That Old-Time Religion

National Review, Sept 15, 2003 by Michael Potemra

The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith, by Alan Wolfe (Free Press, 309 pp., $26)

'We are all evangelicals now": This is the suggestion at the heart of this new book by Alan Wolfe, one of America's most valuable and insightful sociologists. The considerable strength of the book derives from the fact that Wolfe's observations are largely correct, and point to important positive developments in American religion; its weakness lies in the fact that Wolfe seems distinctly unhappy with the data and impressions he has noted down. If ever a book made a strong case for the fact-value distinction, this is surely it.

Wolfe admits up front: "I am not, and never have been, a person of faith." He serves, however, as director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at the Jesuit-run Boston College, and has a certain amount of sympathy with religious believers -- enough sympathy to be able to reassure hard-core secularists about the non- threatening nature of contemporary American religion. American believers, he writes, "are not imperialistic in their attitudes toward everyone else. The God in whom they believe is capacious and understanding of many different ways of life . . . If anything, the problem American believers have is lack of confidence rather than excessive arrogance. They have found their own comfortable niches in American society" and thus avoid risking the status quo.

This description of U.S. religion should be made mandatory reading for all those who fret about the danger of the "Christian Right" lurking within our borders. Wolfe says, correctly, that there is "no reason to fear that the faithful are a threat to liberal democratic values. . . . Despite what both their friends and their critics often argue, believers are full citizens . . . and it is time to make peace between them and the rest of America." Much of the book is devoted to evidence showing how different American religion is from the depictions of it in secularist caricature.

It's great that a scholar of Wolfe's stature is willing to stand up for the full citizenship of religious believers, and for the principle that a vigorous exercise of religious faith poses no threat to the constitutional separation of church and state. But this brings us to the book's central weakness, a weakness interwoven very closely with its strength: Wolfe says the reason people of faith should not be feared by the body politic is that religion has been watered down, robbed of both supernatural mystery and intellectual vigor. He says, in short, that religion -- in its well-documented recent turn toward enthusiastic, emotional megachurch evangelicalism -- has paid too high a price for its newfound respectability. "What has been called a 'generic conservative Christianity' . . . cuts across all existing denominational, doctrinal, and even cultural boundaries in search of an authentically rooted Biblical faith." Many evangelicals "say that faith is so important to them that 'religion' -- which they associate with discord and disagreement and, therefore, if often in an unexpressed way, with doctrine -- cannot be allowed to interfere with its exercise. It has been argued that America has 'an argument culture,' but one finds little taste for argument among [these believers]."

The evangelicals in their megachurches, Wolfe says, are more interested in emotion and experience than in theological disputation:

In such an environment, [the liberal] mainline churches are left as distinctly marginalized holdouts for a way of life that insists on the importance of ideas written down in books meant to be read and digested. . . . Like fundamentalists, with whom they have little else in common, liberal churches now find themselves among the last bastions of ideas in an American religious landscape increasingly characterized by empathic understanding on the one hand and emotional enthusiasm on the other.

An evangelical pastor in Cincinnati told Wolfe that "the message of his sermons is 'love, love, love, love, love, truth.'" Wolfe comments: "I think he may have his priorities wrong; love is something you get from your family, not your church." This statement of Wolfe's is revealing, and troubling, on a number of levels. First, it presents a false choice: That love is present in the family does not mean that it must be absent from church. Second, it displays a basic misunderstanding: In a sermon about love, one is not necessarily given love -- but one is certainly instructed about it. Third, and most important, it makes doctrinal didacticism the focus of worship.

In passages like these, Wolfe displays a certain failure of sympathy with his subjects, and a tin ear for the language of their religious practice. Who, after all, insists that religion has principally to do with intellectual controversies -- Calvinist vs. Arminian, premillennial vs. postmillennial, and suchlike? Thomas a Kempis, the great Catholic devotional writer of the 15th century, wrote that "it is better to show compunction, that is, sorrow for the sufferings and weaknesses of others, than to be able to define the word compunction." This should not be dismissed as anti-intellectualism, but rather as putting the intellect in its proper place. The human mind has an important role in the worship of God, and the work of theologians has been invaluable in man's attempt to grapple with the divine realities. But the language about God is not entirely, nor principally, the language of the seminar room. The man who admits, haltingly and ungrammatically, that he has spoken unkindly to his wife, and vows sincerely not to do it again, will not get an A for his prose; but he is surely close to a key religious truth -- that God wants us to love our neighbor, and act accordingly.