BOOK REVIEW : Cynically Shopping for the Spirit

The Divine Supermarket: Shopping for God in America by Malise Ruthven (Arbor House/William Morrow: $18.95, 317 pages.)

“The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair,” observed Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk-turned-philosopher, “is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.”

Merton’s beguiling observation is quoted by Malise Ruthven in “The Divine Supermarket,” but the ever-cynical Ruthven tells us that Merton was wrong--the Shaker gift for invention and industry can be explained by the fact that Shakers abstained from sexual intercourse at the urging of their founder. All that sexual energy, Ruthven suggests, was channeled into the making of handicrafts.

This little debate over human nature and the Shaker chair demonstrates exactly what is appealing and what is appalling about Ruthven’s ambitious religious travelogue, “The Divine Supermarket.” Ruthven is a civilized man, sharp witted and clever, with an impressive mastery of American social and cultural history, and he has written a brilliant account of his travels in search of our spiritual byways and backwaters.

At the same time, Ruthven and his book are arch, arrogant, condescending, too often glib and occasionally contemptuous, although Ruthven is a master at expressing his contempt in a thousand subtle ways. “The Divine Supermarket” is a worthy if challenging book, but it is also proves that genius and compassion are not linked in the human heart and soul.

Ruthven, author of “Islam in the World” and a visiting professor of religion at Dartmouth College, is an old-fashioned English iconoclast, an agnostic with an acerbic sense of humor and a taste for the exotic and the quaint. In “The Divine Supermarket,” Ruthven describes how he rambled across America, roughly following the Mormon path from Upstate New York to Utah, and then pushing on to California, the inevitable destination of spiritual seekers as well as jaded European intellectuals in search of something to make fun of.

Ruthven calls the Mormons “super-capitalists . . . super-Americans, and ultra-conformists to boot.” He also ponders the curiosities of the Shakers, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Southern Baptists, the Nation of Islam, the Hopi and Nez Perce. He visits the shrine of the Mohawk martyr, Keteri, the Rev. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, Jim Bakker’s Heritage USA, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, the church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, and the Trappist abbey where Merton took his vows.

And, of course, Ruthven pauses to consider at the more extreme varieties of true belief: white supremacists, Creationists, channelers, Scientologists, the now-defunct commune of the Rajneeshis, and New Age cults.

Ruthven’s message is true enough--America is a hothouse of religious eccentricity.

“America . . . was the place where prophecy flourished,” he writes, “where the distressed, the gullible, the confused, the sick in mind or body sought out new panaceas, and found them in new, prophetic agendas. For the inspired seer or plausible impostor, America was a place where no claim to truth, however eccentric or bizarre, would be laughed out of court or would fail to find a dozen earnest seekers after certainty.”

Ruthven depicts himself as a kind of happy wanderer, dropping by the various shrines of America’s religions to gawk at the sights and smirk at the gaucheries and grotesqueries of our folkways.

But Ruthven is plain-spoken when it comes to his impression of America’s “supermarket” of spirituality: “While it is true that the crasser versions of Protestantism, the absurdities in Mormonism, the corruption of personality cults, the rampant idiocies of Creation Science, and the distortions of Schullerism would find it hard to entrench themselves in . . . Europe,” Ruthven concludes, “those bigotries, those idiocies counteract each other. They could almost be said to cancel each other out.”

“The Divine Supermarket” is a fascinating book, and I suppose there is a kind of perverse virtue in the evenhandedness of Ruthven’s skepticism--he is not inspired or even impressed by anyone or anything. My problem with the book is mostly a matter of its cold and even cruel disdain for virtually every quest for faith and redemption. We may wonder why Americans hunger so powerfully for spiritual nourishment, but Ruthven did not succeed in finding out why--nor, it seems, did he even try.