From Rod Dreher’s review, published this morning in The Dallas Morning News, of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by social scientists David E. Campbell of Notre Dame and Robert D. Putnam of Harvard (Simon and Schuster, 2010):
The review is quite long; the above was only an excerpt.Rod Dreher wrote:
….The good news is that we Americans of different faith traditions get along remarkably well, not by casting aside religion, but by learning how to be tolerant even as we remain religiously engaged.
The bad news is that achieving religious comity has come at the price of religious particularity and theological competence. That is, we may still consider ourselves devoted to our faith, but increasingly, we don't know what our professed faith teaches, and we don't appreciate why that sort of thing is important in the first place.
From one point of view, this is a blessing. After all, Putnam and Campbell's research shows that by a variety of measures, religiously involved people make better neighbors. But it's not faith that makes the difference. The scholars learned that religiously involved people make better neighbors because they have committed themselves to being an active part of a community that made the difference. People who affirm a faith's teachings but who are standoffish about a church community are no more likely to be good neighbors than loner secularists.
It can be said, then, that Americans are focusing less on what divides us religiously and more on what unites us, and communal religious activity is adding to our social capital.
Even more good news: These religious communities are not insulated from the larger community. Putnam and Campbell's research finds that the main reason Americans have become more tolerant is because they personally know someone of a different faith. This implies that for Americans, religious divisiveness is a function of ignorance.
It seems the more we know about believers in other faiths, the better we feel about those faiths. Isn't that progress?
The problem – and it's a big one – is theological. If you believe that religion is nothing more than a statement of what an individual or a community thinks or feels about God, this is not such a big deal. If, however, you believe that religion is primarily a statement about what God thinks of us – that is, if religion proclaims binding moral and metaphysical truths that are necessary to live by – then a great deal depends on maintaining theological continuity and integrity.
Granted, there is no logical reason why people with strong views about their religion cannot respect and be genuinely friendly with people of other faiths or no faith at all. Indeed, many believers find it easier to relate to people of other faiths who unapologetically but respectfully reject our own creed. As sociologist James Davison Hunter explained in his landmark 1991 book, Culture Wars, the real dividing line in contemporary America is not between different religious or political groups, but between two incommensurable worldviews: the "orthodox," who believe that moral truth is objective and knowable; and "progressivists," who believe that moral truth is relative to context.
For example, Islam and Christianity may both be wrong, but from an orthodox perspective, they cannot both be right. Progressivists, by contrast, argue that both could be equally valid expressions of religious sentiment and longing for God. The orthodox (both Muslim and Christian) may agree that both religions are worthy of respect and tolerance, but they will insist that is not the same thing as being equally true. To assert that both faiths could be equally true is to radically diminish the truth claims of both, and therefore the power of each faith to hold on to its believers. Few people will live or die for a principle that they consider merely one opinion among many equally truthful ones.
Again: Why is this bad? Isn't it a great thing that Americans no longer are at one another's throats about religious controversies, which are difficult if not impossible to settle anyway? America appears to have reached the Eisenhower-era Promised Land of religious tolerance, in which you can go to the church of your choice, or not. Nobody much cares. Don't worry, be happy.
The broad religious tolerance we have achieved, however, masks the way our religious divisions drive present-day politics. Today, the politics of sexuality is at the center of how Americans define themselves politically and religiously. As Putnam and Campbell report, "religiosity has a tight connection to attitudes regarding abortion and gay marriage, and a more modest correlation – or none at all – to issues that do not pertain to sex and the family." This is the practical reason why the "orthodox" have coalesced around conservative congregations and Republican politicians, and why "progressivists" have done the same around liberal congregations and Democratic leaders. It is hopelessly naive to expect people to make their political decisions without respect to their faith convictions.
Yet if Putnam and Campbell are right, the politicization of faith bodes ill for the future of institutional religion in the U.S. Why? Because it accounts for the fastest-growing demographic category of American religious believers: "the Nones." The Nones, distinct from atheists, refuse to affiliate with any particular church, denomination or religious institution. The Nones account for 17 percent of Americans (compared to 14 percent who claim mainline Protestantism). Nearly 30 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 are Nones. These are stunning figures when you consider that as late as 1990, the Nones were a more-or-less negligible part of the U.S. religious landscape.
