1960s

The 1960s in E. L. Doctorow's City of God is not merely a historical backdrop but a living, contested force that shapes the identities, convictions, and conflicts of its central characters. The decade emerges as a crucible of political activism, spiritual searching, and generational rupture, its energies and contradictions reverberating through the novel's present-day narrative. For figures like Thomas Pemberton, the 1960s are both a formative inheritance and a persistent, unresolved challenge, while for others, the decade's legacy of militancy and doubt becomes a measure of what faith and ethical life might mean in a secularizing world. The novel repeatedly returns to the decade as a point of origin for its deepest questions about God, authority, and the possibility of belief.

The Sixties as a Formative Crucible for Thomas Pemberton

The 1960s are most concretely realized in the biography of Thomas Pemberton, whose path from preppie to priest is traced through the decade's defining movements. Pem begins as "a preppie to begin with, on the hockey team at St. Paul's—a big-shouldered kid—then four years at Trinity in Connecticut." The decade unfolds around him with "teach-ins, sit-ins, marches, ritual draft card burnings," and Pem's own activism escalates from a summer in Mississippi registering black voters, where "his head cracked open," to joining "the Yippies around the Pentagon." This trajectory—from civil rights volunteer to radical protestor—marks him as a child of the sixties, a generation defined by its "habit of militancy." His subsequent choice of seminary is framed as a rebellion against his own house: "as the son of a stalwart churchman, raised in rectories from Seattle to the Upper East Side, what else would Pem go up against if not his house?" The decade's chaos, including "the roiling madness of Vietnam and the agonies of the civil rights movement," paradoxically leads him to see the church as "an institution of truth and sanity," inspired by antiwar clerics, liberation theologians, and figures like Martin Luther King and the Berrigans. For Pem, the Gospels become "a manual for revolution," and his faith is described as a needle "wildly swinging" between "every degree of religious belief from zero to three hundred and sixty." This formative period leaves him with an "absolutism" that a bishop later identifies as "so clearly of the generation that came of age then," a man who "leapt to the barricades and there he has remained."

The Sixties as a Lens on Faith and Doubt

The novel uses the 1960s to explore the tension between faith and doubt, a theme that resonates through its theological debates. In a sermon, the narrator reflects on the longing to share the trustfulness of "those good and righteous folk praying at the bedside of their minister," only to question whether faith must be blind, asking, "Must faith be blind? Why must it come of people's need to believe?" This skepticism is framed as a distinctly modern, post-sixties condition, where "God's authority reduces us all... to beggarly submission." The decade's legacy of questioning authority extends to religious certainty, as the narrator wonders, "Is God a story?" and whether one can "believe anymore in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him?" This doubt is echoed in a conversation with a rabbi, where the narrator muses, "Is time a loop? Do you have the same feeling I have—that everything seems to be running backwards? That civilization is in reverse?" The response—"If it's true and God truly does belong to the atavists, then that's what faith is and what faith does. And we are stranded, you and I"—captures the decade's unsettling of traditional belief. The 1960s thus become a pivot between a confident, inherited faith and a more uncertain, self-conscious spirituality.

The Sixties as a Standard of Generational Critique

The novel also uses the 1960s to critique generational differences and the persistence of its ideals. A bishop, reflecting on Pem, notes that "he has never quite shaken the sixties," and that his "inflexibility, the all-or-nothing nature of what he wants, what he demands" is a hallmark of that generation. The bishop, a few years older, claims to have "managed not to contract that... habit of militancy," positioning the sixties as a kind of ideological contagion. This critique extends to the figure of Bishop James Pike, described as "pure sixties," who "said all the evidence as well as theological common sense suggested Joseph was the biological father of Jesus," rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as verging on tritheism, and had trouble with the Second Coming. Pem's irritable response—"Yeah, I know, that's my bishop's read on me—Pemby, son of Pike"—shows how the decade's legacy is both embraced and resisted. The novel also connects the sixties to a broader cultural moment, referencing the artist who "wants to come to Central Park and staple it with rows of steel gates flying nylon flaps of gold," an example of "out-of-scale art as world occupation, planetary embrace." This aesthetic, like the decade's politics, is marked by a desire for transformation and a rejection of conventional limits.

The Sixties as a Source of Enduring Questions

The 1960s ultimately function as a source of enduring questions about belief, action, and the possibility of a meaningful life. The novel's engagement with the decade is not nostalgic but analytical, using its energies to probe the limits of both faith and doubt. Sarah Blumenthal's address to a conference on religion in Washington, D.C., articulates a post-sixties sensibility: "In the twentieth century about to end, the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt." She argues that "the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering," while those who "hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm convictions of God" may "warrant walking in His spirit." This position, which trusts "those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees," reflects a generation shaped by the sixties' skepticism toward authority. Yet the novel also shows the limits of this doubt, as Pem, studying to be a Jew, declares he "has never felt as completely, wholly Christian in his life as he does now," a statement that unsettles his interlocutor. The 1960s thus remain a living question in the novel, a decade whose legacy of militancy, doubt, and yearning continues to shape the search for meaning in a world where "God has always been a license to kill."