Robert Wuthnow's latest book is a wide-ranging and insightful study into how Americans are responding to dramatic increases in religious and cultural diversity. Wuthnow gives particular attention here to the ways in which Christians are addressing (or ignoring) the growing populations of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other followers of non-Western religions in America. His aim is not only to understand the current terms by which American Christians are negotiating an increasingly complex and diverse religious setting but also to pointedly ask how pluralistic Americans are willing to be. The answers that are revealed throughout this book, drawing from hundreds of in-depth interviews and a large cross-national survey, offer plenty of room for deep worry as well as guarded optimism. Moving beyond these caged responses, Wuthnow pulls together the ambivalent stands of America's present attitudes toward religious differences and offers suggestive ideas about how Americans might begin to move beyond their currently shallow responses to diversity and embrace a more active, self-conscious form of pluralism, what he calls “reflective pluralism” (p. 289).

Americans, Wuthnow tells us, are a people that have long believed and, by all signs, continue to believe that Christianity is “uniquely true” and that America holds special, divine meaning for the rest of the world. The idea of America as a Christian nation, both descriptively and normatively, will not be news to most readers, but to see, in impressive sociological detail, how contemporary American Christians are navigating the tensions between a “theology of exclusivism and a civic code of pluralism” (p. 10) is illuminating as a study of public beliefs and practices, and is of central importance for the future of American collective self-understanding. Thus, after providing a brisk historical overview of the formation and transmission of American Christian exclusivism, running from Christopher Columbus to the mid–twentieth century, Wuthnow gives critical consideration to what is at stake for many Americans with increasing religious diversity (Chapter 3). He shows how this diversity not only raises legal, civil, and cultural questions, but further poses important theological and moral questions as well. In this respect, his treatment of the antinomies surrounding Americans' abstract acceptance of diversity and the toleration of others, on the one hand (86% of the public agreed that “religious diversity has been good for America”), and their ongoing identification with Christianity as a “moral order,” on the other (23% would make it illegal for Muslim groups to meet in the United States), not only speaks to the deep, troubled significance of religious diversity for a large number of Americans today but also reveals a social observer who is acutely attuned to these constraints in a way that is too often not the case.

At the heart of this book is a discussion of three, general strategies by which American Christians are adapting to religious diversity. Wuthnow identifies these broad modes of adaptation as: 1) the “spiritual shopper” who largely embraces religious diversity by virtue of seeing all religions as “equally true”; 2) the “Christian inclusivist” who privileges Christianity while believing that other religions “contain some truth”; and 3) the “Christian exclusivist” who holds that only Christianity is ultimately true, and who resists religious diversity by avoiding it. Each receives generous and critical treatment (Chapters 4–6), for each one of these strategies/identities within the Christian response to religious diversity reveals powerful institutions and cultural factors at work in American society, just as each also holds internal dilemmas that are often insufficiently recognized by those who strive to live within its terms. Overall, a pattern of coexistence rather than pluralism emerges, leaving most Christian Americans (including the spiritual shoppers and inclusivists) ignorant of non-Western religions, and keeping the members of non-Western religions feeling disrespected.

As a result of these findings, Wuthnow rightly acknowledges that the normative case for religious pluralism and for more interreligious cooperation still needs to be made, just as the specific contours of a meaningful embrace of pluralism still need to be imagined. Toward this end, his brief but engaging treatment of reflective pluralism and his critical discussion of interreligious associations throughout the country hold normative promise and are likely to have important practical value in the future. For these reasons, among others, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity is a book that should find a deeply appreciative audience from students of religion, theology, sociology, organizations, public opinion, multiculturalism, and democratic theory.

If Robert Wuthnow's book provides a general portrait of how Americans are struggling to come to terms with religious diversity, ending in a chastened call for both more intrareligious critical reflection and interreligious cooperation, Paul Lichterman's Elusive Togetherness provides a fine-grained study of church-based community groups' practical efforts to build bridges across multiple lines of difference, and whose conclusions underscore the significance of “social reflexivity” for sustaining enduring civic ties amid diversity. In this book, Lichterman analyzes two networks of predominantly Protestant-based volunteer organizations (giving particular focus to eight distinct groups), all of whom were responding, in one way or another, to the charged circumstances created by the welfare reform policies enacted by Congress in 1996. While self-consciously restricted to predominantly middle-class, white, Protestant organizations in America's Midwest, his book is a valuable and timely study of how faith-based groups achieve, and more often fail to achieve, the goals they set for themselves. This is a work that manages to provide a welcome critical challenge to contemporary social theory, as well as arguments about the preconditions of American civil society, while offering keen insights that could (and one hopes will) make an important impact on the practical conduct of civic associations.

