But writing for an audience that includes non-specialists and specialists alike—and specialists from many different fields at that—risks raising expectations for what we will cover. Jon Butler, for example, takes us to task for not including enough history; Molly Worthen suggests that we need more theology. Similarly, other reviewers have called for more constitutional law, political philosophy, and organizational sociology. Not to mention the members of many different religious groups who have written to ask why their group—the Quakers, say, or the Eastern Orthodox—are not featured more prominently. We readily concede that American Grace does not cover all of these subjects in depth. Perhaps, however, other authors will build on the themes, arguments, and data of American Grace to examine these other subjects in greater detail. And one of us (Campbell) is currently engaged in another project to go deep in examining one such topic discussed at length by Jon Butler—Mormonism.

David Hollinger, in contrast, does not call for anything, but instead hints at a lament for the state of religion as we describe it. We have been struck by his comment that the form of religion we describe is “bland” or, more pointedly, that blurred religious boundaries mean that Americans do not take their religion very seriously. Other critics, too, have commented on the tolerant religiosity described in American Grace, but unlike Hollinger, argued that such a religion is hardly worthy of the name. Wilfred McClay, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted that “Surely there is something ironic about preferring a form of religion that asks us to admire and study the great prophets and preachers while warning us against imitating them and their true-believing faith.” Like Hollinger, theologian Charles Mathewes accepts our empirical description of American religion, but unlike Hollinger, he rejects the idea that “bland is beautiful.” In a panel discussion at the 2011 American Academy of Religion annual meeting Mathewes argued that “American Grace is very bad news for American religion and civic life, because churches seem unable to offer a thick counter-narrative to contemporary society.”

If Americans do not take their religion all that seriously, or fail to insist on its superiority to other religions, does this mean that religion has lost its ability to inspire change—either for individuals or society as a whole? Of all the questions to arise in the commentary surrounding American Grace, this is perhaps the most interesting, important and, ultimately, impossible to answer. Have we reached the end of prophetic religion? Is ecumenism ineluctably unable to stir souls? Must a prophetic religion be intolerant of those who disagree? Our own history suggests not. The civil rights movement certainly involved a prophetic call for personal and social reform, yet united Americans of many different faiths. America would be a meaner place without the recurrent challenge to accepted ways that religiously-rooted social movements have posed throughout our history, but we’re unconvinced that prophetic religion is intrinsically incompatible with religious pluralism.

It would be churlish of us to offer point-by-point responses to such thoughtful and generous commentaries. But one point has come up in the discussion of American Grace, including the essays of both Worthen and Butler, that warrants a reply. Both raise a red flag over the following sentence in the book:

The First Amendment to the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no law to curtail the free exercise of religion, but these sparse words do not fully reflect the way in which religious diversity is encoded in America’s national DNA.

In a recent symposium on American Grace, another commentator suggested that there are historians waiting to attack us in a dark alley because of this line, and that we probably regret ever having written it.

To the contrary, we have no regrets—although we have both decided to avoid dark alleys, at least when we know there might be historians around. At the risk of straining a metaphor to the breaking point, our point is simply that just as humans have a genetic code that shapes, but does not determine, their growth and development, so too was America set on a path that eventually led to our current state of—relative—religious harmony. For the Founders, religious diversity might have meant Presbyterians and Episcopalians, but the constitutional architecture they designed has enabled the conditions for harmony among a much wider array of religions. While constitutional guarantees are undoubtedly a necessary cause of religious tolerance, they probably are not sufficient. This is not a story of nature only; nurture mattered too. The constitutional prohibitions on the establishment of religion and wide protection for the free exercise of religion have interacted with other features of American society—immigration, civil society, public schools, the Cold War—to bring us to the point where, to borrow again from the language of genetics, the latent potential for religious tolerance has been “expressed.” None of this is to ignore the deadly manifestations of bigotry directed toward specific religious groups in America’s past, nor the current (albeit muted) antagonism toward Muslims, Mormons, and atheists. Just as our genes do not determine our destiny, these examples remind us that America’s DNA does not guarantee religious tolerance.

In his essay Torpey reminds us of the tensions arising from Islam’s presence in America, obviously a flashpoint of controversy for the current state of inter-religious relations. We say only a little about the public’s attitudes toward Muslims in American Grace but are now able to say more. Since the publication of our book we have collected another round of data, by returning to the same people we interviewed in 2006 and 2007. (Results from our latest round are soon to be published as an epilogue in the forthcoming paperback edition of American Grace). In this latest survey we dug deeper into Americans’ feelings about Muslims, by asking our respondents if they would approve of a mosque being built in their neighborhood. For comparison, we also asked how they would feel about a Christian church or Buddhist temple. The results are a classic case of interpretation hinging on perception. On the one hand, one could say that Muslims are welcomed. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that they would be fine with a mosque in their neighborhood. Yet on the other hand, Muslims are less welcome than Christians or Buddhists. More Americans object to a mosque (35 percent) than a church (8 percent) or Buddhist temple (25 percent).

