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Since the 1960s a fierce debate has raged among scholars seeking to assess the puzzling state of Americans' religious commitments. In one corner are the experts (historians, sociologists, and a host of other specialists) who characterize Americans as the most conspicuously religious people of the Western world. From the other corner, an equally formidable scholarly contingent sees a secularized society in which religious institutions are increasingly marginalized. Both sides muster a good deal of evidence, and the debate is far from being resolved.
What is and has been clear, however, is that in every town, city, and county, Americans are foraging for new forms of meditation, home-spun wisdom, and formulas for ecstatic experience that can patch easily into a highly individualistic, customized religious life. Impassioned, often undisciplined questers, with little respect for boundaries, theological underpinnings, or tradition, these seekers are very much in the American grain, but they seem to many observers to be a larger presence than ever before. Snatching up books, attending seminars and workshops, they represent an enormous, informal, rudderless congregation that somehow flourishes without committees, flea markets, bake sales, budgets, building campaigns, or denominational ties. Worshiping in the church of the Mysterium Tremendum, a placeless space without cornerstones or choirs, a mind-boggling arena where God answers to many names, they gather in disposable communities, retreat centers, and small groups of all sorts.
Ask them what they believe, and seekers will say, as if repeating the cardinal creed: "I am not religious. But I am very spiritual." Ask them about their practices, and prepare for tales of angels or shamans; natural health remedies and psychology; warriors and wolves, new rituals, mysticism, holy texts, and various forms of meditation. Audio- and videotapes, cds, and Tibetan bells call them to worship. They speak of feng shui, 12-step groups, promise-keeping, desert fathers, Sophia, and sometimes, perhaps, Buddhism, Catholicism, Benedictine community, and Depak Choprah all in the same breath.
According to its promoters, this First Church of the New American Pastiche will become the dominant way of religious life in the twenty-first century. (Some are calling it "a Second Reformation.") Critics argue that the hurly-burly between and beyond organized religion's borders reflects the worst kind of consumerism. The pastiche practice, they complain, issues not from a spiritual wellspring, but out of spiritual crisis.
The best place to start getting a handle on all this is a book just published by the University of California Press, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, by the distinguished Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow. His work, the product of a three-year effort funded by the Lilly Foundation, examines every available survey produced about Americans' religious habits, attitudes, and practices across the past five decades, and interprets hundreds of hours of contemporary interviews with men and women from around the country who have willingly offered their stories to Wuthnow's teams of graduate-student scribes.
In the hands of a lesser scholar, the data might have crumbled like dry clay, but Wuthnow describes their shape and texture with convincing precision. In one slim volume, at once critical and optimistic, mocking and sympathetic, Wuthnow has provided much-needed insight into the tensions squirming at the heart of the contemporary American religious experiment. Americans, he asserts, are now experiencing nothing less than "an altered sense of the sacred" and "a profound change in spiritual practices." The very meanings of religious commitment and community appear to have undergone redefinition. And there is no turning back.
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