Shaylyn Romney Garrett

Astounding amount of research but, wow, did I feel condescended to. The common pattern was: show a graph, verbally describe the graph, and then draw conclusions from that and the 20 graphs preceding it. I can read a graph, thank you very much. The political section, which I understood was the core and reason behind this book, did not clearly provide answers. And, for various reasons, the all-important surveys were rarely departed from. The last 3rd was interesting and I agree with the conclusion. But I felt like more could have been done on so many levels. And the conclusion seemed to spring out of mid-air. Could have been better. And Could have asked better questions.… (mehr)

American Grace is a fantastic treatise on the state of religion in America in the first few years after the turn of the century. I suspect some findings may have changed slightly since, but religious feeling is so profoundly cultural and stable that I expect the findings are still true.

Some of my favorite findings:

• Younger Americans are less supportive of abortion than their parents -- though they are not more religious. This can be traced back to seeing abortion rights as given (the current debate is about restrictions on abortion, not about whether it should be legal at all), to easy access to contraception that allows moral judgments against unplanned pregnancy, and to widespread and high-quality ultrasound photos that are never passed around as "my fetus".
• The number of white Catholics and mainline Protestants is dropping -- and quickly. However, because of the influx of Latino immigrants, the overall number of Catholics has stayed essentially constant (though with huge cultural challenges), whereas the number of mainline Protestants has actually dropped. Why are the traditional mainline Protestants and Catholics leaving and becoming non-religionists? I have to wonder whether it is the rise of evangelicalism and the fact that evangelicals are claiming the term "Christian" for themselves, linguistically eliminating a space to be Christian and non-evangelical -- and given lack of cultural familiarity with anything but Christianity and non-religiosity, folks opt for non-religiosity. This, to my mind, has problematic implications.
• The evangelical rise of the 1970s and 1980s was a tiny absolute change (adding about 1 in 20 Americans to the ranks of evangelicals) -- it was massive only through comparison to the simultaneous decline in the number of mainline Protestants. The number of evangelicals has been dropping again for the past 20-30 years.
• In 2006, about 30% of the population was evangelical, about 8% was Black Protestant, about 14% was mainline Protestant. About 23% was Catholic, about 2% was Jewish, and about 2% was Mormon. About 17% professed no religion (this means more non-religious folks than the mainline Protestant traditional heart of America!), and about 4% professed other faiths. To me, this is many fewer "other faiths", "non-religious", Jews, and Mormons than I expected -- presumably a reflection of my privileged citified life.
• Religious Americans are nicer (more generous, more civic-minded, more trusting and trustworthy, more empathetic, more altruistic). This effect does not depend on denomination. However, these changes are due to church-going social networks -- not due to conservative politics, due to religious beliefs, or due to demographics. In fact, religious beliefs alone make adherents less tolerant, less civic-minded, and less nice; when this negative effect is not attenuated by the positive effect of churchgoing, the negative effect of religious beliefs without religious community becomes more apparent.
• Religious people are happier. Religiosity is one of the closest correlates of life satisfaction, at least as strong as income. The difference in happiness between a non-churchgoer and a weekly churchgoer is slightly larger than the difference between someone who earns $10k a year and someone who earns $100k a year.
• People don't like Buddhists. This blows my citified mind. They are second-least liked, followed by Muslims. Almost every religious groups feels coldly toward Muslims and Buddhists -- with the exception of Jews, who are warm to Buddhists and cool toward Muslims. I am dismayed and intrigued by this finding, and I'd love to see more on it.

The authors do an excellent job at filling the book with findings rather than filler (no filler to be seen in this long piece of non-fiction, in fact), graphics that illustrate, and detailed and straightforward discussions of methodology in an appendix and footnotes for those of us who prefer to judge ourselves the quality of findings in the social sciences. Altogether, it's extremely well written for a lay audience without sacrificing any rigorousness -- a hard line to walk, and one that I applaud the authors for.

I also found myself reflecting on the final chapter, which lauds how American culture is able to be devout and diverse and not have religious wars. Putnam and Campbell attribute this stability to the history of interreligious interactions and marriage. We are bound together, they argue, because we know people who believe differently than we ourselves do, and we resolve the cognitive dissonance of personally knowing good people of other faiths with the theology that they are going to hell by changing the theology away from orthodox, rather than by changing our friendships. They find American religious pluralism to be the saving grace of a country that is highly religious, high diverse, and highly charged.

For me, interpersonal argument for the lack of religious-based war goes a long way to explaining the increasing tension regarding Muslim immigrants, like that of St. Cloud described brilliantly in Act I of a This American Life episode -- we're at a moment in history where Muslims are demonized and feared in the mainstream because of lack of personal contact as well as media portrayals, and this lack of contact is only exacerbated by the immigrant status of the most visible Muslims in the USA today. The call to action, then, is to keep forging personal relationships, to keep holding interreligious fastathons for charity during Ramadan, to keep talking and discussing and assimilating. Assimilation is, indeed, just what the old guard is asking for. What's missing -- and important -- however, is that assimilation changes both groups.… (mehr)