While it presumably comes as no surprise that a mosque evokes a more negative reaction than other houses of worship, those who—like us—care about the state of inter-religious relations should still be concerned about the negativity toward Muslims. We are even more concerned, however, about the partisan flavor of anti-Muslim feeling. When we employ an arsenal of demographic, social, religious, and political characteristics to predict unease with a mosque, we find that politics matters most. One’s level of religious commitment matters not at all, while there are only slight differences across religious traditions, with evangelicals slightly more opposed to a mosque than anyone else. It is partisanship—whether someone identifies as a Republican or Democrat—that has the biggest impact on attitudes regarding a mosque and thus, by implication, toward Muslims. When holding everything else constant, 56 percent of strong Republicans are bothered by a mosque, compared to 24 percent of strong Democrats. That is a huge gap.

The overlap between partisanship and anti-Muslim sentiment is a potentially explosive combination, especially if opposition to Islam were to become a regular feature of conservative political rhetoric. While, today, such sentiments are only on the fringes of acceptable discourse, more incendiary anti-Islamism might very well inhibit the inter-religious bridging in personal relationships that, for other religious groups, has led to their place in the religious mainstream (cf. Catholics, Jews). Non-Muslims might be reluctant to befriend Muslims, while Muslims might be socially marginalized and thus radicalized.

In other words, there is nothing inevitable about religious tolerance, in spite of the nation’s metaphorical DNA. Mormons are an especially timely example. They are one of the most religiously insular groups in America and, accordingly, face opprobrium in some circles (cf. Mitt Romney).

Our newest data also reveals a second major finding—“creeping secularism”—which also raises questions about the future trajectory of religious tolerance in America. In American Grace we detail the growth in the Nones, the religiously unaffiliated, who are concentrated among younger Americans. Now, with our latest data, we see evidence that the rise in Nonery is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. What we term “the second aftershock” has, in fact, measurably strengthened since the first of our Faith Matters surveys in 2006. Secularism is surging among the Millennial generation. The youngest Americans—18 to 25—are far more secular than even those age 26 to 30. Not only are they the most likely to disclaim a religious affiliation, they are less likely to attend religious services, believe in God, believe in hell, and say that religion is not important in their lives. Young people are drifting, maybe even running, away from religion. And the public has noticed the slow and steady creep of secularism; just in the last five years, more and more Americans report a diminished role for religion in American society.

We also find further evidence for a key claim in American Grace, namely that America’s receding religiosity, especially among the young, is largely due to an allergic reaction to the mixture of religion and conservative politics. As a result, the religious-secular divide has a partisan flavor, suggesting a parallel with the partisan nature of anti-Muslim sentiment.

There is, however, a big difference between attitudes toward Muslims and the non-religious. While only a small percentage of non-Muslim Americans are personally acquainted with a Muslim, a growing percentage of religious Americans know someone who is “not religious”—rising from 44 percent of Americans in 2006 to 51 percent in 2011. Just as homosexuals coming out of the closet and revealing their sexual orientation to family and friends is one cause of the increasing support for gay rights, so too as more secular and even atheist Americans express their views to close acquaintances, tolerance for secularism seeps through the broader population. This degree of bridging seemingly bodes well for the health of relations between religious and secular Americans.

On the other hand, the label of “atheist” remains anathema to most Americans. While younger Americans are more favorable toward atheists than their elders, on average they still view them negatively. Like attitudes toward Muslims, the negative perception of atheists can be explained by the simple fact that very few Americans know a self-described atheist. There just are not that many atheists to go around, although the creeping secularism in American society suggests that their ranks are growing.

Just as growing acceptance of Muslims is not a given, neither should we assume the inevitability of full inclusion for non-religious Americans, whether atheists or not. Mutual tolerance would suffer if heated rhetoric about the “other side” were to separate Americans into religious and secular bunkers. In American Grace, the basic story is that while our politics may be polarized along religious lines, our personal relationships are not. If polarization at the personal level were to replicate the polarization of our politics, hostility would replace acceptance.

How likely is it that America fractures along religious lines? Notwithstanding the alternative scenarios we have described, we are optimistic enough to think that, in time, Mormons, Muslims, and atheists will be fully accepted into the mainstream of American society. But likely is not the same as inevitable.

