Citation:
Abstract:
American Grace is a major achievement, a fascinating look at
religion in today’s America. Unique among nations, America is deeply
religious, religiously diverse and remarkably tolerant. But in recent
decades, the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped.
America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and
David Campbell. In the 1960s religious observance plummeted. Then, in
the 1970s and 1980s a conservative reaction produced the rise of
evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young
people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative
politics, have abandoned organized religion entirely. The result:
growing polarization. The ranks of religious conservatives and secular
liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates
in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are
strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased, while religious
identities are increasingly fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this
denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance,
notwithstanding the so-called “culture wars.”
American Grace is based on two of the most comprehensive
surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America. It
includes a dozen in-depth profiles of diverse congregations across the
country, which illuminate the trends described by Putnam and Campbell in
the lives of real Americans.
Nearly every chapter of American Grace contains a surprise about American religious life.