In an era in which social scientists have either focused almost exclusively on narrow, specialized questions or labored to land partisan body blows, it is refreshing to read Robert Putnam and David Campbell's sweeping and sober analysis of the American religious landscape. Their book both eschews polemic and is largely a descriptive work of the sort that is too often maligned unfairly by political scientists. It offers a rich and varied portrait of American religious life that, unlike Putnam's classic work Bowling Alone, offers no single organizing thesis or narrative. American history emerges in American Grace as something more complicated, with no stark trajectory. This complexity deprives it of Bowling Alone's polemical power. There is no great civic crisis to be averted and no call for “a period of national deliberation and experimentation” to renew America.Footnote ¹ In fact, far from warning of an approaching national crisis requiring an immediate response, the authors find that our nation's civic life is graced because it manages to mix diverse forms of religious devotion with interreligious tolerance. Can these different assessments of America's public culture find reconciliation? And what are we to make of the claim that America's religious life is graced?

In Bowling Alone, Putnam criticized individualistic currents in American culture because they weakened institutional and communal ties. Writing on the fraying of religious ties, for example, he lamented the tendency of Americans, and baby boomers in particular, to treat their religion like a consumer by “surfing” from one congregation to the next. This “switching game,” as Putnam called it, has left Americans less “committed to a particular community of believers.” He further found ample evidence of weakening ties to religious organizations: Since the 1950s, church attendance had fallen by a third, while participation in church-related groups, such as Bible study groups, had declined by at least 50%. Such trends were particularly alarming given that he regarded religious communities as “arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America.”Footnote ²

In American Grace, Putnam and Campbell identify the same “religious churn.” Americans move easily between religious traditions that once had firm boundaries and intermarry at high rates. Nearly half of all Americans have departed from their parents' religious tradition either through intermarriage or a lapse into nonbelief. As the authors conclude, “religious identity in America has become less inherited and fixed and more chosen and changeable.” Unlike Putnam's analysis in Bowling Alone, however, Putnam and Campbell tend to emphasize the civic virtues of this “switching game.” They find, for example, that this religious fluidity has increased interreligious tolerance by linking Americans in a web of social relationships that cut across old theological boundaries (pp. 4–6, 134–60, 493–550).

If Bowling Alone and American Grace are read together, therefore, it appears that America's distinctive religious churn has depressed social capital and increased interreligious tolerance, though it is not clear that the authors would draw this conclusion. This is partly because their book rarely gives the impression that religious institutions are in significant decline. Whereas Bowling Alone claimed that church attendance had dropped by a third since the 1950s, Putnam and Campbell find that Americans are just “somewhat less observant” due to “slight, but cumulative declines from generation to generation” (pp. 79–80). They also make no mention of the precipitous decline in church-related groups highlighted in the earlier work.

Despite this difference in emphasis, however, some of the evidence presented in Putnam and Campbell's book suggests that our increasingly individualistic religious marketplace has compromised faith communities, particularly Catholic ones. They find that Mass attendance “fell so dramatically that Catholics alone accounted for much of the aggregate decline in church attendance during the long Sixties” (p. 96). One influential interpretation of these trends by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark concluded that the Catholic Church thrived when it maintained a “parallel society” that was simply intolerant, even as it was reacting against the anti-Catholicism so prevalent in the larger society. In addition to creating its own sectarian social institutions, Catholic clergy enforced many rules that separated Catholics from Protestants, including strict prohibitions on intermarriage or even setting foot inside a Protestant church to attend a funeral or wedding. Finke and Stark contend that the softening of such prohibitions was part of the church's “new ecumenism” in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. It set in motion “an extraordinary shift away from a churchly faith based on clear doctrines and rules, backed by a strong, hierarchical institution, to a highly personalized faith.”Footnote ³ Not all scholars believe that the Second Vatican Council was as decisive as Finke and Stark contend. Others argue that the upward mobility of Catholics and cultural changes in the sixties were more important. However, there is a broad consensus that as the cultural, social, and theological boundaries that marked the Catholic subculture weakened, Catholic identity and religiosity suffered.Footnote ⁴

The new ecumenism of American Catholics was certainly good for interfaith relations, as Putnam and Campbell's analysis would suggest. Catholics and Protestants married and mingled together as friends at far higher rates. In fact, the authors (p. 157) make the startling discovery that in recent generations, the odds of two Catholics marrying each other are less than would be expected by random chance. Many Catholics also became essentially like the Protestants they married, in the sense that they approached their faith as believers with their own personal and particular relationship to God. But insofar as these developments weakened the Catholic Church, they also contributed to the erosion of religious communities and furthered the secularization of American society. In other words, the very same individualistic “religious churn” that improved interfaith relations also undermined religious community and identity.

Putnam and Campbell believe that religious identities are still generally distinct and meaningful despite the fluidity of Americans' religious convictions and associations. Indeed, they are impressed by the fact that America has managed to mix high levels of religious devotion and diversity with interreligious tolerance. Yet they also present evidence showing that Americans tend to share a common religious metaphysics even when they identify with different faith traditions. Most Americans believe in a common God who works through different faiths to reward the just. “A whopping 89 percent of Americans,” write the authors, “believe that Heaven is not reserved for those who share their religious faith.” And in their own lives, religion enjoys very little moral authority for most Americans: 80% report that they follow their own conscience rather than religious teachings (pp. 534–47). This finding is consistent with Alan Wolfe's important study of middle-class Americans, which found that they tend to “impose their individualism on their religious beliefs rather than the other way around.”Footnote ⁵ It is hardly surprising, then, that the vast majority of Americans do not really care if their children exit their faith. All religions are essentially the same and should not be taken very seriously. As Hugh Heclo recently put it, “Reciting the traditional Christian creed at worship, and meaning it, is a countercultural gesture.”Footnote ⁶

Given so much common ground, it is even less surprising that Americans are so tolerant of most other religious traditions. Americans are tolerant of other faiths because there is actually very little to tolerate. They believe in the same God. If our metaphysical and doctrinal differences ran deeper, then tolerance would be genuinely needed and also more difficult to summon.