How did this happen? American Grace tells the story of the 1960s sexual revolution causing the first big shock to American religion. The second shock was the conservative backlash in the 1980s, which was a boom time for Evangelicalism. And then came a third shock, which has been much less recognized: the backlash against the backlash, a falling-away from organized religion by young Americans alienated by its politicization.
Putnam and Campbell observe that the rise of the Nones coincides with the early 1990s and the increased acceptance of homosexuality among 18 to 29 year olds. Curiously, these young Americans have not left conservative churches for liberal ones that accept and affirm homosexuals. This cohort – which differs from the mainstream in that it is disproportionately young and politically moderate or liberal – has walked away from organized religion entirely. And data show they probably aren't coming back.
"In religious affinities, as in taste in music and preference for colas, habits formed in early adulthood tend to harden over time," the pair wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times essay. "So if more than one-quarter of today's young people are setting off in adult life with no religious identification, compared with about one-20th of previous generations, the prospects for religious observance in the coming decades are substantially diminished."
Putnam and Campbell contend that churches that stick to traditional teachings on homosexuality will probably end up "saving fewer souls." They may be correct that theologically orthodox religions will suffer a loss of numbers by staying the traditionalist course, but attracting bigger crowds on Sunday is not the same thing as saving souls.
Religions may not agree on how to achieve salvation, or what salvation entails. But in general, most recognize that to be saved requires changing one's life, both internally and externally, to conform to certain precepts. All religions change to some extent with time, but it is difficult to see how a religion that jettisons core teachings for the sake of popularity can endure. Nothing becomes a cheesy relic more quickly than the Church of What's Happening Now, as demonstrated by the withering away of mainline Protestant churches that changed their theology to conform to cultural trends.
Conservative churches, though, have no reason to gloat. Once-vibrant Evangelicalism has stalled, research shows, and if not for the influx of Hispanic immigrants, Roman Catholicism would be hemorrhaging adherents at the same rate as the Protestant mainline. Besides which, the self-serving narrative that conservative churchmen tell themselves about the inherent superiority of orthodox theology at a popular level – that is, the idea that people would rather believe in something hard-edged than mushy – is no longer true.
American Grace relates a telling anecdote, in which Putnam addresses a conference of conservative Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) theologians, and presents statistics showing that most Americans believe that there are many ways to get to heaven. One audience member said that surely LCMS members don't take such a casual view of salvation. Putnam produced research showing that 86 percent of the LCMS faithful believe exactly that. Indeed, judging by a recent survey conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Americans may consider themselves to be religious, but they are astonishingly ignorant of basic religious teachings.
This suggests that Americas' extraordinary level of religious tolerance amid religious diversity exists not only because the more we know about one another, the less likely we are to think our differences matter, but also because we have become theologically illiterate.
From the publisher’s website:
This book is going on my reading list immediately. It sounds fascinating, and the research would appear to be vital to understanding many of the issues we discuss here on the forum.
American Grace is a major achievement, a fascinating look at religion in today’s America. Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades, the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped.
America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s religious observance plummeted. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organized religion entirely. The result: growing polarization. The ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased, while religious identities are increasingly fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called “culture wars.�
American Grace is based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America. It includes a dozen in-depth profiles of diverse congregations across the country, which illuminate the trends described by Putnam and Campbell in the lives of real Americans.
Nearly every chapter of American Grace contains a surprise about American religious life.
Among them:
Between one-third and one-half of all American marriages are interfaith;
Roughly one-third of Americans have switched religions at some point in their lives;
Young people are more opposed to abortion than their parents but more accepting of gay marriage;
Even fervently religious Americans believe that people in other faiths can get to heaven;
Religious Americans are better neighbors than secular Americans—more generous with their time and treasure, even for secular causes—but the explanation has less to do with faith than with communities of faith;
Jews are the most broadly popular religious group in America today.
