by I’ve brought up here from time to time an issue that worries me, but that doesn’t worry others much: how serious and threatening is the division between people who adhere to what James Davison Hunter called the “orthodox” position– conservative Christians and devout Jews, mostly– and the adherents of the “progressive” position– secularists, more liberal Christians, etc.? Hunter thought the division shapes people’s attitudes on a range of “culture war” issues. Abortion may have been the most divisive of these issues in the past (and perhaps still); same-sex marriage may be the most conspicuous now.
But how serious is the division, really? I’ve said here before that I find it very worrisome, but others tell me I’m way too apocalyptic on these things.
A recent book that’s getting a lot of attention– American Grace, by Robert Putnam and David Campbell– is basically optimistic. Putnam and Campbell discuss religion’s potential both to divide and to unify, but they seem to think its unifying function is more powerful. It’s an interesting and important book (confession: I’ve only read parts of it so far), but I have to admit that in places there seems to me to be a bit of strained Polyannishness about it.
Summarizing recent survey evidence, Putnam and Campbell note that 72 percent of Americans today agree with the statement that “America is divided along religious lines,” and they acknowledge that “[o]n some matters there is a gaping chasm between those who are highly religious and those who are highly secular.” They admit as well that that “the United States would appear to be a tinderbox for religious conflagration.” (Emphasis on “appear”; they think the appearance is misleading.) They report that religious and secular Americans each perceive the other as selfish and intolerant, and they offer extensive data showing that political polarization along religious lines has increased significantly since the 1980s.
All this sound pretty worrisome, doesn’t it? So why are Putnam and Campbell in the end so optimistic? They argue that religion does more to unite Americans than to divide us. This unifying function is a product of “bridging”: nearly all of us have friends or family members whose religious or secular views are different than our own, and these bridging associations help us learn to be tolerant and accepting of difference. Despite “growing religious polarization,” they cheerfully conclude, “America has solved the problem of religious pluralism . . . [b]y creating a web of interlocking personal relationships among people of many different faiths.”
I hope that this happy denouement is correct. But the unity they describe appears to be a sort of friendship or mutual acceptance among people of diverse faiths. Putnam and Campbell report that despite belonging to religions that officially claim to be the “one true faith,” most Americans are happy to allow that other kinds of Christians and even non-Christians can go to heaven, or can be good citizens. People of different faiths can get along quite well, in other words: we do not belong to the post-Reformation period in which people of different faiths were willing to die, and to kill, for their religions.
Fair enough. But it isn’t those divides that seem threatening today. Putnam and Campbell acknowledge that “religious and secular Americans have differing worldviews, and see each other in starkly different terms,” and they are less persuasive in arguing that those differences can be happily reconciled. There may be “bridges” that link Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics and devout Jews; but it is less clear that there are bridges promoting mutual understanding among, say, academic and media secularists and the supporters of Ten Commandments monuments.
The fragility of Putnam and Campbell’s optimism is evident, I think, in the fact that they offer “civil religion”– the kind of public religiosity reflected in Ten Commandments monuments and Presidential invocations of deity and similar expressions and practices– as a means by which religion unites Americans. Well, no doubt “civil religion” does serve to unite some Americans. But of course it is precisely this sort of public religiosity that many more secularly-minded citizens find so offensive, and unconstitutional. So the ostensibly unifying factor of civil religion in reality operates as a major provocation of civil division.
In the end, it seemed to me that in their optimistic conclusion, Putnam and Campbell are arguing not so much from the considerable empirical evidence they discuss but more in the face of it.
Steve — in American evangelical Christianity, it is a significant division, that I think is becoming a yawning divide. There are a number of factors at play here, and it’s by no means as simple as “orthodox vs. progressive” — categorizations I and many “progressive evangelicals” such as myself would find somewhat offensive. To a significant extent in American evangelicalism it is a generational divide, resulting from the fact that — and some who think themselves more “orthodox” will bristle here — younger evangelicals tend to be better educated than previous generations (at least from the 1920′s or so to now). An excellent discussion of this phenomenon is in this article by Jamie Smith, a leading theologian writing what might be called “progressive” evangelical stuff.