'Transformation' a thoughtful analysis of US culture's impact on religion

By Rich Barlow, Globe Correspondent, 10/1/2003

The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith, By Alan Wolfe, Free Press, 304 pp., $26

American culture is the world's teenager, vibrantly exuberant if often crass. It has remade all in its path, homogenizing everything from the food we eat to the TV we watch to foreigners' clothing and movie tastes. No wonder God never had a chance against this juggernaut.

"In the United States, culture has transformed Christ, as well as all other religions found within these shores," Boston College professor Alan Wolfe writes in "The Transformation of American Religion," his intriguingly reported survey of our religious beliefs and practices. This most modern of nations has reshaped the most ancient of faiths, from Judaism to Buddhism, says Wolfe; a country of multiple ethnicities, multiple opinions, multiple get-rich-quick schemes, multiple marriages, and, for numerous converts, multiple religions sees God as a celestial Stuart Smalley, a benign figure reassuring believers that they're good enough, they're smart enough, and doggone it, people like them.

Culture influences practice as well as belief. Only in America could Judaism adopt a new ritual, the adult bar mitzvah, after a character on the old "Dick Van Dyke Show" mourned that he'd never had one -- one of the fetching anecdotes with which Wolfe leavens his statistical evidence. With beliefs becoming more distinctly American, so are believers. "Whether or not the faithful were ever a people apart, they are so no longer," instead resembling their nonfaithful countrymen, according to Wolfe, who proclaims this good news. People who prefer a God of love to a God of truth are not going to kill for their beliefs. And people who change religions are going to blunt the knife edge of interfaith bigotry.

There's another part of Wolfe's message that may discomfort secular progressives. If most believers are not bug-eyed fanatics, the liberal intelligentsia nevertheless clings to that outmoded image, and Wolfe addresses them: Believers' "views may be different from yours on abortion or prayer in school, but we expect people in a democracy to have different views on major questions of public policy. As modern Americans with distinctly tolerant sensibilities, you pride yourselves on your willingness to change, yet religious believers, even the most conservative among them, have adopted themselves to modern society far more than you have changed your views about what they are really like. You have made the whole country more sensitive to the inequalities of race and gender. Now it is time to extend the same sympathy to those who are different in the sincerity of their belief."

That the faithful aren't monsters isn't news; even the dimmest secularist knows that it was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet Wolfe's reminder is still timely. Yes, he says, most fundamentalists "send a chill up my spine" with their self-certainty, but they "will always be a minority, even among conservative Christians." (Wolfe's profiles of evangelical churches debunks their fire-breathing stereotype.) Some right-wing ministers condemned Islam after 9/11, but our faith-based president was the leading cheerleader for religious tolerance. Yes, Catholic bishops covered up pedophilia, but public opinion forced reform.

To the extent that Americans' historic anti-intellectual streak now extends to religion (Wolfe reports that 10 percent of us think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife), is that all bad? We may not know who said "Blessed are the clean of heart," but we believe it, prizing character above brains.

"Transformation" is not the breeziest read. The prose is accessible but sober as a Bible Belt parson. Occasionally, Wolfe's corroboration for his assertions seems light. Overall, though, his documentation suggests that he's on to something.

When academic provocateur Stanley Fish is quoted as saying that "broadmindedness is the opposite of what religious conviction enacts and requires," he's being quoted for his ignorance. Wolfe puts analytical heft behind a cliched plea: Can't we all just get along?