Religion is playing a major role in the 2004 campaign for the presidency. Conservative faiths are growing rapidly, in the United States as well as abroad. While a clash of civilizations may not be taking place, religious conflict -- primarily, but not exclusively, in the Middle East -- is a major cause of global instability.
All of those statements are not only true but testify to the importance of religion in the contemporary world. They also raise the question of whether scholarship on religion is up to the task of offering Americans insights on the controversies that surround them.
She knows that representing her organization here is the political equivalent of showing up at Yankee Stadium in a Red Sox jersey. But having expected some antagonism, she remains calm. "It's not any nastier than I expected it to be," she says.
Thirty years ago, the answer to that question would have been negative. Religion had been instrumental in the founding of at least two academic disciplines: sociology, because of the focus of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim on the role of religion in maintaining social order, and anthropology, because of its interest in ritual and symbols. Yet persuaded that the world was becoming increasingly secular and dedicated to value-free scholarship ill equipped to deal with passionate and irreconcilable beliefs, social scientists from the 1960s until the 1980s treated religion as marginal to their concerns. Combined with the conviction on the part of many natural scientists that religion was hostile to their enterprise and a turn in the humanities away from actual texts like Paradise Lost in favor of theories about how such works can or should be read, that left American academics outside of divinity schools unready for the religious revival that seemed to take on new life in the 1990s, particularly the rise of evangelical religions and the decline of mainline ones.
The academic study of religion, having badly missed the boat on one of the most profound social transformations of our time, has a lot of catching up to do. The good news is that the process has started, as a plethora of books and scholarly articles dealing with religion has begun to appear. There may even be an advantage to the late start in academic scholarship on the role of religion in American life: Scholars have been able to incorporate recent approaches that show considerable promise.
One involves ethnographic description of individuals and the groups with which they affiliate. Looking under the conventional labels used to depict religious believers, ethnographers and cultural historians are uncovering some unexpected findings. We know, for example, that religious conservatives are likely to vote Republican, but what, exactly, does it mean to be a religious conservative? If the scholarship of historians like R. Marie Griffith or sociologists like Gerardo Marti is any indication, it does not necessarily mean turning one's back on the modern world. Griffith's Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, published this month, places the popularity of diet and fitness books among American believers, many of them conservative, in the context of earlier attempts to achieve spiritual renewal through mind control or self-discipline. Marti's A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church, to be published next month, offers a case study of a Los Angeles-based church that is at one and the same time Southern Baptist in affiliation and conservative theologically and attractive to a young, primarily single Hollywood clientele working at cutting-edge cultural jobs in the entertainment industry.
As such books illustrate, the ethnographic trend overlaps with interest in the complexities of religion and American culture and their intersection. While religion has certainly done its share to shape American culture, it is also the case that American culture shapes religion, and in very powerful ways. For example, the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jew on North American soil marks the publication of Jonathan D. Sarna's magisterial American Judaism: A History. Sarna's recent book documents the many ways American Jews adapted themselves to American practices, not only in the obvious case of transforming Hanukkah into a holiday resembling Christmas but also by revising Judaism to help suburban parents with child rearing or to appeal to increasingly assertive Jewish women. At the same time, Sarna also shows the importance of movements designed to resist American culture in the name of Jewish renewal, including the return to Orthodoxy on the part of highly educated Jews who once might have been considered candidates for assimilation.
Jews belong both to an ethnic and a religious category, and, as such, their history reflects the ways in which not only national culture but the specific cultures of America's many ethnic groups influence the religious composition of the nation. The forthcoming Themes in Religion and American Culture, edited by Philip Goff and Paul Harvey, offers a synthesis of the work of primarily younger scholars who examine the ways in which Latinos, Native-Americans, and African-Americans, among others, have shaped a contemporary religious environment in the United States that would have been unrecognizable to a Jonathan Edwards or a Henry Ward Beecher, however much they may have admired its energy and authenticity.
No other scholar in America has explored the relationship between ethnicity and religion with the insight of Robert A. Orsi, whose classic work, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem 1880-1950, published in 1985, brought to life the visibly celebratory and public world of Italian-American Roman Catholicism (while comparing it to the more cerebral and dourly Calvinistic IrishAmerican variety). In his Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, due out soon, Orsi combines personal reflections on his own family with a historical analysis of the relationships Catholics have formed with the Virgin Mary.