Of course, we should not necessarily lament this religious homogeneity, or what Robert Bellah has called a Protestant monoculture.Footnote ⁷ But we should also not overstate our religious diversity or imagine that we have managed to mix deep pluralism with tolerance. As James Davison Hunter has emphasized, genuine cultural and religious diversity is inherently offensive because it involves different conceptions of the good and ultimate truth. Such differences, according to Hunter, are “real and immutable, harsh in their implications, morally judgmental, and fundamentally offensive.”Footnote ⁸

For all their understandable regard for interreligious tolerance, Putnam and Campbell find genuine religious diversity offensive, just as Hunter might predict. They admire the dominant religious monoculture in America, which posits that all faiths are essentially the same, and they dislike those “true believers” who are susceptible to “religious chauvinism” (pp. 534–40, 542–47). Putnam drew a similar distinction been good and bad religion in Bowling Alone when he called for a renewal of American religious life, so long as it included greater interreligious tolerance.Footnote ⁹ Christianity as it has been traditionally understood, which included sharp truth claims about salvation, is simply fanatical, according to Putnam and Campbell.

I highlight their dim view of Christian orthodoxy not to criticize it but to underscore the fact that it is difficult to be tolerant of genuine cultural and religious diversity. But if, in fact, Putnam and Campbell genuinely value religious diversity that includes groups with sharp sectarian differences, then they should recognize that the price of such pluralism is greater intolerance and even conflict. Peter Skerry has put the trade-off well: “If we truly value diversity, then we will need to enlarge our concept of tolerance to include tolerance of contention and outright conflict. Alternatively, if we decide that we value consensus and social harmony more, then we should reexamine our preference for diversity.”Footnote ¹⁰ Putnam and Campbell seem to prefer social harmony to diversity.

Academics of a Tocquevillian bent have long been wary of deep religious conviction and differences. Even as Alexis de Tocqueville praised the ways in which Christianity tempered Americans' appetites, he also feared the “enthusiastic, almost fierce spirituality” found in evangelical sects and revivals.Footnote ¹¹ This orientation makes sense if the principle virtue of religion is its ability to inspire modest expressions of charity and virtue. But if religion is to do more than cultivate what de Tocqueville called a “decent materialism,”Footnote ¹² then one cannot dispense with precisely the kind of zealous faith Putnam and Campbell hold in low regard.

The sort of orthodox Christianity that fueled the American Revolution, abolitionism, the Civil Rights movement, and the right-to-life movement was not the kind of half-hearted faith celebrated by Putnam and Campbell. These were movements populated by religious fanatics who believed that Jesus Christ was “the way, the truth, and the life.” This sort of intense, “fundamentalist” faith drove even the Civil Rights movement. David Chappell's important work has shown that the Civil Rights movement is best understood as an evangelical revival with political overtones, rather than a political movement with religious ones. Its activists evangelized, spoke in tongues, talked of miracles, experienced conversions, and believed in the direct intervention of God in the struggle against segregation. This intense, orthodox Christianity was also instrumental to the movement's success. “It's hard to imagine,” Chappell concluded, “masses of people lining up for years of excruciating risk against southern Sheriffs, fire houses, and attack dogs without some transcendent or millennial faith to unite them … without something extreme and extraordinary to link the masses' spirits.”Footnote ¹³ Most activists would not have risked their lives for the vague and distant Jesus of mainstream American Christianity.

To be sure, Putnam and Chappell admire this history of religious social protest. They highlight the impressive number of “progressive movements” with “powerful religious roots.” And they lament the failure of contemporary evangelicals to “mount a more vigorous campaign against class disparities.” But they do not ask whether Christians who possess “faith without fanaticism” can sustain this tradition of religious social protest (pp. 246–52, 257–58, 547). Are citizens who have stopped believing Christianity's most basic doctrines likely to make great sacrifices in its name?

If, in fact, such fanaticism is necessary to propel religious social movements, then a deeper irony emerges. Often, liberal reform and progress have advanced in American history through illiberal, fanatical Christianity. Chappell has pointed out the same irony in the context of the Civil Rights movement. “One surprise that has not been appreciated,” he concluded, is that “the irrational traditions of revivalistic religion served the liberal goals of freedom and equality.”Footnote ¹⁴

I do not mean to suggest that Putnam and Campbell should admire “true believers” or be untroubled by their intolerance of other faiths. Such religion certainly has a dark side, as countless studies have shown. But they should also be more attentive to both the political impotence of half-hearted religion and the ways that religious zealotry advances, as well as compromises, liberal democracy.

I have focused here on areas of disagreement with Putnam and Campbell because Perspectives seeks to be a forum for controversy and because I think it is a better way to deepen the discussion of an important work. I would be remiss, however, if I did not emphasize my high regard for Putnam and Campbell's work. American Grace is a remarkable book of great importance: It is empirically rich, modest in its proclamations, lucidly written, and by far the most comprehensive account of American religion in the post–World War II era. Those of us who study religion and politics are in its considerable debt.