More than three-quarters of Americans have a religious preference, and almost 60 percent say religion is very important to them. More than 90 percent of Americans believe God or a Universal Spirit exists, and more than two-thirds are absolutely sure of it; a striking 60 percent believe that there is a heaven. People use religion actively as a personal guide. Nearly 40 percent attend services at least once a week and have a place of worship, and a third turn to scripture almost every week.71
That level of religious attendance puts America on a par with Iran, though the United States’ level of observance is modest compared to India, strong Catholic countries such as Poland and Brazil, and Muslim nations such as Egypt, Indonesia, and Jordan.72
America is exceptional, however, in comparison with Western Europe and nearly all the other major economic powers. In Britain, a sizable majority say they never pray, compared to the United States, where less than a fifth never turn to God for help. Just a quarter in Germany and a fifth in Britain say their religion is important to them. And leading the secular disengagement are the oldest Catholic countries, Italy and France, where just 9 and 4 percent, respectively, are active in a religious organization. The great cathedrals of Europe are still standing, though they are virtually empty.73
Church attendance is relatively low in China and very low in Russia, each with their Communist history and continued government restrictions on the exercise of religion. While Orthodox Catholic affiliation in Russia has more than doubled in the past two decades, to 72 percent, barely 7 percent attend services at least once a month. Religious service attendance in Japan is almost as low, at roughly 3 percent, with a majority of Japanese claiming no religion and 41 percent identifying as Buddhists.74
Though religious observance is also on the decline in the United States, it is nonetheless striking that 37 percent report attending religious services at least once every week and, even more meaningfully, 40 percent describe themselves as being an active member of a church or other religious organization. This dominates all other types of civic organization in American life. The number of people who reported participating in leisure activities—including hobbies, music, arts, and sports—in the past year falls well below the 62 percent of people who reported going to a regular place of worship in the past year. School, youth, and parent support groups are important to Americans, but only half as many attend those as participate at church. Participation in professional groups, trade associations, self-help groups, and service and fraternal organizations is much lower, with involvement in neighborhood, ethnic, or political associations at the very bottom. It is the church congregations that continue to play the local community role.75
Religious practice in congregations is uniquely American and deeply connected to the country’s Protestant heritage and frontier history. Americans do not just prefer or identify with a denomination. They join a congregation with a finite membership. The congregation is a social space where people can share their faith, play roles at the church, celebrate holidays with others, educate and counsel young people and families, and have a social hall to host community events. Robert Putnam and David Campbell call this “congregationalization”—and all American faiths have moved toward it. Mosques and Hindu temples operate differently in America compared to elsewhere in the world, where imams and priests have more limited functions.76
America has also nurtured a mad number of religious denominations. Many emerged out of fluid beliefs, schisms, and mergers, some are new faiths founded in America, and still more came with diverse immigration, historically and contemporaneously. Mainline Protestantism encompasses vast numbers and types of Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Pentecostals. Modern Jewry includes the major Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements, as well as the Reconstructionists. The Orthodox movement also captures the various Hasidic traditions and Haredi rabbis with sect-like followings among the ultra-Orthodox in Brooklyn. Many Christian churches and megachurches are not grounded in any specific denomination. The black Protestant churches have their own distinct histories and traditions. And the Sunni and Shi’ite are distinct denominations, not surprisingly with their own mosques.
This is exactly what Thomas Jefferson aimed to achieve by the inclusion of the First Amendment: “Congress [will not endorse or establish] religion.” While the First Amendment does not bar the establishment of state religion, all state subsidies to support denominations ended by the early 1800s and “nonestablishment” has remained the rule. The new states of the New World were mostly Protestant: Puritans who were looking for freedom from religious persecution, Anglicans aligned with the Church of England, and reformed faiths in the Calvinist tradition. While Europe spent a good century contesting the relationship of state and religion, the United States disestablished its churches and promoted religious freedom from the beginning, even as America grew more religiously diverse. That is why America’s religious pluralism and greater involvement through congregations have, amazingly, endured.77
We should remember that the nativist reaction against the waves of immigration also included hostility to certain faiths, particularly toward the Catholic Church, as the papacy was presumed to exercise a foreign and authoritarian control incompatible with American liberties. John Kennedy, as we discussed earlier, had to assure the Protestant South that “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.” Mormons faced enmity and discrimination. Jews were subjected to virulent persecution and quotas that limited access to universities, clubs, neighborhoods, and corporate boards.