As in all his work, Orsi shows religious believers as people who are very much like everyone else in their concerns with pain, suffering, and getting by, yet also unlike secularists because they really do believe that supernatural forces shape the course of the lives they lead. Orsi also demonstrates how slippery even some of our basic religious categories can be, for while the term "Catholic" conjures up for many Americans a universal church led by a pope in Rome, the worship experiences of a Latino in New Mexico may have so little to do with those of a German-American in Milwaukee that applying the same term to both is not going to tell us much about how Catholics will vote or even about what they believe.
What do religious people believe in when they believe? Monotheistic religions emphasize the centrality of one God, but people themselves, even those devoted to monotheist faiths, are often more capacious in their understanding than that. Indeed, if the work of a cultural historian like Stephen R. Prothero is any indication, Christians believe in Jesus while Buddhists, or at least significant numbers of them, believe in -- Jesus. In American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, published last year, Prothero finds people continually defining and redefining Jesus to accommodate their needs. If one believes that belief itself is or ought to be fixed, universal, and demanding, one comes away from Prothero's book convinced that something is rotten in the state of faith. If one admires people for their ingenuity, as well as their determination to make religion meaningful to themselves, one comes away impressed by the many forms belief can take.
When it comes to politics, ethnographic and historical accounts of religious experiences supplement surveys and polling data, but they do not entirely supplant them. If anything, quantitative studies of the role that religion plays in American voting have increased in both their methodological sophistication and their understanding of religion since political scientists began in the 1950s to pay attention to political behavior in addition to political institutions. Of all the scholars who offer journalists and others interested in the role religion plays in American politics relevant data, no one is more frequently cited than John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron. And with good reason. Green, who happens to live and work in the crucial swing state of Ohio, never allows his political views, whatever they are, to color his analysis.
At a recent retreat for political journalists held in Key West, Fla., under the auspices of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Green presented the findings of a study, "The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004," which offered a number of conclusions that support the ethnographic approach to the study of religion. For example, evangelical Protestants, who, according to Green, constitute 26.3 percent of the American population, are by no means unanimously Republican in their political outlook. And that is because evangelicals come in many forms, some more traditional than others. In fact, Green shows, of those usually considered by the news media to be associated with the "religious right," traditionalist evangelicals (12.6 percent of the population) represent a smaller group than the combined centrist (10.8 percent) and modernist (2.9 percent) evangelicals. Since the latter two groups are not as likely to identify as Republican as the former, George W. Bush would be wrong to take the evangelical vote for granted in the 2004 election.
Sometimes the new scholarship on religion directly relates to the issues facing Americans as they vote for candidates or take positions on matters of public policy. Consider Robert Wuthnow's recent book Saving America?: Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society. Wuthnow, America's most distinguished sociologist of religion in the generation that has followed Peter Berger and Robert N. Bellah, points out that both President Bush, who defends providing public funds to religious-based charities, and his critics, who worry that such financing may violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, know very little about how America's faith-based organizations actually work. Based on surveys he and others have taken, as well as his own study of the Lehigh Valley area in Pennsylvania, Wuthnow has concluded that congregations are unlikely to increase the charitable work they already do if additional federal funds come their way through faith-based initiatives; that even strongly religious national organizations devoted to charitable provision frequently play down their religious character; and that recipients of public provision are more likely to trust providers if they view them as motivated by faith. Wuthnow does not tell Americans what they should believe about Mr. Bush's proposals, but he does offer them empirically grounded findings that can help them reach their own conclusions.
There are other ways to have an impact on society besides direct engagement with its preoccupations. The study of religion will always, and should always, include those who examine the theologies of different faith traditions, write biographies of important religious figures, or study the psychological templates of belief. But by focusing on culture, examining the actual practices of believers, and demonstrating a willingness to explore widely used, but often misunderstood, categories, much of the new scholarship on religion enables Americans to recognize that a revival of religion need not lead to the creation of a theocracy or that the religious conflict so evident around the world need not be played out within the United States. Religion is here to stay. What form it takes and how it will continue to interact with culture and politics is very much open to discussion.
Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College. He is on leave this fall at the American Academy in Berlin.