Drawing on classic arguments from Tocqueville, Dewey, and Jane Addams—as well as contemporary sociological work by Wuthnow, Robert Bellah, Theda Skocpol, and Robert Putnam—Lichterman is concerned with understanding the specific conditions under which civic groups are able to fashion stable bridges across lines of racial, class, or religious differences. All of the groups analyzed here held “reaching out to others” as a central part of their purpose. However, the majority of these efforts, as becomes painfully clear throughout the central case chapters of this book (Chapters 3–6), resulted in aching, frustrating failure. There are, to be sure, some important, deeply instructive exceptions. Yet because Lichterman does not simply assume, first, the Tocquevillian argument about the power of civic associations to expand peoples' affective and cognitive attachments to others, second, the neo-Tocquevillian view that civic groups provide their members with “social capital” (Putnam, 2000), or third, that stocks of such “capital” necessarily facilitate outward-looking forms of public action, he is well positioned (theoretically and methodologically speaking) to assess how the beneficent “social spiral” that has excited so much of contemporary social and political theory is, or is not, set in motion. It is also worth pointing out that by not acceding to Durkheimian (or post-Durkheimian) approaches to religious culture, Lichterman offers a nuanced and highly instructive account of the diverse and often quiet ways that religion “goes public” (see Chapter 7).

The result of this theoretically driven, participant-observation study is an orientation to the study of groups and civic engagement that would have us attend, far more carefully than is usually the case, to the customs and messy internal communication patterns that constitute the meaning of membership in civic organizations. Of course, scholars have long recognized that not all civic groups are created equal in their desire, capacity, or institutional opportunities to affect positively the civic health of American society. Lichterman's study provides analytic precision to this general observation by highlighting the power that variable, group customs play in facilitating or constraining a virtuous social spiral, giving particular weight to the custom or practice of social reflexivity. By social reflexivity, Lichterman means the practice of talking reflectively and self-critically about a group's extant relationships to the wider social world of which they are a part (p. 15). With this concept in view, his central claim is that those organizations whose group culture appreciates and sustains an ongoing practice of social reflexivity are able to construct durable bridges across prominent social divisions; those groups whose customs and sense of collective identity/solidarity foster barriers to the (sometimes painful) process of relational-social imagining fail to “spiral” very far, if at all, beyond their own group. The former set of customs facilitates a cooperative, partnership model of “doing things together,” while the latter results in the more familiar, loosely connected volunteer/network model of public work.

Why should this be so? Lichterman considers a wide range of possible alternative explanations for assessing the successes and failures of bridge-building groups (resources, opportunities, and organizational structure). At the same time, he offers his interactive account of civic customs, social reflexivity, and bridging relationships as a “tentative” if “grounded” set of generalizations (p. 214). This strikes me as an appropriately modest orientation to assume, given the various constraints of this study. Still, Elusive Togetherness raises a host of interesting questions that beg for additional analysis. I offer the following not as critique but as a spur to future research. First, is it possible to unpack the interactive dynamic between social reflexivity and the heightened prospects for “bridging social capital” in a manner that could persuade social actors of its determinative role in cultivating pluralistic civic ties? In other words, what are the transferable dispositions or virtues that reflexivity provides individuals and groups that help to sustain cooperative relationships with social “others”? Second, how might groups cultivate these specific qualities without endangering either their sense of collective identity or the sources of their own agency? Finally, what are the specific religious (and perhaps theological) preconditions for cultivating social reflexivity among faith-based groups? Drawing on Wuthnow's work, for example, we might ask not only how religious identity influences bridge building (which Lichterman treats persuasively) but also how religious orientations toward truth (here in the case of mainline and Evangelical Protestants) constrain and facilitate the practice of relating self-critically to others. All of these are fertile questions, prompted by a deeply engaging work that one can only hope will influence and inspire future scholars.

On this last point, I should like to recommend the very useful appendices that Lichterman has included here. Students of civic groups (as well as students of the philosophy of social sciences) could learn a great deal from Lichterman's own critical reflexivity toward the wider field of social inquiry.