In the post-9/11 world, Muslims have not been embraced, and close to half of all American Muslims say they face a lot of discrimination here, and opposition to building mosques still has the potential to be politically explosive. Hostility to Islam figured prominently in many Christian conservatives’ rejection of Barack Obama, whose middle name is Hussein.78
But with secular culture so intrusive, the religiously faithful are very conscious of America’s religious diversity and for the most part are mutually supportive of other faiths. It helps that the observant look to a more loving than judgmental God and are more likely to believe in heaven than hell. Across all denominations, large majorities believe someone not of their own faith can go to heaven and receive God’s grace. More than 80 percent of Mormons, Catholics, and mainline Protestants believe that about non-Christians, as do about six in ten black Protestants and Evangelical Protestants.79
As Putnam and Campbell point out, “Americans’ God is more avuncular than angry, and it turns out that this sort of everyday theology has real implications for the ways in which Americans get along with one another.” The authors provide readers with a scorecard: “Almost everyone likes mainline Protestants and Jews”; “almost everyone likes Catholics more than Catholics like everyone else”; “Mormons like everyone else, while almost everyone [except Jews] dislikes Mormons”; “Evangelicals like almost everyone else more than they are liked in return”; “Catholics and evangelicals rate each other warmly,” with no sign of our earlier religious wars; but “almost everyone dislikes Muslims and Buddhists more than any other group.”80
While Muslims are victims of America’s new religious polarization, they still do much better economically in the United States than in Europe. And while one-third of Americans say they would be bothered if a large mosque like the one proposed at “ground zero” in Manhattan was built in their area, two-thirds of Americans say they have no problem with it.81
America’s religious pluralism is being sustained and renewed by the forces driving the country’s immigrant and racial diversity. The growing Hispanic community reflects the religious diversity of the Americas, and each evolution of America’s black community continues a commitment to black churches. Immigration from Asia and Muslim countries also adds to the mix, underscoring how much religious observance and new congregations are part of the modern American landscape, not just hangovers from past periods.
The African Amer
ican Protestant churches offer a mixture of evangelism, social gospel, and black identity, with a long history of protecting and guiding their parishioners in a racially segregated world. About 8 percent of all Americans belong to an African American Protestant church, and attendance has been rising; indeed, attendance is trending upward among the blacks with a four-year college education—the reverse of trends for other denominations. African American Protestants are more likely than mainline Protestants and Evangelicals to say religion is important to their daily life and to their identity. They are more likely to attend church weekly and to read scripture literally. They are also more likely to pray daily, say grace daily, talk about religion daily, and read scripture daily.82
The African American Protestant church is the ultimate congregation, community center, and venue for politics as well. For their parishioners, the church is part of a racial and political identity with a history of providing institutional support to the black community that extends from the abolitionist movement through the civil rights era and today. African American Protestants stand out among other religious groups as the most likely to make political decisions based on religion. And virtually no blacks voted for John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012.83
Hispanics are similarly religious and are helping to sustain religious observance in the United States. About 20 percent of Hispanics belong to Evangelical churches, similar to the proportion in Latin America. But two-thirds are Catholic, and that is changing the face of the Church in this country, just as the waves of Irish, Italian, and East European Catholics did when they dominated immigration to the United States. Today, more than a third of American Catholics are Hispanic, and that climbs to nearly 60 percent among those under age thirty-five. They are more observant and value religion more than non-Hispanic Catholics. They hold more traditional views on issues such as abortion and gay marriage while sharing blacks’ views on government, including aid to the poor and narrowing the gap between rich and poor.84
The church has a special importance in the growing number of Hispanic neighborhoods. Many of their parishes are almost entirely Hispanic and provide a space that nurtures shared traditions and a sense of belonging. The clergy in Hispanic communities have also become strong advocates for undocumented immigrants and immigration reform.
So this diverse, dynamic religious landscape plays an enduring role in America, despite the very real secularizing trends in the country.
But for all of its continued and unique importance, there are vast, long-term changes taking place that are dramatically changing the role of religion in politics and fueling the country’s political polarization. The slow, long-term decline in church attendance obscures dramatic and polarized generational and denominational shifts that are unfolding. Putnam and Campbell describe these shifts as “seismic societal shocks.”85
The first shift is the rising number of people with no religion. Starting in the 1990s, the number of Americans who no longer attended church rose steeply from about 13 percent to more than 20 percent by 2010. We saw similar trends among those with no affiliation, climbing from about 7 percent and approaching 20 percent during the same period. The secular “none’s” now exceed the number of mainline Protestants and are only outnumbered by Catholics and Evangelical Protestants.86
The second set of big shifts is generational and begins with the baby boomers, though the Millennials have the last word. The baby boomers lived the tumult of Vietnam, civil rights, changing gender roles, and the sexual revolution. They emerged more open to premarital sex than their parents and upcoming generations. More than 80 percent of baby boomers came to believe that premarital sex is acceptable, which turns the traditional value judgment at the heart of marriage and gender roles upside down. Their elder generations believed premarital sex was unacceptable with equal conviction and unanimity. But the baby boom was the largest generation, and its views on sex and marriage and skepticism about big, traditional institutions led it to pull back from organized religion. Between 1952 and 1978, the proportion of baby boomers saying religion is important to them fell from 75 to 52 percent. They became less observant than any other generation, and they have not returned as they have aged.87
The baby boom generation’s marked shift produced a counterreformation in the generation behind it, which became more observant and more traditional on the disruptive issues of the 1960s. That generation identified more with the conservative Evangelical churches. This anti–baby boom generation gave religious conservatives the most support when they mobilized to forcefully defend traditional values from the cultural trends in the 1980s and 1990s.