Which brings us back to public sociology. While our primary objective has been description and explanation of the state of religion in today’s America, we are also willing to offer a prescription. It is our hope that Americans continue to forge interlocking personal relationships across religious—and non-religious—lines. If American Grace nudges its readers toward building more such bridges, so much the better. A house divided cannot stand, no matter our national DNA.

The other big sociological bestseller of the past generation was of course Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone—the argument of which also began life as an article, published in 1995—which decried the decline of “social capital” and its consequences for the country. Because it was focused on domestic affairs, the book was of much greater interest to American sociologists, who tend not to pay much attention to matters beyond their own borders. Like the previous sociological bestseller (this time by card-carrying members of the tribe), Robert Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart, the book fit into the long tradition of reflection on the pitfalls of American individualism that goes back at least to Tocqueville. Putnam worried that TV- and electronic gadget-addled Americans have retreated from the voluntary associations that impressed Tocqueville as the true life-blood of American democracy, weakening its civic fiber. Yet Bowling Alone soft-pedaled the rougher edges of American life and the growing dominance in its politics of a profligate financial elite. In this respect, it is noteworthy that, in the preface to a new edition of Habits published in 2007, Bellah mused darkly about the runaway unaccountability of a wealthy “oligarchy” in American life. Nonetheless, Putnam’s ideas caught the attention of the nation and spawned a cottage industry of research on social capital—that is, more or less, on the role of trust, networks, and volunteerism in social life.

Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell’s American Grace follows up on these Tocquevillean themes, exploring the contemporary American religious landscape to understand, in the words of the subtitle, “how religion divides and unites us.” As in Putnam’s earlier work, the book mobilizes the full array of methods available to the social scientist—survey research, interviews, participant observation in relevant settings, historical comparisons. Vignettes drawn from qualitative research are interspersed with discussions of the quantitative data accessible to the uninitiated. The authors draw frequently on other pertinent studies to buttress their own findings, helping reassure us that the results of their research are reliable.

And what are those results? One main finding is that, as compared to thirty years ago (their baseline of comparison), religion and politics have tended to line up more consistently than they had previously, such that people who are more religious tend to be more conservative politically, whereas people who are less religious tend to be more liberal. One of the chief reasons is that younger people have been put off by the association of religion with conservative politics since the time of the Moral Majority. This was itself, according to Putnam and Campbell, a response to the upheavals of the 1960s, and especially to its challenges to gender and sexual norms. Religious-political polarization has been the consequence.

This partisan realignment represents an important shift from a time when churchgoers were more evenly divided between the conservative and the liberal. In those days, for example, many opponents of abortion were liberal on other measures; the reason is that they were devout Catholics who objected to the taking of unborn life but also supported measures to soften the blows of a capitalist economy, which was much less true of their white Protestant political allies. Now, opponents of abortion tend to be the more devout of all denominations (other than Jews), and those more devout people also tend to be more conservative across the board. The association of religiosity with conservatism has driven younger people out of religion, leading to a spike—into the 15-percent range—of the “religious nones,” those who claim no religious affiliation. Needless to say, these trends strongly parallel the contemporaneous emptying of moderates from the Republican Party and its transformation into a strongly ideological grouping lately driven by the sensibilities of the Tea Party.

Still, there remain important exceptions from the tendency for the more devout to be politically conservative. Black Protestants and Jews remain politically more liberal than white evangelical Protestants, while their religion is also much more deeply bound up with their ethnicity than is the case for other Protestants and Catholics. Yet their numbers are rather small. The authors also find that the white evangelical surge actually came to an end in the early 1990s; we have been shadow-boxing with it for the last two decades.

Meanwhile, in contrast to a waning mainline Protestantism (there is currently not a single Protestant on the Supreme Court!), Roman Catholicism remains vibrant in the country, but that is mainly because of the large-scale immigration of Latinos since the mid-1960s. The social cohesion of the WASP elite has declined in favor of a more religiously mixed top tier, and the general connection between ethnicity and religion has declined, with the exceptions noted. On the whole, in other words, religion is less strongly associated with other divisions in American social life, which tends to moderate the conflict deriving from the conservative political impulses of white evangelical Protestants.

Accordingly, despite the tendency toward polarization between religious conservatives and less religious liberals, Americans demonstrate a great deal of religious tolerance. Using an example reminiscent of the famously self-worshiping “Sheila” in Habits of the Heart, Putnam and Campbell adduce every family’s “Aunt Susan” as the person who doesn’t fit the family religious tradition but sanctifies her particular faith for them by being such a good person anyway. She personifies the “religious bridging” that they regard as typical of the American experience and the key to its high levels of religious tolerance. Indeed, while acknowledging the country’s sometimes deadly anti-Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century, the book concludes by gushing that “America has had religious toleration encoded in its national DNA.”

