This work has already acquired the status of an “instant classic.” The primary reason for this is the reputation of Robert Putnam, one of our most influential political scientists and the author of Bowling Alone, a book whose title helped to “name” the debate about the fate of American civil society in the 1990s. The honorific status of this new and hefty tome is well-deserved. American Grace is exemplary in displaying social science at its best. Its great strength lies in the careful, calibrated use of empirical data absent the methodological fetishism that too often mars contemporary political science. And up to a point, it heals the quantitative/qualitative divide that makes very little sense, if you think about it, for more than five minutes. A political theorist such as myself can read this book with great appreciation for the sheer doggedness of the effort—crunching and recrunching mountains of data to be certain that one gets things right–and, for the most part, not claiming more for that data than is warranted.

Along the way, American Grace beats down one canard after another, for example, that those drawn to religion can be found lopsidedly about the uneducated (and likely unwashed, those who love their “guns and religion,” as someone once said). Or that it is overwhelmingly the “right wing” that politicizes religion when the data show quite clearly that if you want a political message, you are most likely to get it in a black church or a Jewish synagogue. Black churches are the most politicized of all. Indeed, Putnam and his coauthor, David Campbell, found strong opposition to explicit political mobilization using the churches, lending credence to their conclusion that “political appeals by clergy are relatively rare” (p. 420). At the same time, of course, religion can drive politics and vice versa, but we have known that forever, so to speak, and it is one of the key themes in Tocqueville's great classic.

Let us take up the book's major thesis: Religion in America unites us rather than divides us. Overwhelmingly so. Remarkably, the authors tell us—and their analysis demonstrates—that Americans combine extraordinary religious diversity with unusually high levels of religious devotion. How can this be? There is another factor that has emerged that is less salutary where the fate of American politics is concerned, and that is the fact that the division between the “churched” and “unchurched” has grown. Given the collapse of the American mainline Protestant denominations, a collapse the authors call “catastrophic” at one point, the religious middle has thinned out, and the distance between the devout and the “nones,” or “avowedly secular” Americans, has grown. One effect of this collapse is the emergence of closer party identification based on religious grounds: The more religious, the more likely a citizen is to vote Republican, and vice versa.

Of course, one must qualify this the moment one states it, as large cohorts of voters are deeply torn, for example Catholics and black church goers; each is more likely to be “conservative” on certain social issues but “liberal” on socioeconomic issues. Putnam and Campbell clearly point out that Catholic orthodoxy does not align neatly along the left/right dimension of politics. The first major debacle that drove huge numbers of Catholics away from their solid identification with the Democratic Party was abortion. Gay marriage, strongly opposed by black clergy and religious laypersons, has not been sufficient to drive black voters away from the Democratic Party, but it has created a situation fraught with tension and some bitterness.

Mentioning abortion alerts us to what Putnam and Campbell call the first “great shock” to our polity, namely, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The many reasons that can be adduced for this revolution need not deter us here, but the point is that sexual attitudes changed radically and dramatically in a very short period of time. This invited alteration in norms and these changes were not necessarily all for the better, including a divorce rate that skyrocketed (with no-fault divorce), routine premarital sex (in some cases with many partners, which figured in the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases that followed), and a huge rise in out-of-wedlock births to younger and younger women.

This first shock triggered a quite predictable reaction, leading to the rapid growth in evangelicalism and a decline in mainline religions that seemed more determined to “go with the flow” than to offer a nuanced alternative to the radically altering sexual and social norms. The reaction, in turn, invited what the authors consider yet another aftershock, namely, the rejection of religion by growing numbers of Americans. The numbers of respondents who indicated that they had no religious beliefs jumped dramatically in a relatively short period of time, and their numbers disproportionately represented disillusioned young people who scored religion as being too “judgmental” and rule bound.

The routine expectation that children would follow in the religious footsteps of their parents held no longer, as children followed their own paths—either to other faiths, to a vaporous “spirituality,” or to “none,” that is, no religion at all. One might unkindly call this the consumerist model of religion: a kind of market of possibilities, with consumers making their own “free” choice as to whether they want serious or lighthearted, traditional or untraditional, orthodox or unorthodox, sacramental or antisacramental, and the list goes on and on. One fascinating spin-off worth noting here is that even as the gap has grown between the religious and the nonreligious and between social and economic classes in America, religiously observant Americans are more likely to experience friendships that cross socioeconomic barriers—by a wide margin—than are their secular counterparts, the “nones.”

All of this is quite interesting, but it scarcely accounts for the buzz surrounding American Grace. That has been generated by the fact that many find it remarkable—although regular churchgoers likely do not—that religiously devout Americans who are regular churchgoers are far more likely to be generous, to be involved in American civic life, both for church-based and secular efforts, and to do volunteer work. The data here are impressive, demonstrating that the faithful are twice as likely to help the needy in concrete ways (pp. 446–7), and that religious people score higher on measures of empathy and altruism. Indeed, religion is the strongest predictor of altruism with everything else held constant. Religiously observant people are less likely to espouse selfish values (p. 461). There are spin-off effects here that surprise. Those who spend time with religious people, for example, become better neighbors themselves (p. 475). It is difficult to come upon findings as robust as those that Putnam and Campbell offer.

