Charles Lindbergh
A Religious Biography of America's Most Infamous Pilot
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
The narrative surrounding Charles Lindbergh's life has been as varying and complex as the man himself. Once best known as an aviator—the first to complete a solo nonstop transatlantic flight—he has since become increasingly identified with his sympathies for white supremacy, eugenics, and the Nazi regime in Germany. Underexplored amid all this is Lindbergh's spiritual life. What beliefs drove the contradictory impulses of this twentieth-century icon?
An apostle of technological progress who encountered God in the wildernesses he sought to protect, an anti-Semitic opponent of US intervention in World War II who had a Jewish scripture inscribed on his gravestone, and a critic of Christianity who admired Christ, Lindbergh defies conventional categories. But spirituality undoubtedly mattered to him a great deal. Influenced by his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh—a self-described "lapsed Presbyterian" who longed to live "in grace"—and friends like Alexis Carrel (a Nobel Prize–winning surgeon, eugenicist, and Catholic mystic) and Jim Newton (an evangelical businessman), he spent much of his adult life reflecting on mortality, divinity, and metaphysics. In this short biography, Christopher Gehrz represents Lindbergh as he was, neither an adherent nor an atheist, a historical case study of an increasingly familiar contemporary phenomenon: the "spiritual but not religious."
For all his earnest curiosity, Lindbergh remained unwilling throughout his life to submit to any spiritual authority beyond himself and ultimately rejected the ordering influence of church, tradition, scripture, or creed. In the end, the man who flew solo across the Atlantic insisted on charting his own spiritual path, drawing on multiple sources in such a way that satisfied his spiritual hunger but left some of his cruelest convictions unchallenged.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this convincing biography, historian Gehrz (The Pietist Option) argues Charles Lindbergh was an early example of a public figure who led a spiritual but not religious life. Lindbergh did not grow up devout, but when the dawn of aviation sparked an optimistic "winged gospel" marked by the desire to merge technological progress and evangelicalism, Gehrz writes, Lindbergh became a symbol of religious idolatry by the admiring public. Lindbergh's friendship with French doctor Alexis Carrel, who was investigating "questions of existence and immortality whose answers lay beyond the reach of science," heightened his desire to blend certain spiritual notions with modern scientific ideas. Carrel also encouraged Lindbergh's eugenic and anti-Semitic impulses, which underpinned Lindbergh's resistance to American involvement in WWII. Despite the pilot's anti-interventionist stance, the war stoked Lindbergh's patriotism and paved the way for his postwar writings, a "fusion of anti-Communism, atomic anxiety, and spiritual rumination" that questioned scientific supremacy and urged a return to spiritual principles. Using Lindbergh's journals, writings, and public statements, Gehrz builds a thorough portrait of the aviator's inner life, and the inclusion of the equally complex spiritual path of Lindbergh's wife, Anne, adds useful context. Readers curious about a lesser-seen side of Lindbergh's life will gain much from this well-argued biography.