One might wonder here about the relative exclusion from the discussion of the newer religions on the American scene, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, and above all Islam. The stated reason for excluding these groups from the analysis is that their numbers remain so small that reliable statistical analysis is impossible. Fair enough. But the focus on the American mainstream is likely to encounter the same response from critics as it did when Bellah et al. wrote Habits of the Heart—that the book concentrates too much attention on the mainstream and obscures the margins. In view of the extensive mistreatment and opprobrium directed at Muslims in the post-9/11 period, one might ask, can the Putnam/Campbell approach be justified? One answer is that, in contrast to the European situation and to that surrounding such anomalous episodes as the so-called Ground Zero mosque, Putnam and Campbell’s marginalization of the Islam question gives it just the right amount of attention—namely, very little. Islamic extremism engages a vanishingly small proportion of Muslims, but overwhelms all other discussion of Islam (and, of course, drowns out other things that one might pay attention to, such as the approximately five million deaths in the god-forsaken Congo during roughly the same time period as the “war on terror”).

On the other hand, to await the day when newer religious groups achieve a statistical critical mass might keep us from saying anything about them for a long time to come. And whether they like it or not, Muslims in the United States are the subject of a great deal of attention at present and are adherents of the only faith associated with extensive anti-American violence. As even so liberal a publication as the New York Review of Books has pointed out, there is also an increasingly homegrown dimension to anti-American Islamic attacks. Does the religious tolerance in Americans’ national DNA extend to Muslims? Given radical Islam’s targeting of the United States, chiefly if by no means exclusively, should Americans be tolerant of Muslims’ demands for accommodation of their faith when those demands seem at odds with liberal norms? Germany sought to be tolerant but eventually felt that it had to deport the so-called “caliph of Cologne” for his repeated and outspoken denunciations of the German political order. Putnam and Campbell say that the more Americans get to know people of other religions (or of no religion), the more they like them. But what of those—not always Muslims, to be sure—who denounce America as the Great Satan on religious grounds? Liberal societies reach the limits of tolerance when they have to deal with persons who reject the constitutional basis of those societies. This book cannot help us with that debate.

Notwithstanding this quibble, Putnam and Campbell have produced a thoroughly researched, clearly written study of the state of American religion that reminds Americans of what we hold in common and offers the prospect that the polarization produced by the 1960s and its sequelae may be behind us. They do so on the basis of meticulous research using a broad variety of social scientific methods. The book comprises another valuable contribution to sociological efforts to make sense of American life—even if its principal author is not formally a member of the guild. Many sociologists will follow in his footsteps, as will many nonspecialist readers, because American Grace is an outstanding example of public sociology.

American Grace

To Putnam and Campbell, the grand irony of their data is this: in a time of unprecedented religious and political polarization, America is more pluralistic and tolerant than ever before. The authors build on Robert Wuthnow’s assessment of the “restructuring of American religion” along political rather than denominational lines in the decades after World War II, and their study pursues many of the familiar themes of the “culture wars” that James Davison Hunter began exploring twenty years ago. Their telling of post-war American cultural history will provoke quibbles from specialists, but the basic storyline of American Grace is sound: the social revolutions of the 1960s set in motion a series of cultural reactions and counter-reactions that have left Americans increasingly polarized over whether or not to impose the authority of holy scripture over one another’s lives, particularly in their bedrooms. That polarization accelerated in the 1980s, and since then frequent churchgoers across all traditions have been more and more likely to favor conservative politics. At the same time, the “moderate religious middle is shrinking,” and growing numbers of Americans are disavowing the rule of organized religion altogether. When pollsters ask these people to describe their religious affiliation, they answer “none”—and they tend to vote Democratic. Despite this widening chasm, the country is not perched on the precipice of religious war. On the contrary, Americans seem to be getting along rather well, and have more and better relationships with people of different faiths. How can this be the case?

This state of affairs suggests that the reality of religion in America may be outpacing the categories and assumptions of those who study it. What, for example, are scholars to make of the “nones” who fervently declare that they still believe in God? And what about all those Americans who not only host summer barbecues with neighbors of different faiths, but also nonchalantly shrug that those neighbors might very well end up in heaven too? The Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) takes the unequivocal position that a “horrible doom” awaits “all those who do not believe in Jesus.” Church leaders practically rent their garments upon hearing that 86 percent of Missouri Synod Lutherans told pollsters that “a good person who is not of their faith could indeed go to heaven.” When Martin Luther proclaimed the priesthood of all believers, this is not what he had in mind. It’s enough to make any scholar wonder if creeds, confessions, and statements of faith are obsolete.

What, in heaven’s name, is going on here? Is the country marching inexorably toward—dare I use that vexed word—secularization? Is America merely in a trough of unbelief something like the fallow period that American churches experienced in the late eighteenth century, soon to rebound in the fervor of revival? Or are human beings, since time immemorial, simply inconsistent creatures?

