All That's Holy: A Young Guy, An Old Car, and the Search for God in America

All That's Holy: A Young Guy, An Old Car, and the Search for God in America. By Tom Levinson. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. 309 pages.

Tom Levinson was not exactly the typical student at Harvard Divinity School. Among other things, Tom is Jewish. While it is true that Harvard Divinity School integrates the comparative study of religions into its curriculum, houses the Pluralism Project, and emphasizes global issues, Harvard Divinity School does not lie on the straight path between struggling with one's own Jewish identity to becoming a rabbi. On the other hand, Tom's mentor, Harvey Cox, who has been a pioneer in the study of religion in the so-called secular age, encouraged Tom to trade in his textbooks, graphs, and statistics for an automobile and a willingness to ask complete strangers to bare their souls, to share their life stories, and to explain how their religious faiths shape their identities.

Levinson did not begin his journey with a methodologically sophisticated approach for capturing a cross-section of American religious views. On the first day of his journey, his car broke down, and he missed a soul-saving crusade at Madison Square Garden. When he ended up in a largely Muslim section of Dayton, Ohio, and met a former exotic dancer who had converted to Islam, Tom asked the obvious questions: "Why? What inspired you to embrace the traditional religious beliefs and practices of Islam and to reject the modern, secular, materialistic conceptions of reality?"

In the course of his pilgrimage, Levinson spoke with Catholics, Pentecostals, Fundamentalists, and Orthodox Christians; with Hasidic, Reform, and Orthodox Jews; with Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and atheists; with Hare Krishnas, Branch Davidians, and Wiccans. His description of each encounter provided anecdotal evidence about the motivations for people in a pluralistic world to embrace religious faith. Yet Tom also chose many of these encounters to provide an overview of the world religions. For example, a report of an encounter with a Muslim would include a brief overview of the Five Pillars of Islam. A report of an encounter with a Buddhist would be punctuated with a reference to the Four Noble Truths. A report of an encounter with a Hare Krishna would be filtered through a brief historical reconstruction of the Hare Krishna movement in America. (More than once I have asked myself whether this book might provide a more interesting introduction to world religions than the standard history of religions textbook that I currently use.)

Throughout my reading of this book, I struggled with the issue of genre, Arguably, this book is about a road trip, but to lump it in this category is to miss the point. It is about the dispassionate analysis of religion, yet it also has a certain spiritual depth. It is autobiographical, yet it is also sociological. It is historical, yet it is also personal.

This book is thought-provoking, inspiring, and witty, but I am shocked that Levinson never managed to have a conversation with a mainline Protestant. Does the absence of liberal Protestantism in his book simply point to the lack of sophistication in his choice of subjects, or does this omission confirm the increasing invisibility of mainline Protestantism in American culture?

Andrew D. Walsh

Culver-Stockton College

Copyright Christian Theological Seminary Spring 2004
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