in america

The editors of The Atlantic recently invited Bernard-Henri Levy to take a Tocquevillian excursion around America and chronicle what he found. The first installment appears in this month's Atlantic.

Levy's America can be a depressing place: one is reminded of Herodotus in reading his narrative of the moribund condition of the northern cities (Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit): "For most of those which were great once are small today; and those which used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike."

It can also be downright weird. Especially of interest to me were his comments about America's mega-malls, both spiritual and secular. Levy makes stops at the Willow Creek megachurch in suburban Chicago and the Mall of America in Minnesota.

The banks in America look like churches. But here is a church that looks like a bank. It has the coldness of a bank: its futuristic, somber architecture. No cross, no stained-glass windows, no religious symbols at all. It is ten o'clock in the morning. The faithful are beginning to pour in. Or perhaps one should say "the public." Video screens are pretty much everywhere. A curtain rises to the side of the stage, revealing a picture window that opens onto a landscape of lakes and greenery. And now the bank begins to resemble a congress.

On the stage a man and a child in shorts, under a tent, discussing the origin of the world, eating popcorn.

Levy, an atheist, gets to the heart of what, for many, is the real issue with the contemporary church fad:

Inspired by a former member of the Baptist church on the Avenue du Maine, in Paris, deliberately "nondenominational" and, because of this, using every marketing technique to target a maximum number of customers (sorry—potential faithful), the Willow Creek Community Church, in South Barrington, Illinois, gets 17,500 worshippers every weekend, and has 10,000 affiliated churches dotting the country. Power? Political influence and aim? That remains to be seen. What is obvious is the power of a religion whose secret is perhaps, simply, to get rid of the distance, the transcendence, and the remoteness of the divine that are at the heart of European theologies. A present God this time; a God who is there, behind the door or the curtain, and asks only to show himself; a God without mystery; a good-guy God; almost a human being, a good American, someone who loves you one by one, listens to you if you talk to him, answers if you ask him to—God the friend, who has your best interests at heart.

Nicely paired up with the Willow Creek carnival is the Mall of America. I'll quote Levy at length here:

It's a mall. The biggest one in the United States. The second biggest in the world, after the one in West Edmonton, Alberta...It's a New Age temple of consumption. It's a church—yet another!—to the glory of triumphant capitalism and neo-American living for business. Except—and this is where things get interesting—it's meant to be a lively gathering place. It's the one place in maybe all of Minnesota where lonely social misfits, addicted to the Internet and to the glamour of the virtual, come to experience reality and get a shot of physical community. There are day-care centers here. Restaurants. Cinema multiplexes showing the best Hollywood has to offer. A bank where you can deposit your money before you spend it. An amusement park, "Camp Snoopy," with a roller-coaster and elaborate fountains. Lego dinosaurs in the Lego Imagination Center. A business school, the National American University, for hardworking teenagers. Greenery. A health clinic. What haven't the mall designers thought of? What possible circumstance of existence hasn't found a setting in this cocoon, this happy metropolis, where you could, in principle, spend your entire life? There are "mall walkers," about 200 a day, who come here not to buy anything but just to walk, because it's free, the weather is always clement, never too hot or too cold, and, above all, it's safe, without danger, under surveillance 24/7. They even ended up forbidding children under fifteen to enter after 6:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays unless accompanied by an adult, when word got out that bands of wild children were preparing to sow terror here, like wolves. Hence the patrols of volunteer "Mighty Moms" and "Dedicated Dads" who come on the weekends to watch over and chaperone unruly children. So you have to wait till you turn fifteen to have the privilege of attaining the holy of holies and becoming a true Mall goer. The ideal thing is to celebrate your eighteenth birthday here at the Mall. There is an entire population in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul whose dream is to come here on the major occasions of life, to these long, windowless galleries, devoid of fresh air, dotted with surveillance cameras and the occasional sniffer dog, noisy, stifling. They come here to pick one another up. Flirt. Lift their spirits when things aren't going well. Hang out. Give themselves a festive honeymoon. Get married.

And, for Levy, the chilling future that this portends:

What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist? It brings to mind the easily led, almost animal-like face Alexandre Kojève said would be the face of humanity at the arrival (which he described as imminent) of the end of history. It brings to mind the "absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild" authority predicted by Tocqueville, the dominant characteristic of which would be a state of "perpetual childhood" in which the master is "well content that the people should enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind." And in both cases we are gripped by an obscure terror, as if, suddenly, we have discovered the true face of Big Brother: enveloping and gentle, pure love—and thus all the more perilous.

Food for thought.