American Grace will be a must-read for scholars of religion and American public life. The book is based on a staggered survey design, with a 3,000+ person nationally representative sample in the first wave supplemented with a smaller follow-up survey (1900+ persons), and short ethnographic-style vignettes of religious communities. It provides a comprehensive picture of Americans' religious beliefs, affiliations, and patterns of institutional involvement, along with their attitudes on a range of important social and political issues. It also interprets the nature and implications of religious difference for our common civic, cultural, and political life; it is this interpretation that seems likely to generate debate.
The authors acknowledge an emerging religious division in the United States — a polarization between the religious and the non-religious and a concomitant shrinking of the “moderate middle.” The authors explain this polarization as the result of a series of major cultural shocks and after-shocks. The 1960s led to sexual liberalization, which the religiously devout found particularly problematic, leading to the formation of the Religious Right. The Religious Right was strident, motivating the growth of a non-religious constituency, especially among younger Americans who associate religion with an unseemly overreaching in the public realm.
The authors' main objective is to offer a counter-narrative to this polarization story. They emphasize associational patterns that largely bridge religious divisions; these patterns comprise “America's grace.” They acknowledge an unabashedly pro-religion bias both in American public discourse and in private attitudes, but believe this bias is benign because it is coupled with high levels of tolerance, including tolerance of the non-religious. Many would agree (for example, see Fischer, C., and Michael Hout. 2008. A Century of Difference. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation). Others would be more cautious (see Edgell, Penny, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann. 2006. “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society.” American Sociological Review 72:211–234). It is noteworthy that cautionary voices receive little attention in an otherwise extensively referenced book.
American Grace is a valuable and important contribution due to its comprehensive and representative survey data, which the authors explain in an accessible way. Moreover, documenting the tolerance and pragmatism of most Americans is a significant contribution in a society where the media generally privilege (and engineer) misleading and combative portrayals of religious differences.
American Grace is also a problematic book, largely because of the authors' approach to the use of attitudinal data, an approach that many outside of political science (and some within it) will find troubling. The authors view American public life as an aggregation of individual attitudes and beliefs. By this logic, if American individuals are largely tolerant, then religious divisions cannot lead to fragmentation in the public realm. However, questions about the fragmentation of American society as a whole, about the polarization of public discourse, about political divisions and policy gridlock — these are questions about a nation, a collective body that is more than the simple aggregation of individual attitudes and interests.
A focus on the collective, instead of the aggregate, would place more emphasis on the role of mediating institutions in shaping how individual attitudes affect public life. To take one example, the authors argue that the major aftershock of the 1960s had to do with individual religious conservatives' disapproval of changes in premarital sexual behavior. They do not discuss the role of conservative religious leaders, whose discourse wove together views on sexual morality with attitudes toward sexuality and gender, in defense of a way of life that seemed threatened not only by increased sexual license, but also by birth control, changes in women's roles, and a visible and vocal gay rights movement. In this context, attitudes about sex were not just about sex. (This is not an original point. See DiMagio, Paul, John H. Evans, and Bethany Bryson. 1996. “Have Americans' Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?” American Journal of Sociology 102:690–755; or Bendroth, Margaret. 1993. Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.) Likewise, the authors underplay the importance of the alliance of the Religious Right and the Republican Party in “bundling” certain issues together in public discourse and policy.
A similar problem arises in the authors' discussion of the political and social significance of the 10 percent of Americans who are both religiously devout and politically uncompromising. Crucial mediators, including the mass media, social movement organizations, and elite networks, ensure that this 10 percent have a disproportionate influence in the public realm. And while they are certainly more extreme than most Americans, some of their rhetoric resonates quite broadly with a citizenry that is largely pro-religious and of Christian cultural heritage.
American Grace was written, in part, to spur on a public dialogue that more accurately reflects the tolerance that most Americans express in their private life (and in survey responses). This goal is hard to achieve without developing a more complex and nuanced understanding of the relative importance of individual attitudes, elite discourses, the media, and social movements in shaping public debate. American Grace does not help to develop that more complex understanding, which will make it somewhat disappointing for those who believe that it takes more than tolerant individuals to make a tolerant nation.
