The Transformation of American Religion

How We Actually Live our Faith, by Alan Wolfe

Alan Wolfe's claims that religions in America have been changed at least as much by the culture as the culture has been changed by religion. He makes a pretty good case for it, too. We talk a lot about God, but on inspection we don't actually say a great deal.

When you're too close to a mountain, you don't see it very well. It may seem a small thing to say that our culture loves novelty, but the pervasive quest for novelty has profound effects on everything from the economy to religion. Set aside brand-new do-it-yourself religions like Wicca: religions appeal to timeless tradition--perhaps newly revealed to some Smith or another, but nevertheless reflecting the ancient/eternal plans of God (or karma, or whatever). "Gimme that old time religion" is its traditional appeal--after all, ultimate reality shouldn't change.

But Americans don't respect tradition and authority. Americans enjoy/suffer the most hyper-individualistic culture I know of, with very little reference to duty or sacrifice. Churches, synagogues, and Muslim groups all make accommodations to these cultural traits; by downplaying the elements of sacrifice, focusing on "consumer-oriented" service, and very often minimizing doctrine in favor of affirming personal experience.

The result: churches which differ less and less; making fewer and fewer claims to truth; and trying to appeal to members who may have once been Catholic, Pentecostal, and Methodist--or at least members of churches with those names. Even nominal faith-based social projects tend to rely almost exclusively on the same social and economic principles as secular programs. God

"is a God of love, comfort, order, and security. Gone is the God of judgment, wrath, justice, mystery and punishment. Gone are concerns about the forces of evil." America's God has been domesticated, there to offer solace and to engage in dialog with the understanding that, except that under the most unusual circumstances, he will listen and commiserate. In a world governed by this more accessible God, sin still exists and atonement is still possible. But the sins are less numerous, less serious, and more forgivable. The wrongs that people do are the sorts of things that can be set right by pleading to God's good side, not his commanding presence.

I firmly agree that the church must constantly translate its message into the language of the then-current culture. Unfortunately there are irreducible complexities--statements about the nature of God and man that aren't part of everyday experience. We easily slide from the precise to the fuzzy to the wrong. Because guilt generally makes you feel guilty, feeling guilty is a good sign of guilt. So we talk about feeling guilty (part of everyday experience). But not all guilty feelings are important, and so we wind up talking about feelings and psychology rather than moral guilt.

Wolfe looks at the impact of culture on religion in worship, fellowship, doctrine, tradition, morality, sin, witness, and identity. (And he skewers The Prayer of Jabez gratifyingly.)

I find it hard to pick out a single section from his chapter on tradition, but he details the curious interplay between Jewish denominations in their reaction for or against the traditions--including a Conservative kaddish which event which has the aura of tradition while changing just about everything about it.

Sin seems to vanish into psychology and non-judgmentalism--for some reason people don't like to hear that they are sinners, and often don't come to churches that talk about sin. They want uplift (a good thing), and somehow the subject of sin doesn't come up so much.

Morality

Wolfe covers many topics here. Though fundamentalists often speak of the submission of wives to husbands, in practice this is heavily modified and indeed many women resemble what he (after Carol Gilligan) calls "difference feminists," holding that "women's morality tends to be more caring and cooperative." Mormonism "is all but creedless and stands completely without exegesis." And Islam in prisons . . .

Although Islam in many ways resists the culture of the prison, in other ways it copies it. "We have to deal with discipline in the ranks of the masjid [mosque]," as one life-term Sunni Muslim comments. To do so, Muslims, he points out, judge their own, and when mild punishment fails, "other methods can be invoked. In certain instances people have been severely beaten up or stabbed, depending on the severity of the transgression and the threat it presents to security of the Muslim community."

And he looks at the famous study in which 150 students were told that some of their exams were graded in error--some over and some under by a point. (All were a point too high.) "The teacher wanted to know whether students who were more religious would be less likely to cheat that those who were less religious. And that is exactly what he found. ... the faithful, on every single measure of religiosity, were the ones more likely to say so. ... The true importance of this little study lies in the fact that, given a chance to cheat, the overwhelming majority of students, religious or not, in fact took it."

Witness

It is no secret that evangelicals, despite the name, rarely evangelize. Instead of the often reviled Bible-thumping proselytizing, you find extreme sensitivity (to the point of shyness) to the feelings of others and a heavy reliance on "lifestyle evangelism," in which you try to be a good person and hope non-believers notice.

In traditional evangelism, the church, standing in for God, is the savior and the sinner is the penitent; believing themselves to be in possession of a truth that will set others free, evangelicals seek to bring the power they possess to those whose empty spiritual lives render them weak. Lacking either downtown locations that bring them in contact with strangers or public places in which they can reach out to passersby, evangelical megachurches, by contrast, have little choice but to offer incentives that will bring people to their doors. That process inevitably transforms the balance of power between institution and individual. The unchurched and the newly churched know that they have something the megachurches want--their potential or continuing membership--and they are willing to drive a hard bargain before they offer it up.

Evangelicals have tried to use contemporary music as a vehicle for evangelism. But

one has to pay careful attention before the coded religious messages of Heart in Motion can be detected. . . . There is always a price to be paid by those who cross over into the mainstream, and for evangelicals, the price is self-effacement.

Identity

For Muslims in a non-Muslim America the mosque has taken on a number of the roles that governments or community organizations performed back in their Muslim homelands--and so the mosque takes on a prominence that it lacked back home. In fact, "in the United States, mosques inevitably come to resemble churches," with well-defined congregations, with formal instruction, and with opportunities for socialization.

In East Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Muslim community in the United States, "the Sunday service--or any service, for that matter--is a time to meet with friends," writes an anthropologist who lived in and studied the community. "This is very much the case for young unmarried men, who cluster in corners of the building. Not always welcome in the homes of one another's parents because of the unmarried sisters who may be present and because they are often perceived as a general nuisance, the mosque is a safe haven for them. Unless they have pretensions to religious sophistication . . . enlightenment by the sheiks is probably not their primary concern."

(It had not occurred to me before that the sequestering of women would have the effect of creating a pool of discontented young men hanging out in a place quite likely to offer radicalizing instruction.)

My take

Go read this one for yourself. I cannot do the book justice here--he covers too many aspects of the transformations for any neat summary.

Are the transformations good? As I read my history, each era has its characteristic virtues and vices--and likewise the church in each era. If you "go with the flow"--we know where the broad road leads. I believe that only by maintaining the tension between the ideal and the available can churches stay honest. Preach uplift if you like, but don't forget about sin. The same Jesus who said "My yoke is easy" also said "count the cost."