The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith
By Alan Wolfe
Free Press, 309 pages, $26
An Intellectual in Public
By Alan Wolfe
University of Michigan Press, 386 pages, $29.95
American faith has met American culture,’
Alan Wolfe tells us in “The Transformation of American Religion,” and “American culture has triumphed.”
The sentence has perfect Wolfe pitch. One of the country’s most wide-ranging and distinguished intellectuals, Wolfe has long sustained a remarkable high-wire act, drafting opinion pieces for The New York Times even as he advised President Bill Clinton on a State of the Union Message, skewered scholarly pretensions in lengthy book reviews and published a series of important books. A political scientist turned sociologist turned social critic, he is heir to a distinguished tradition of American letters, absorbed in the big questions about community, institutions and the individual that inspired Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th Century and American sociologist David Riesman in the 20th.
Wolfe’s new book, or rather, one of his two new books, since he has also just published a collection of essays, “An Intellectual in Public,” is a natural follow-up to his widely noticed 1998 study, “One Nation, After All.” There he argued that polemicists on both sides of the culture wars had it wrong. If you actually listened to middle-class Americans, Wolfe ex-plained after conducting interviews around the country, you discovered a tolerant citizenry. A non-judgmental ethos and a respect for the right of individuals and families to make their own moral choices had become the standards of contemporary suburbia, not the sullen paranoia imagined by liberals barricaded within city limits or the snarling conservatism favored by talk-radio hosts.
The message of “The Transformation of American Religion” is much the same. Forget stereotypes of believers as obsessed with sin, hell and damnation. After surveying ethnographic studies of contemporary religious practice and visiting churches, synagogues and mosques, Wolfe finds that most religious people in the U.S. care less about theological fine points than about finding a personal, spiritual home. Just as historians are routinely depressed to learn that high school graduates struggle to name, for example, the U.S. president during the Civil War, theologians have become accustomed to meeting Catholics unable to name the sacraments or Presbyterians unable to distinguish themselves from Methodists.
Public-opinion surveys tell a similar story. Remarkably, one in three Americans now practices a different faith than that of his parents. Rising rates of religious intermarriage are one explanation; geographic mobility and a drift from mainline Protestant (and, increasingly, Catholic) churches in the last generation also play a role. Personal religious choice increasingly trumps institutional or family tradition. The result is religion as philosopher William James once defined it: “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.” Soon, Wolfe predicts, Jews, Christians and Muslims in the U.S. will have more in common with other Americans “than they will have with coreligionists who live in countries where older forms of faith flourish.”
Even the clergy are examining their options. It is startling to learn that more than half of the pastors of so-called megachurches, such as Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, are serving in denominations different than the ones that provided their seminary training. The popularity of Willow Creek and non-traditional churches like it also reflects disenchantment, especially among young adults, with traditional denominations and religious vocabularies. ” ‘If we use the words redemption or conversion,’ ” explained one California evangelical minister in a study cited by Wolfe, ” ‘they think we’re talking about bonds.’ “
Much of this is unarguable, and it is to Wolfe’s credit that he sees American religion whole. (One of Wolfe’s recent essays, included in “An Intellectual in Public,” rightly chastises scholars unconvinced that such a thing as American culture even exists.)
But focusing on what unites religious believers gives Wolfe a certain myopia about the effect of developments outside the U.S. on people living in it. American Catholics, roughly 6 percent of the Catholics in the world, know that appointments made in Rome, and doctrines developed there, powerfully shape American church life. This does not mean that Catholics in the U.S. (or anywhere else) are persuaded by the church’s teaching on contraception or its refusal to ordain women; these particular edicts stand too powerfully against the currents of contemporary culture and the heartfelt objections of thoughtful Catholics. But it does mean that the absorption of church within culture described by Wolfe is actually a tug of war, with the fax from Rome landing on a bishop’s desk competing with demands swelling up within the parishes. Similarly, while Muslims in the U.S. do adapt to American culture, the Internet, cheap airline tickets and low long-distance phone rates enable Muslims in Cleveland to keep informed about controversies in Sri Lanka. In fact, a quick perusal of religious magazines suggests that each major religious group within the U.S., concerned about too rapid an assimilation into American culture, is developing strategies to enhance the theological literacy of its communicants.
Even if we accept Wolfe’s analysis, his conclusions are remarkably sanguine. He concedes that religious insiders concerned about the integrity of particular faith traditions might feel uncomfortable with such a comfortable fit between American culture and American faith. (If choice and a reverence for personal experience become the guiding principles of faith traditions, for example, placing a McDonald’s on a church campus, like one church noted by Wolfe, is only good marketing.) And Wolfe the serious scholar is unnerved by the sheer amiability, the unwillingness to argue, that marks small faith-sharing groups. Still, he stresses that a country with high rates of religious intermarriage and denominational switching will not fall prey to the anti-Semitism or anti-Islamic sentiments now widespread in supposedly tolerant Europe. Be grateful that Americans are “a religious people,” Wolfe emphasizes, “but . . . not a zealous one.”
Perhaps. Another explanation for the institutional weakness of American religion is more encompassing. Institutions of all sorts, ranging from police departments to corporations, have come under sustained scrutiny since the late 1960s. Much of this is healthy: Corporations should fear class-action lawsuits if they pollute the environment, government officials must be accountable to the media and the courts. (And churches, as the sexual-abuse crisis within the Catholic Church has made clear, should not be immune from demands for accountability and transparency.)
According to Robert Putnam and other scholars, one consequence of this widespread suspicion of institutions is a waning commitment to civic organizations. Compared to Americans in the 1950s, we belong to fewer organizations that hold face-to-face meetings, socialize with our neighbors less and pay less attention to local and national politics. Just ask anyone who has attended a city council meeting or tried to recruit leaders for the local parent-teacher association. Indeed, Wolfe’s cheerful assessment of American religion might be contrasted with his bleak view of national politics as presented in the essay “Idiot Time” in “An Intellectual in Public.” In Wolfe’s view, George W. Bush, “handed the presidency” by a partisan Supreme Court, has, with his tax cuts for the rich, “discovered something that no one before had ever quite known: there are simply no limits to how much you can lie in American politics and get away with it.”
But what if the same fragile institutional culture, overwhelmed by corporate interests, the mass media and a cult of celebrity, produces politicians and churches with less substance? Then the decline of powerful local institutions like political parties with sharply defined constituencies, or churches animated by believers with strong convictions, becomes cause for worry, not celebration. None of this denies the importance of “The Transformation of American Religion,” surely one of the best studies of the subject. But it does prompt the question: What will take religion’s place if so transformed?
