Glenn Lucke, Review of Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity

[Reprinted with permission from InSight, a  publication of the think tank where I work.]

America and the Challenge of Religious Diversity

by Robert Wuthnow—Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 448pp.

Citizens of the United States are living in a time of religious and cultural diversity that is unprecedented in our nation’s history. The electoral map from recent presidential campaigns, dividing the country between Red and Blue, is often read as a proxy for religious affiliations. However, as Robert Wuthnow shows with a wealth of data, religious commitments represent a far more variegated topography. New and emerging religious differences, previously addressed only in the context of sociological debates over secularization, have not been adequately explored. America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity takes up the question of pluralism and the problems it presents both for democracy and for religious communities in our society.

In this rich and nuanced study, Wuthnow addresses a number of pressing questions facing the nation. How, he asks, are Americans able to maintain a sense of exceptionalism—with divine sanction—while encountering other religions? How will our sense of identity change as new religions grow? And how do Americans manage diversity in their daily lives?

The question of the sustainability of democracy occupies the first part of the book. The 1950s “tripartite settlement” described in Will Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew no longer obtains as Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists have swelled in numbers in recent decades. The response to this growing pluralism, Wuthnow argues, has played out at three levels: the legal protections afforded in basic civil rights, cultural issues of assimilation versus transmission of traditional folkways, and at the level of religious life, where mere toleration is the general disposition. In spite of the real pressures engendered by pluralism on the legal system and on cultural arrangements, Wuthnow believes that sufficient resources exist to enable American institutions to deal with these challenges. The key problem comes at the third level, where, on the whole, Wuthnow detects avoidance as the most common strategy for dealing with diversity. In the balance of the book, he explores how religious people engage religious pluralism.

Based on his survey data and extensive interviews, Wuthnow classifies spiritually-minded Americans into “spiritual shoppers,” Christian “exclusivists,” and Christian “inclusivists.” He details the social forces that shape adherents in each group, explores the resources they have for maintaining belief plausibility, and suggests ways in which each group interacts with the society more broadly. Paradoxically, while spiritual shoppers have a commendable openness, that very openness inclines them to a shallow, eclectic spirituality with little commitment. In Wuthnow’s view, the individualistic consumerism of shoppers means that they are unlikely to build institutions and so are unlikely to forge any new religious consciousness.

Compared to the other groups, Wuthnow finds the exclusivists best able to maintain their worldview in the face of otherness, and identifies such social factors as restricted networks, lower cultural capital, and a consequent deference to credentialed authorities (in their realms), as enabling this preservation. Still, he shows that even the exclusivists no longer believe innocently, but must negotiate the challenges of holding to their beliefs in the face of neighbors, coworkers, and even family members from other religions.

Inclusivists may have the most difficult path. They try to hold in tension both the notion that Christianity is the best religion and that all other religions are equally valid means to God, notions that are not easy to harmonize. One senses that while he is respectful of shoppers and exclusivists, Wuthnow finds inclusivists traveling the more helpful road. “Religious pluralism,” he writes, “involves more than the mere coexistence of multiple traditions.” “At the very minimum, it requires engagement across traditions.” A reflective pluralism is needed that goes farther than a merely tolerant, peaceful co-existence. In an earlier book (Christianity In The 21^st Century, Oxford, 1993) Wuthnow writes about ‘living the question’ and here he contends for a stance that valorizes both civic pluralism and religious commitment, both true-believing congregations and open-minded individuals. These are difficult positions to live.

America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity is a carefully researched, highly accessible, and beautifully written book. It makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the sources of pluralism and how the tensions it generates are being lived out.

© 2005, Glenn Lucke.

Comments

[Rich]

Glenn,

It sounds like a great book. The author's characterization of three common American perspectives on religious pluralism begs the obvious question.... What is a Gospel-oriented perspective on pluralism and how does it compare and contrast with these views?

RBC

[Glenn]

I think that Wuthnow might place what you term a Gospel-oriented perspective in the category he labels "Christian exclusivism".