On the face of it, a slim volume carrying the subtitle “Contemporary Trends” would seem to be an unpromising candidate for addition to the library of a professional historian or to a course syllabus. But Mark Chaves's tightly written, levelheaded, and greatly informative book is such a work. Those who follow and contribute to the literature on U.S. religious institutions will be enlightened by it, and those who teach U.S. religion could well assign it, as I have, as required background reading.

Chaves's contemporary period is the past four decades, following the tumult of the 1960s, in the wake of the apex of once-dominant “mainline” Protestantism, coinciding with the rise and imminent decline of politicized evangelical Protestantism, and leading into the rise of religious “nones.” These were also years of increasing presence of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other non-Christians in American society, of the advent of women clergy in Protestantism and Judaism, and of growing controversy over homosexual rights in all religious bodies. In other words, Chaves's “contemporary” period spans a stretch of historical ground fraught with change.

Chaves's methods are those of the sociologist. Although he avails himself of the same kind of sources that historians use—for example, formal records produced by denominational bodies and stored in their archives—his principal source is social survey data, above all those collected by NORC, the National Opinion Research Center in the form of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Congregations Study NCS). The GSS uses randomized sampling methods (to preclude sampling bias), and employs highly trained interviewers who query subjects face-to-face to elicit answers to an elaborate, standardized battery of question about family status, employment, education, and religion, as well as a wide range of attitudes. Since 1972, the GSS has produced by all odds the best survey data on religion in the United States.

Chaves, a member of the GSS's board of overseers, is personally responsible for the NCS, a major increment to the kind of information survey methods can produce. Beginning with a standard question about the subject's membership in a church (or other religious institution), GSS interviewers ask those who claim such an affiliation to identify the congregation in question. In this way, the representative sampling methods of the GSS produce a representative sample of American congregations. Periodically since 1998, NCS researchers have contacted a key informant in these congregations to ask another battery of questions about their membership, finances, programs, worship and other matters. Thus sociologists of religion, of whom Chaves is one of the foremost, routinely have at their disposal high-quality information on the individuals and local religious communities that populate American religious life.

As a guide to the present state of American religion and its grounding in the recent past, Chaves is therefore in a position to see behind the “latest religious scandal, conflict or innovation” (114) to the realities of much continuity of belief and practice and some institutional erosion but no evidence of religious resurgence. “Americans still are more pious than people in any Western country, with the possible exception of Ireland” (1), but “all talk of increased religiosity . . . in recent decades is baseless” (15).

Over the past forty years, it has been apparent that conservative denominations have grown as liberal ones have declined, but it's not that the conservatives have attracted disaffected liberals. Rather, the conservatives tend to have more children whom they do a better job of retaining, and because conservative Protestantism has largely lost its social stigma, upwardly mobile evangelicals no longer need to change their affiliations to accord with their new social station. Moreover, although liberal Protestant institutions have declined, liberal religious ideas, including interreligious tolerance, have grown across the board. In this way, liberal Protestantism, despite its institutional decline, has significantly influenced American culture. Nonetheless, since the 1980s there has been a growing correlation between religious observance (measured by attendance) and socio-political conservatism (that is, voting Republican and disapproving of abortion and homosexuality).

The number of those who claim no religious affiliation, religious “nones,” has grown dramatically, especially since 1990. The best explanation is that disaffiliation represents a backlash against the religio-political right. Legions of marginally involved people of broadly liberal religious inclination have increasingly decided to disavow a religious identity. But this trend is not tantamount to growing atheism. Sixty percent of those who say they have no religion also say they believe in life after death. Twenty-two percent say that they know God exists. “There is more traditional religious belief and participation among religious ‘nones’ than the zero religiosity we might expect to see” (19).

One key link between such manifestations of religious continuity and decline is what Chaves calls “religious concentration” in American Protestantism, the fact, first substantiated by the NCS, that more Americans are attending fewer and larger churches. Many, but not all, of these churches are evangelical ones, and their leaders garner disproportionate attention. In that way, American religion commands a great deal of attention, not all of it favorable. To their dismay, but inaccurately, secularists may then perceive that Americans are becoming increasingly religious and more conservative in their religion. Chaves puts their fears to rest.

This fine, brief, book helps us understand both the realities and the misperceptions. Speaking as one who studies and teaches the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender and religion, I could wish that more attention had been devoted to demographic subgroups within American religion. But students in the two advanced classes to which I have assigned this book in the second week of the semester effectively absorbed its lessons as foundational for their eventual term papers.