But the shifts in the Millennial generation are of a whole different order. Church attendance has been dropping sharply with adolescents since the late 1990s, producing a generation where a stunning three in ten have no religious affiliation. In the mid-1980s, many young people were gravitating to the Evangelical churches in greater numbers than those who gave up on religion; but since 2000, the seculars widely outnumber Evangelicals among the Millennials—and the gap grows wider still with those under thirty. Today, 36 percent of adults under thirty are seculars while just 20 percent are Evangelical.88
And the third big shift forming Putnam and Campbell’s “seismic societal shocks” is the deepening, polarized, and politicized reaction to the secularizing trends in the country. Over the past two decades, as church attendance plummeted among both non-Hispanic Catholics and mainline Protestants, the Evangelical churches gained more adherents and Evangelicals became more observant. And on matters of sexuality, there is a widening gap between them and the rest of the country. Through the 1990s, just 20 percent of non-Evangelicals judged premarital sex as always wrong, but Evangelicals grew more opposed over the decade.
The judgment that homosexuality is always wrong is a core belief among Evangelicals, and about 80 percent continued to be opposed through the first decade of the new millennium. Meanwhile, opposition in the rest of the country fell to just 45 percent. As same-sex marriage gained legal standing in more parts of the country and the Supreme Court’s decision granting constitutional equality to gay unions paved the way for even more disruptive changes, almost seven in ten white Evangelicals remained strongly opposed to it. A 60 percent majority of the country and rising now favors recognizing same-sex marriage, up from about 30 percent a decade ago, and support has even surged among black Protestants, rising from 32 to 43 percent in one year. But among white Evangelicals support reached only 23 percent in 2014, though that reached 27 percent in 2015.89
In 2004, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled to legalize same-sex marriage, only religiously unaffiliated and Jewish voters supported the change—and John Kerry paid a considerable price. But today, three-quarters of the unaffiliated and even more Jews support same-sex marriage, and they are joined by 62 percent of white mainline Protestants, 58 percent of white non-Hispanic Catholics, and 56 percent of Hispanic Catholics. Support for gay marriage is the emerging norm among many religious denominations, and that says a lot about America’s religious pluralism and multiculturalism.90
Sometimes it is hard to see past the intensifying polarization and remember that this is a country where 40 percent still attend religious services each week and where religious pluralism and tolerance are very much alive.
BLACK AND WHITE?
America’s “black and white” story has many chapters: a violent history of slavery; a civil war to achieve emancipation; a century of racial domination and legal segregation and disenfranchisement; periods of abolitionist opposition and struggle for civil rights, culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws; antipoverty organizations and urban riots; affirmative action; and national protests demanding police reform after police killed unarmed blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, Staten Island, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland.
Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese Americans each have their own racial history, too. Nonetheless, America is undoubtedly in a new chapter of that history today. Consider this
fact about the new America: a record 10 percent of couples told America’s census takers in 2010 that their marriages are interracial—up from 7.4 percent in 2000. How annoying these spouses and their multiracial children must be for the census takers or pollsters trying to fit Americans into neat categories.91
The proportion of newlyweds that entered mixed-race marriages doubled, from 6.7 percent in 1980 to 15.1 percent in 2010. Among newlyweds, a stunning 17 percent of African Americans, 26 percent of Hispanics, and 28 percent of Asian Americans married someone of a different race. About a quarter of newly married African American men, a quarter of all Hispanics, and more than a third of Asian women formed interracial households. In big metropolitan areas such as San Antonio and Los Angeles, one-third of third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans “married out.”92
The proportion of Americans who are multiracial Americans is growing at triple the rate of the whole country and reached 6.9 percent of the population in 2015, according to a special Pew survey. Most Americans with a mixed-race background said they faced racial discrimination at various points, yet three in five “felt proud to have a multiracial background.” That background, they reported, came with more “advantages” than “disadvantages.”
Given America’s history of excluding, segregating, and discriminating against blacks, Latinos, and Asians, not to mention Muslims today and Jews, Italians, and Poles in the past, one in ten is both remarkable and revealing of the plate-shifting social transformations that are changing the country before our eyes.
President Barack Obama is the living embodiment of this trend—the American melting pot incarnate—as he noted during his address on the long-since-forgotten Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy. “I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents,” he said, “and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”93
America Ascendant Page 10