As the authors state: “In every major national survey we have found that religious social ties predict good neighborliness, controlling for religious beliefs. That kind of robust correlation is uncommon in the social sciences … So religiously based social networks lead people not just inward to the church but outward to the wider secular community, in terms of giving, volunteering, and participating in civic life. This is the civic equivalent of the echo-chamber effect … we found to be so important in amplifying the political effects of religion” (pp. 476–7).

By contrast, the most secular 20% of their samples had donated no money to help the needy and, fascinating to note, religious apostasy—becoming unchurched—led to a dramatic decline in giving, volunteering, and doing any civic good works. Thus, even as “greater religiosity tends to produce increased giving, volunteering, and civic engagement … apostasy tends to lower those same measures” (p. 462). If you add the generosity—religious Americans are the core of our extraordinary philanthropic tradition—to the fact that “religious people are unusually active in civic life,” you see quite readily how important regular churchgoers are to the vitality and well-being of American civic life. It is important to stress here that this involvement is across the board, not just in efforts that are church-based or have some overt religious theme or purpose. And this is the second reason that the book is so important—because it demonstrates that religious commitment is a foundation, perhaps even the most important foundation, of American liberal democracy.

This should be quite enough, surely, for one book. But there is more to mull over and gnaw on like a good bone. It would be very easy to spend the entirety of this brief essay singing the praises of American Grace, and I must do so one additional time before turning to my irritation with its rather distorting formulation of certain themes. The additional bit of praise is the authors' stress on the connection between religious diversity and devotion. How have Americans combined both?

For one thing, religious persons have a good deal in common, as their civic efforts provide much of the glue that unites us rather than dividing us. In large social networks “peopled” by those of diverse beliefs, peaceful coexistence is the rule and not the exception. Americans, Putnam and Campbell insist, do not merely tolerate religious diversity; they see it as a value for its own sake. Most Americans are intimately acquainted with people of other faiths, and fully one-third of Americans are married to someone from a different religious tradition. Tolerance has grown by leaps and bounds, including the conviction that people of different faiths will go to heaven, including non-Christians, and that those who have no faith can be “good Americans.” (Following Putnam's earlier work on forms of social capital, Putnam and Campbell call this cross-associational linking “bridging.”) Only a very small minority hold that they alone possess the one true faith. The upshot? Americans combine high levels of religious diversity and devotion.

The authors conclude on a quasi-elegiac note with these words: “How has America solved the puzzle of religious pluralism—the coexistence of religious diversity and devotion? And how has it done so in the wake of growing religious polarization? By creating a web of interlocking personal relationships mong people of many different faiths. This is America's grace” (p. 550).

I am tempted to leave things there. It is hard to beat an eloquent ending. But more, surely, needs to be said. There are always downsides to happy stories and always a few flies in the ointment, even in the most careful and nuanced studies. So let me play contrarian for a few moments. All the happy moderation and everybody going to heaven stuff means that faith means less and less, surely. It has become more like a “preference” than a conviction.

Now, to casually deploy the term “preference” to describe religious faith in the nineteenth century, say, or even in the early twenty-first century, is a mistake that misleads. For at one point, religious belief was quite literally a life-and-death matter for people. Eternal souls were at stake. The faith of one's mothers and fathers linked one to a chain of believers over many centuries. There were stories that were shared, sins that were repented, martyrs that were honored. If none of this matters very much, it is easy to be latitudinarian. There are, to be sure, congregations that are civically active—bustling day and night with volunteer activities and “social missions”—who are also pretty serious theologically. The wonderful vignettes that form a key part of American Grace offer us a cultural ethnography of diverse congregations, and one is struck by this diversity. Some are theologically serious; some are not. Those who are serious about the tenets of their faith would never characterize it as one preference among many others. So the language of preference should not become a routinized way to talk about religious belief. For some it may well be a preference; for many hundreds of thousands it is much, much more. And indeed, the very fact that religion is increasingly viewed as a preference by many can be interpreted as a loss.

This leads me to a curious claim in the book, that religious beliefs themselves are pretty unimportant when it comes to good neighborliness and civic-mindedness. It is, the authors declare, belonging, and not belief, that counts, and religious friendships that predict good works. The key, they tell us, is how involved you are in religious networks (pp. 467–8). It is difficult to accept this full stop. I do not understand how Putnam and Campbell can tell us with such confidence that religious belief matters not a whiff to how people wind up behaving. Surely if you hold that we are all children of God, that we are created in the image of God, that the dignity of the human person must be honored and respected, this is going to have some effect on how you treat people. And if you hold to those beliefs, surely you are more likely to go to church and to do so regularly than if you do not believe anything of the sort. I am afraid that Putnam and Campbell sever belief from behavior too tidily here.