The answer might be none, or all, of the above—no survey can tell us for sure. What we need is a bird’s eye view, and that requires taking theology seriously, and considering a longer view of the history of Western civilization than any sociological survey can provide.

American Grace adopts a position of respectful skepticism toward theology. The authors dutifully reproduce the questionnaire of “measures of theological belief and religious commitment” included in their survey, but they express surprise that many Americans “have stable views on such seemingly arcane theological issues” as whether a person is saved by faith or by their own good deeds. (Calling this fundamental question “arcane” is a bit like expressing confusion at that obscure rule in baseball that allows a player to score a run by crossing home plate.) Americans might be reluctant to condemn a non-believing friend to eternal hellfire, but this emotional ambivalence does not necessarily mean that they take theological matters lightly.

In fact, survey respondents overwhelmingly ranked theology as the most important reason for switching churches—liturgy or worship style was the second-most important, and political reasons were the least important. Yet Putnam and Campbell seem to conclude that this means theology has become a vessel for politics in disguise. To religious people of all faiths, issues like sexual morality and abortion are not simply, or even primarily, political questions. God has expressed an opinion—and that means that these are theological matters. By asserting that American evangelicals’ primary ambition is their “desire to convert sexual morality into public policy,” the authors obscure the bigger picture. The culture wars are not just about sex and social norms: they represent a contest between those Americans who locate ultimate authority in God and a traditional reading of scripture, and those who believe the freedom of individual choice trumps the dictates of some bearded old man in the clouds.

Putnam and Campbell are hardly alone in their doubts about theology’s role in elucidating American religious life. In their zeal for interdisciplinary breadth, today’s scholars of religion are so eager to pay due respect to political science, economics, gender and race theory, cognitive psychology, and other fields that they sometimes overlook theology as an explanatory factor in human affairs. The religious studies crowd is particularly sensitive about the Protestant bias that has saturated the discipline ever since its origins in missionaries’ efforts to study and convert the heathen. We have spent much energy flagellating ourselves for our semi-conscious Protestant frame of mind—our focus on belief at the expense of practice; our search for coherent intellectual systems defined by Enlightenment standards; our blinkered emphasis on the individual over the community. Our efforts to eradicate that prejudice have left theology all the more passé. Putnam and Campbell, for their part, worry about the possibility that their survey might have selected for religious attributes that are distinctly or predominantly Protestant. They point out that their polls diagnosed religiosity just as accurately in British Muslims as among American evangelicals (though it’s worth noting that British Muslims might not be the best control subjects, since they live and worship in a society still groggy with a Protestant hangover).

The trouble, however, is that it’s not just the ivory tower of religious studies that operates in a Protestant framework. As Tracy Fessenden and others have pointed out, a “Protestant consensus,” a civil religion based in the premises of the Reformation, still saturates American society. Despite the proliferation of Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and “nones” in modern America, I wonder whether American Grace is telling us that America, if not officially a Protestant nation by established church or creed, is still evolving along a historical trajectory that one can trace back to the 95 Theses.

In American Grace, the internal contradictions of Protestantism are front and center. On one side of the cultural divide that the authors describe, conservative Americans’ views on sexual morality stem from their respect for traditional authority and a distrust of human nature rooted in the Protestant emphasis on humankind’s irreparable depravity. Yet that other fundamental principle of the Reformation—individual freedom of conscience—has found its most extreme expression in America’s free marketplace of religion, the country’s founding narrative of individual liberty, and a political culture that allows little deviation from the tenets of classical Enlightenment liberalism. Many religious Americans would say that they have no king save the Lord of scripture—but if the God of the Bible is king, then individual conscience is his formidable royal consort.

Pollsters’ growing tally of “nones”—those Americans who have thrown off the demands of organized religion but still believe in some kind of God—represent the palace coup, the triumph of individual conscience as ultimate authority. This is a conflict driven, not by doctrinal nitpicking, but by the basic question of intellectual authority in human society. The “nones” may not fit neatly into scholars’ preexisting categories, but one thing is certain: they are heirs of the Reformation who have taken Luther’s courageous stand to its logical conclusion. The nineteenth-century Presbyterian theologian B.B. Warfield once observed that “the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the church.” The American experiment might just turn out to be the triumph of Luther’s doctrine of free conscience over his doctrine of human nature—though the battle is far from over.

Although American Grace doesn’t leave historians on the whirling dime, wondering “So what?” it does raise questions about historical context. In other words, how do the changes that Campbell and Putnam retrace fit three centuries of evolution in American religion, politics, and culture?

