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Clearly, I am doing no more than sketching the arguments of a complex and idea-rich book, but even this brief summary raises many questions. With any luck, Greeley's work will generate a major debate about the evidence for European (and, by implication, American) religious belief and practice. Having said this, though, I want to suggest several critical areas in which his argument is questionable.
Let us begin with the history, the debunking of the Age of Faith: "The golden age of religion never existed." Everything in this debate depends on terminology, and especially the use of words like "religion." Using a number of standard social histories of medieval and modern Europe, Greeley questions whether "save in some times and some places, religious practice was ever all that intense." I would argue that the studies he cites prove the exact opposite. They demonstrate a massive commitment to religious belief and practice, defined as interest in a supernatural reality that could be accessed by ritual conduct, although these accounts raise real doubts about how much of this was carried on under the auspices of orthodox Christianity, or with the consent of established church authorities. But does Greeley want to talk about religious practice or orthodox observance? If he says that the religious life of early modern Europe was not uniformly Catholic or Protestant, fine, but that is not the conclusion he actually draws. If we define religion in broad terms, then we certainly see a massive decline in religion with the advance of industry and modern medicine, and the growth of cities: in other words, a process of secularization.
And there are other issues. Greeley's surveys show Europeans agreeing in large numbers with certain beliefs and assertions, but with little sense of the strength or cultural meaning of these statements. Based on impressions of European media and public discourse, of ethnographic observations of European communities, I would see strong support for the idea of secularization, which is quite at odds with Greeley's survey data. But then there are strict limits to what can be determined by such surveys, or at least what real indications they give of the role of religion in politics, society, or culture. The statement "I believe in life after death" has radically different cultural connotations in (say) Nashville as opposed to Frankfurt, and these different meanings reflect the very different history of religious change and secularization in the two regions.
Though my critique may seem subjective, what I am offering is in fact a standard social-scientific criticism, namely that Greeley's data might be reconciled with theoretical interpretations other than those he offers, and which he does not explore. His interpretation might or might not be correct, but this cannot be decided definitely unless a test is devised to assess those other interpretations.
The issue of methodology is critical. Greeley has a thorough (if not Gradgrindian) commitment to a positivist quantitative approach, and if this leads to conclusions that seem frankly silly, then the fault must lie in public perceptions, not in the statistics. The introduction offers a gorgeously Greeleyan piece of rhetoric: "Data from probability samples do not make for easy cocktail party chatter, but they are a lot more reliable than the repetition of clichés about 'what everybody knows.' " Well, clichés are never worth defending, and I would be the last to reaffirm the truthfulness of "what everybody knows." But the argument here is that on the one side, we have Andrew Greeley with his hard statistics, and on the other we find only feather-brained dilettantes at their cocktail parties. It really is not that simple.
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