Authors are usually asked by publishers to help the marketing department locate the audience to which the proposed book is directed. Most professors write for colleagues in their own and adjacent fields, but the potential of sales to the dwindling ranks of rich university libraries and narrowing ranks of congenial private scholars is nowadays deemed insufficient.

To judge by the product, Alan Wolfe and his agent must have had an easy time of it pitching the idea for The Transformation of American Religion, his unflinching overview of contemporary religious life in the United States. Not only is Wolfe, a social scientist who teaches at Boston College, a prolific and increasingly influential writer. He also addresses two distinct nonspecialist audiences, both of which should (and likely will) pay attention to what he has to say.

The first audience is made up of people like himself, the sort of public intellectual who writes for (or would like to write for) The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The second audience is people of faith in America, especially but not solely the sort of evangelical with whom he became friendly in the course of his research. Both audiences, overlapping only in places like the readership of this review, are implicated in the book, albeit unequally, public intellectuals in the introduction and conclusion, people of faith in the eight chapters in between.

Wolfe's message for the first audience is that they need not fear the kind of people who make up the second. Religious people pose no threat to democratic institutions. In earlier times and other places, religion may have been a radical force or a repressive one, but not today in the United States. Religious Americans are overwhelmingly moderate, unwilling to press their ideas against those they perceive to differ with them. Indeed, "if anything, the problem American believers have is lack of confidence rather than excessive arrogance."

Wolfe's purported message for the second audience is that because of their desire to please and their need to fill pews, they have become so comfortable in the surrounding culture that they ought to abandon any claims to being "resident aliens." Taking issue with what he hears Stanley Hauerwas telling American Christians, Wolfe says to them, "I would urge you instead to take pride in your flexibility and adaptability" in transforming faith to fit society.

Pride, however, is not the feeling Wolfe's account will engender in evangelicals who overhear him saying much less complimentary things. "For all their (often quite legitimate) denunciation of sex and violence in the popular media, evangelicals flourish amidst the celebrity-drenched, lowest-common-denominator, highly sentimentalized world of romance novels, daytime soaps, NASCAR races, and Opry-knockoff music that dominates America's entertainment industry." With well-chosen and telling detail, Wolfe applies this lesson across the board: Americans of all faith communities pose a decreasing ideological challenge to culture. "Evangelical churches lack doctrine because they want to attract new members. Mainline churches lack doctrine because they want to hold on to those declining numbers of members they have." Each in its own way, American religious communities are shown bending before American social pressures.

What Wolfe says to his audience of secular intellectuals is irenic and calming. They should be willing to engage religious people in debate and not attempt to use the courts to rule them out of public life. What he says to his religious audience is, despite his own reluctance to offend, ironic and alarming. People like me, he says just between the lines, can live with people like you because you do not truly take yourselves seriously. He thus invites people of faith to prove him wrong by becoming the fearsome cabal they are imagined to be.

Wolfe reached his conclusions through a prodigious effort of watching, listening, and reading. He visited churches, synagogues, and mosques from one end of the country to the other, surfed the web, and especially studied scores of the ethnographies of American religious communities that have appeared in the past generation, seamlessly weaving into his narrative observations made by over a hundred of my fellow sociologists of religion. (He is scrupulous to give proper credit in the endnotes and in an unusually thorough index.) The literature he draws upon represents a choice in favor of empirical social science and against so-called "cultural studies." What Wolfe and his sources document are folkways by which American lay people--Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, but especially evangelicals--actually live their religion, not the texts through which their spokesmen and their scriptures officially define it.

The illustrations Wolfe has chosen are rich in themselves--the book is one of the most assiduous reviews of a new and growing literature that I know of--and they are punctuated with thoughtful insights. He writes about post-Vatican II Catholic liturgies, Pentecostal practices in black mainline denominations, Jewish women recruited into "Modern Orthodoxy," white Americans converting to Buddhism, and Muslim immigrants who get a few minutes off the job for midday prayer but cannot find a proper place to do their ritual washing. Reflecting on the need for suitable religious facilities, Wolfe writes, "Money is not always alien to faith; in some cases it makes possible its exercise." Linking Protestants' habit of denominational switching to immigrants' need to adapt to a new country, he observes that "because of its immigrant history, the United States is, in a very basic sense, a nation of switchers."

The special attention Wolfe pays to evangelicals is occasioned not only by his newfound familiarity with them (he is careful to distinguish them from fundamentalists) but also by their vulnerability to his scorn and their centrality to his narrative. It takes little effort to find instances of "insipid," "simplistic," and "narcissistic" praise music and pop theology in seeker-sensitive megachurches and feel-good small groups. Wolfe respects his new evangelical friends too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture. But he also recognizes the extent to which the deep-seated individualistic and anti-formal currents in American culture, and even the fashionable mantra that lauds "spirituality" over "religion," are themselves the product of evangelicalism. When he writes that "we are all evangelicals now," he knows that evangelicals are agents as well as victims of cultural accommodation.

The trouble is that Wolfe's recognition of the many ways the evangelical tradition has influenced American religious life for two centuries does not figure in his overall thesis: "In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture--and American culture has triumphed." It is true, of course, that evangelicals have both shaped and been shaped by American culture, but in Wolfe's telling these acknowledgments come off as contradictions and their dual recognition as so much theoretical waffling. I wish Wolfe had spent more time at his desk to decide just where and when evangelicalism's respect for individual conscience and its suspicion of institutions had spread through American culture, which in turn lent its conformism and spirit of toleration back to today's evangelicalism. Theorizing religious change as a one-way street does not permit Wolfe to make full use of what he is too good an observer to ignore.

Although he recognizes the significance of American religious freedom, Wolfe can only see how it promotes pandering to the lowest common denominator: "Savvy church officials search out savvy consumers (and vice versa), and the result is a form of religious practice capable of pleasing both parties." Of the many studies he could have cited, he mostly chose those addressing his own concern--whether religious and secular Americans can coexist--and those of religiously conservative analysts evaluating current evangelical practice in the light of evangelical pretensions. He paid little or no attention to studies that ask different questions, coming to different conclusions, where another result of American religious freedom is the voice it gives to distinct, often marginalized, peoples.

Thus the reader learns little of the central role of the black church in the civil rights movement, of the hundreds of activist congregations that provided "sanctuary" to Central American refugees and thereby helped delegitimate Reagan-era counterinsurgency policies, of children of immigrants struggling to find the religious core in their cultural patrimony, or of Pentecostalism not just oppressing women but encouraging them in astounding acts of assertion. When Wolfe cites studies showing how women are sometimes empowered through conservative religion, he is too ready to hear them exercising their voice to demand sexual equality in ways that would make St. Augustine blush. It is as if women's empowerment means the death of true religion.

Wolfe's well-intentioned purpose to allay mutual fears and disarm recriminations on the part of his two audiences would have been better served if the theme of capitulation had not been such a relentless drumbeat. As it is, he lends support to those who see an eschatological slippery slope instead of a perennial tightrope in every instance calling for their cultural discernment.

R. Stephen Warner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he has directed the New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project and the Youth and Religion Project under grants from the Lilly Endowment and the Pew Charitable Trusts. His books New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church and Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration (with Judith G. Wittner) are among those cited in the book under review.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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