On the two issues that generate discord between religious and secular voters—abortion and gay marriage—Putnam and Campbell find us becoming far more tolerant about gay marriage and, interestingly, less tolerant about abortion, especially among the young—in each case, with secular young people far more ambivalent about abortion than were their parents. I suspect that dramatic developments in the area of fetalology is the reason. No one can any longer claim that there is “no there there” with a developing fetus. Most Americans break neither securely “left” nor “right” on these issues, and one wonders why they are parsed along that ideological spectrum in any case.

The authors do not seem to grasp a number of vital things about abortion. They mislead, first, by quoting the sociologist Kristin Luker, who, in a study that goes back 20 years or so, clearly throws her weight down on one side of the dispute. (Ludicrously, she refers to the developing fetus at any stage, including through the third trimester of pregnancy, as an “embryo” so as not to be too provocative. But this is a biologically and medically inaccurate characterization.) Here is the citation: “The pro-life world view … is at the core one that centers around God … The pro-choice world view is not centered around a Divine Being, but rather around a belief in the highest abilities of human beings. For them, reason—the human capacity to use intelligence, rather than faith, to understand and alter the environment—is at the core of their world” (p. 390).

What is wrong with this picture? For starters, it perpetuates the tedious and false distinction between “reason,” on the one hand, and “faith,” on the other, when a reasoned faith has been the lodestar of Christianity in its major incarnations throughout history. “Credo ut intelligam,” St. Augustine called it. Reason is lifted up, not denigrated, within Catholicism and much of Protestantism. The simple fideists have been a minority, not the majority. The Luker quotation indeed suggests what the authors' own findings belie, namely, that the faithful are less reasonable and educated (i.e., those who oppose abortion) and the unfaithful are more reasonable and educated (i.e., those who support abortion). Perhaps Putnam and Campbell, in a rare lapse, did not parse through the full implications before they committed to that citation.

Then there is the matter of tolerance. One of what the authors take to be a darker finding about the faithful is that they are somewhat less tolerant than are “seculars.” There is increased tolerance across the board, to be sure, but it does not seem helpful to equate increased tolerance with a type of behavior (such as abortion or homosexual sex, for example) in some cases, with hostility to an aggregate of persons based on an ascriptive characteristic (like race) in other cases. Pushing the analogy between homosexuality and the classic black struggle for civil rights is problematic in a number of ways, as it does not make certain distinctions that people take into account as they offer their views (Note that I am not saying that any of this is a good thing or a bad thing, just raising a question about drawing analogies too quickly). Yet I am concerned that some of Putnam and Campbell's formulations lean in this direction.

Here is one other matter that I stumbled over, and I wonder if others find it problematic. According to Putnam and Campbell, one element of the “less tolerant” stance of religiously devout people is that “the one who seldom attends church is likely to be more supportive of the civil liberties of racists, militarists, and so forth than is her religiously observant counterpart” (p. 483). This formulation strikes me as a bit weird. Are we to celebrate the fact that a person who does not attend church is more tolerant of “racists” than the person who does attend church and who cannot abide racism? A lower tolerance for racism strikes me as a good thing altogether. Unless one is a full-bore libertarian about civil liberties, there are nuances that must be analyzed here. Talking about civil liberties in the abstract is always tricky. It inevitably comes down to hard cases. And yet there are times when the authors seem to lean in a libertarian direction, or at least to employ a vocabulary that leans there.

As I read American Grace, I thought from time to time about my own childhood. When I was growing up, a “mixed marriage” was talked about in shocked and sometimes hushed tones. Such a marriage meant, say, that a Lutheran and a Presbyterian were going to get married. This was considered not such a good idea. As to a marriage between a Catholic and any Protestant: unthinkable! At that point, the usual anti-Catholic prejudices would be uttered by someone—I do not recall my parents trafficking in this sort of thing overmuch—but, inevitably, the pope would come into it and images of menacing priests forcing this or that. Surely it is a good thing that the hard edges of this sort of business have been smoothed away.

At the same time, one does sense something of a loss in continuity, family tradition, shared beliefs. In my own family, among my Lutheran parents' children and grandchildren, one now finds Lutherans, Unitarians, Methodists, unchurched (a pretty hefty number), and Catholics (and I have probably missed a denomination or two). Live and let live, yes. But here is the rub. If religion is going to play the countervailing role that Tocqueville, among others, assigned to it, namely, to temper the drive toward a destructive leveling that shreds distinction and isolates us in our individualism, then it must have some robustness. The authors miss the paradox: that it is precisely institutions that are not organized along “one man, one vote” that help to sustain character formation and serve as schools for citizenship. The strongest barrier to a majoritarian morass is our diverse, plural associational life.

Families and places of worship have long been the heart of it all. If families weaken and collapse more readily and we shift religion nearly as quickly as we replace cell phones, then they no longer play their essential role, by definition. I would be very interested indeed in what the authors of this superb work of social science think about that.