American Grace is hardly without history. Its most sustained historical analysis occurs in the third chapter, “Religiosity in America: The Historical Backdrop.” A subheading outlines a principal point: “The 1950s: the high tide of civic religion.” Campbell and Putnam rightly caution against accepting some of the common enthusiasm about the purportedly ubiquitous religiosity of the 1950s, such as is suggested by Gallup polling data on church and synagogue attendance. But their main point is straightforward: “Virtually all experts agree, however, that the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s was one of exceptional religious observance in America”—the experts ranging from the historians Sydney Ahlstrom, Patrick Allitt, Maurice Isserman, Michael Kazin, and Uta Andrea Balbier to the ever-looming Will Herberg.

However, my sense is that “backdrop” well describes how history works in American Grace. The book isn’t historiography and wasn’t meant to be.  When it invokes history, often the point is to demonstrate religion’s continuing importance, as well as its new divisions, in America, the authors’ argument about religion’s contemporary centrality being supported by reference to patterns continuing from earlier decades. Consider the first pre-1950 historical reference, which concerns evangelicalism:

Evangelical Protestants comprise one of the most significant religious traditions in America—particularly for understanding change in American religion. Historian Mark Noll notes that evangelicalism dates as far back as the early eighteenth century, when a movement began within Protestantism to find a ‘true religion of the heart.’

Campbell and Putnam describe evangelicalism as “the dominant strain within American Protestantism through most of the nineteenth century,” then raise the fundamentalist-modernist split that “spilled over into American society more generally.” But rather than illustrate change, my sense is that these references limn a comforting continuity, the “religion of the heart,” and even its divisions, remaining a primary mode of American religiosity.

Neither the concept of “religion” that informs American Grace nor longer-term historical patterns provoke much discussion. Campbell and Putnam shun theoretical issues: “One can quibble over just how religion, and religiosity, should be gauged.” They don’t. They seem, literally, to opt for Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” approach. “By any standard,” Campbell and Putnam write, “the United States (as a whole) is a religious nation.” So ends, or begins, their discussion; perhaps one might say that American Grace is itself a riff on the American meaning of “religion.”

Although history doesn’t operate by the “by any standard” approach here used for religion, the “backdrop” slant given it by Campbell and Putnam makes weak-kneed history. Their discussion of “civic religion” serves as an example. Unlike their operative concept of religion, they do define it, as the notion that “religion—or at least a belief in God—serves to bind the nation together,” and this stands at the center of their discussion of the 1950s. But the only discussion of civic religion before 1950 comes 400 pages later, on a single page that cites Robert Bellah citing Jefferson and Lincoln, along with some words on George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all essentially emphasizing a soothing continuity rather than a contested evolution.

What’s missing in American Grace is a sense of how the current polarization, or its development, from the seemingly peaceful 1950s to the antagonistic 1990s and 2000s, fits American historical patterns more generally. The references to both evangelicalism and civil religion implicitly stress continuity, with the authors’ emphasis on the “religion of the heart,” or on the importance of a broad commitment to a simple “belief in God,” both lasting from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first. Yet the history of American evangelicalism itself is as much one of anger, argument, schism, defeat, organization, dead-ends, and yes, triumph, which might well fit the diagnosis of polarization that Campbell and Putnam find alarming and claim to have developed mainly in the last twenty years. Yet, if we rethink the issue, American civil religion also wallowed in the anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Mormonism that created at least one American political party, deeply shaped others, and produced much violence, fire, murder directed against Catholics, Jews, and Mormons for many, many decades, even into the 1950s.

Because American Grace makes much of Campbell’s own Mormonism and contains ample discussions of contemporary Mormon belief and behavior, its approach to Mormon history is itself intriguing. Its account of Mormon origins bypasses the upheaval of the movement’s radical, polygamous, and harassed past. An acknowledgement that Mormons were “driven from place to place by persecutors” entices no detail, and a plain reference to “the death of Joseph Smith” raises no mention of his brutal assassination by a Missouri mob. Instead, this “backdrop” jumps to the triumphant present and Mormonism’s status as a “global church some 13.5 million strong,” whose “success at winning converts owes largely to its strongly evangelical spirit.” Lacking is an account of Mormonism’s truly extraordinary transformation from polygamous, sometimes communitarian radicalism into the epitome of twentieth- and twenty-first century American political and religious conservatism. Is the intensity of contemporary Mormon conservatism in any way related to consciousness of Mormonism’s radical past, as though Mormons still needed to prove their cultural and Christian orthodoxy?

