responsibility of atomic holocaust or work to avoid the realities of "atomic fear." The book then is an exploration of the various cultural myths, the sacred stories, that Americans believed, rejected, redeployed, or retooled in order to cope with the shifting world provoked by the bomb itself. In a sense, it's a genealogy of the transformations of the cultural landscape in the face of a possible apocalypse.
The book itself is an experience. It is sweeping and magisterial in its conception, and Hales is masterful and effortless in its execution. While some cultural historians have a hand for broad brushstroke impressionism and others for detail, Hales moves back and forth seamlessly between both. Chapters shift perspective from close readings of particular cultural texts, and then span quickly out to wide-angle-lens discussions of the way they exemplify or take their place in the big cultural picture. For instance, through close commentary on the film Miracle on 34th Street, Hales energetically paints a picture of the "birth of atomic America," with its freshly reconceived approach toward the ideal domestic life of the suburban homeowner away from the crowded urban centers, the conflict of the sexes as returning G.I.s needed the jobs that women filled during their absence, a new emphasis on consumerism as community-building practice, and so much more. It would be foolish to attempt to give a full account of Hales's work, but two threads in the vast tapestry are worth highlighting.
The Medium and the Message
While it's probably an exaggeration to say that Outside the Gates of Eden is extended proof for Marshall McLuhan's dictum, "The medium is the message," it's not too far off. One of Hales's major themes is the way the material media of mass communication, entertainment, and social media were shaped by, and thereby shaped, our convulsing American consciousness. Hales conducts his archeological research by paying attention to "broadly popular cultural artifacts, forms, and media" of the time, because it was then that America became a "fully popular" culture. It was in these forms that America told and retold its story, wrestling with the drama of our vocation unto righteousness.
One of the most fascinating portions is the way propaganda and newsreels from a wartime era were redeployed in a postwar context in order to acclimatize a nation to the responsibility and privilege of atomic power’for the greater good, of course. The generation raised with such propaganda films gave us the revolutionary and prophetic voice of Bob Dylan on the radio hinting at impending exile and the judgment our injustices might bring upon us.
Moving beyond radio, TV, and film into today, Hales's final chapters on the sea change that the digital turn has brought about is alone worth the price of the book. He treats the way violent video games allow us to reenact our atomic fears, and he invites us to recognize ourselves acting out the narrative lines drawn some sixty years earlier. If nothing else, it serves as a powerful apologetic for pastoral social awareness and an inoculation against passive cultural consumption.
America and Its Discontents
The other thread to note is Hales's attention to the fact that "American culture" and the American experience are not monolithic. Indeed, one of the explicit themes of the work addresses the racial and sexual structural imbalances that hide beneath the veneer of the American dream. Having grown up with the I Love Lucy show, Hales's penetrating chapter on the way the show's success was tied into Lucy's ability to both challenge and reinforce prevailing gender roles of men and women was eye-opening. Through Lucy the show gave voice to the frustration of a generation of women, Ricky called into question the dominant male stereotypes, and all the while tension was cathartically resolved and the stories played out in expected ways.
Outside the Gates of Eden is a stunning achievement. I have not done it justice, but as a final word to commend it, Hales's book demonstrates the all-encompassing importance of understanding, telling, and consciously living in light of the gospel. If the story of the last sixty years of American consciousness warns of anything, it's that we are unavoidably dramatic beings, longing to be caught up in a larger story that conveys cosmic meaning and truth. Hales has done us the invaluable service of charting the way a major counter-story of our culture has continued to fail, reshape, transform, and fail again. Pastors and parishioners looking to present our neighbors with a more compelling story about Jesus would do well to take up this book to know better what they are up against.
