A Kinder, Gentler Fundamentalism

In his 1998 book, One Nation, After All, Alan Wolfe chided liberals for their misapprehensions about the political attitudes of ordinary Americans. Drawing on interviews with 200 suburbanites, Wolfe argued that middle-class Americans are far more moderate in outlook than most intellectuals and journalists gave them credit for. The book--part of what Wolfe called the Middle Class Morality Project--contended that the whole notion of a "culture war" was a myth and that most Americans were instinctive pluralists with admirably tolerant positions on issues like race, homosexuality and welfare.

Now, in The Transformation of American Religion, Wolfe is extending that project into the realm of religion. By examining "how we actually live our faith," as his subtitle puts it, he is attempting to counter what he sees as a reflexive liberal disdain for America's faithful. A sociologist at Boston College (a Catholic institution with Jesuit leanings), Wolfe notes that while not a person of faith himself, he feels discomfort with the academic world and its "long tradition of intellectual snobbishness toward people of faith--a tradition, I have come to believe, that ends in forms of bigotry little different from religion at its worst moments."

To research this book, Wolfe dropped in on churches, synagogues and seminaries, and read numerous ethnographic studies of congregations. He came away convinced that the old image of religion as a fire-and-brimstone, Bible-thumping affair is obsolete. "If Jonathan Edwards were alive and well," he writes, "he would likely be appalled." Far from living in a world apart, "the faithful in the United States are remarkably like everyone else." Seeking to reassure those "who worry about faith's potential fanaticism," Wolfe argues that "we are all mainstream now." Ordinary people "who want nothing more than to serve their God and to be modern, American," have "more in common with you than you realize."

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