Even the seemingly simple issue of heaven unravels in the face of both history and theology. Campbell’s and Putnam’s polling data shows that Mormons are far ahead of any other religious group in believing that even non-Christians can enter heaven; 98% of Mormons—but only 83% of Catholics, 79% of mainline Protestants, 62% of black Protestants, and 54% of evangelical Protestants—hold such views. But the Mormon heavens and means of getting to them are remarkably different than those of other Christian groups. Only Mormons have held, since the 1840s, that heaven is complex, with “three degrees or kingdoms of glory,” and that Mormons may baptize the dead by proxy to provide the foundation for their entrance into heaven. These views and this history shape modern Mormon behavior. Mormons have collected birth and death records worldwide for a century, now in microfilm and digital form, and are the originators of the fabulous Ancestry.com, which provides access to more than five billion birth records—a gold mine for historians (it’s by far the best route to fully digitized U.S. census returns up to 1930), genealogists of all kinds, and Mormons verifying records for proxy baptism.

This history and this theology upend one of the seemingly innocuous questions Campbell and Putnam pose in American Grace—can even non-Christians enter heaven?—because the respondents simply don’t share the same understanding of “heaven.”  Mormons pointedly understand heaven differently than do other Christians, and they have a mechanism for getting even the dead there, of which others disapprove, most notably Jewish leaders, who have sometimes bitterly protested Mormon proxy baptism, especially of Holocaust survivors. (Campbell and Putnam do refer to Mormon “posthumous baptism” in an endnote, but one limited to Mormon convictions that theirs is the only true faith.)

Similarly, Campbell and Putnam do not systematically engage Catholic, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, and evangelical Protestant theologies of heaven.  For them, one might wonder if the issue has less to do with heaven than with reluctance to believe in hell, which Campbell and Putnam do discuss, and whose historical decline for Protestants was charted a long time ago, in D. P. Walker’s The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment. Of course, that would also seem to include the “nones,” the non-religious who might feel that if people go anywhere, it must be “heaven,” which our broad popular culture seems to think is good.

I admire the complexity and fascinating ethnographic excursions American Grace offers. I wish I could write as cleanly as Campbell and Putnam do across more than 500 pages. I appreciate the effort at keeping the big picture constantly in focus. At the same time, for a historian, American Grace‘s many and complex “beliefs” float too free from their historical moorings, and not just because I like history, but because history is embedded in contemporary behavior—as in contemporary Mormon views on heaven—even when it doesn’t seem to be.  Maybe part of the general problem is taking the irenic 1950s as the departure point of its historical backdrop. We could debate whether or not the religious peacefulness of the 1950s is itself over-rated, but that’s a different discussion.  Instead, I would suggest that, even if the 1950s weren’t entirely peaceful, they may still have been the most unusual, and indeed relatively irenic, years in American religious history.

But for three centuries, tumult, disputation, and anger— i.e., “polarization” —characterized much of American religion. It is hard for a historian not to remember the hangings of Quakers in Boston in the 1660s, the jailing even of Quaker dissidents by other Quakers in Philadelphia during the Keithian schism of the 1690s, the suppression of much traditional African religious practice among enslaved Africans, even after emancipation, plus virulent American anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anti-Mormonism, and both polite and impolite ridicule of evangelical fundamentalism, to highlight only some of the contentious, polarizing substance of America’s long spiritual history.

Campbell and Putnam acknowledge this historical religious polarization on the penultimate page of American Grace. Yet they not only trumpet its rarity but assert that “from its founding, America has had religious toleration encoded in its national DNA.” Our DNA?  Here, the episodic, conditional past is annihilated in a paroxysm of essentialist rhetoric. Most historians would say that religious toleration emerged fitfully in America but certainly wasn’t present at its founding; it’s the point of William R. Hutchison’s Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. We might hope it’s present now. But religiously based homophobia, anti-Muslim tension, and even the quietly continuing evangelizing of Mormons by Wisconsin Synod Lutherans suggest that America’s genetically assured triumph of religious toleration hasn’t yet arrived.

The religious polarization of our own and recent times, which Campbell and Putnam chart in such chewy ethnographic detail, is not at all “the same” polarization that began when England’s dissident Puritans joined gold-seeking Virginians to contest the land as well as the divine with American Indians, who themselves had long fought their own battles over both.

Yet maybe, in some very broad and general way, American Grace really announces, without saying so, “Welcome Back.”

This is the chief, if probably unintended implication of American Grace, which I take to be the most successfully argued, comprehensive sociological study of American religion in more than half a century. Robert Putnam and David Campbell harvest a generation of research and mature reflection about how religious affiliations of all kinds divide and unite Americans of different generations, regions, sexes, educational levels, and ethno-racial groups. Will Herberg’s endlessly discussed Protestant-Catholic-Jew, a book of 1955, was not remotely as methodologically self-conscious and as empirically grounded as is American Grace, but one must go back to Herberg to find so striking a single volume purporting to explain the religion of an author’s contemporary Americans. If this coming generation of scholars and journalists allow Putnam and Campbell to define the terms of conversation to the extent that our predecessors allowed Herberg to perform this role, we will be in fine shape.

Why does this book prompt the suspicion that bland may be beautiful? Because Putnam and Campbell argue that the decline of intense, sectarian devotion to any particular faith enables religious believers to be more tolerant and appreciative of ideas and practices different from their own. Putnam and Campbell’s central, data-driven theme is the fluidity of American religion. Americans move in and out of religious affiliations with dizzying frequency. While in other societies religious identity is more often perceived “as a fixed characteristic,” they explain, in the United States “it seems perfectly natural” to refer to one’s religion as a mere “preference.”

All this mobility in an immigrant-receiving society with multiple ethno-religious groups creates, especially in recent years, high levels of religious diversity within families. One half of Americans today are married to someone who came from a religious tradition different from their own, and when you start counting cousins and in-laws you have extended families in which most people are intimately connected with several individuals from a variety of communities of faith. This reality leads Putnam and Campbell to their charming “Aunt Susan Principle.”

Just about everyone has an Aunt Susan, the kind of relative who is so saintly that you know she will get to heaven (if you believe there is such a place, but let’s put aside differences of opinion about that), even if she is an atheist or a Presbyterian or a Buddhist or something else that you are proud not to be. Familiarity and love conquer sectarianism and breed tolerance. The “My Friend Al Principle” encapsulates the same situation for non-family acquaintances. You greatly admire Al, your office co-worker. So, you have no doubt he’ll make it to heaven even though he happens to be a Jehovah’s Witness (horrors!) and you are an Episcopalian.

Putnam and Campbell well understand that American society is sharply polarized by religion, and that this polarization often parallels political polarization. They believe they have solved the paradox of how a religiously polarized society can also be a religiously tolerant society. The answer is that Americans do not get too deeply entrenched in any one, particular religious affiliation.

But some people do. “True believers” is American Grace’s term for those who are intensely religious, and as a result have little use for folks with beliefs different from their own. Putnam and Campbell insist that only about ten percent of Americans are true believers, but the true believers turn out, predictably, to be among the least tolerant of same-sex relationships, non-marital co-habitation, abortion, divorce, and of all kinds of pluralism. Even apart from these extremists, however, conservatism of this type is more prevalent within the most homogeneous and stable of religious groups, such as Mormons and evangelical Protestants, than among the most fluid, such as Jews, ecumenical Protestants, and agnostics. Here, American Grace is consistent with Robert Wuthnow’s findings concerning “exclusivist Christians” in America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity.

This demonstrable tension between intensity of belief and pluralistic tolerance is where the beauty of blandness becomes visible. Putnam and Campbell are not as forthright as they might be about the implications of their work. Clearly, they understand religion as a fine thing, providing needed networks of belonging and systems of meaning. Indeed, American Grace is a relentlessly generous book, filled with hope that the intolerance and sectarianism found among the “true believers” can be contained. The authors warn that the future is far from certain, and that the current association of religion with conservative politics might well be reversed. Religion in this book is, by and large, warm and wonderful. But their research leads to the conclusion that the warmest and most wonderful kinds of religion—and the kinds most compatible with a diverse, democratic society—are the kinds of religion that adherents regard as disposable, as something one is willing to trade away.

I hasten to acknowledge that American Grace offers an imposing and altogether welcome array of detailed information and wise reflection about countless aspects of religious life in the United States today. This very rich work’s value should not be reduced, as I risk doing here, to its most obvious and most general implication for the sociology of religion.

American Grace reminds me of one of the most striking findings in another recent sociological study, Christian Smith and Patricia Snell’s Souls in Transition: Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. Invoking H. Richard Niebuhr’s legendary put-down of liberal Protestantism’s drift away from doctrinal particularity, Smith and Snell remark that today’s younger Christian believers apparently feel no objection to “a God without wrath” who “brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” Harry Emerson Fosdick “would be proud,” Smith and Snell allow mischievously, to listen in on the religious chatter of today’s young adults, including evangelicals whose grandparents hated Fosdick, because even if they’ve never heard of Fosdick they talk just like him.

Putnam and Campbell offer their own families as both normative and representative of life in our own time, which might be called “the era of Fosdick’s revenge.” Campbell is a Mormon with Protestant and Catholic ancestors. Putnam was raised a Methodist but converted to Judaism, while his sister married a Catholic and had three children all of whom are now evangelicals. Will all these Putnams and Campbells, like Aunt Susan and friend Al, get to heaven? Only if they remember the chief lesson of this book: don’t take your religion too seriously.