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Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College. He is the author most recently of An Intellectual in Public (Univ. of Michigan Press), a collection of his essays and reviews from The New Republic and elsewhere, and The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (Free Press). Many readers of Books & Culture will have seen his October 2000 Atlantic Monthly cover story, "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind." Michael Cromartie spoke with Wolfe in Washington, D.C, last November; John Wilson joined the conversation.
Alan, you say that "in the United States culture has transformed Christ, as well as all other religions found within these shores. In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture—and American culture has triumphed." Why is this?
Religion is an enormously overpowering force that influences how people think and how they act, what they do, what they think is ethically right and wrong, and so on. But culture has very much the same kind of impact as well. It also shapes who we are and how we act. The question that preoccupies me is what happens when these two gigantic forces clash, as they do in the United States. And I argue in the book that culture tends to win in most such clashes. And so religion finds itself adapting to some characteristic features of American culture that are antithetical to what, for lack of a better term, we call "the old-time religion."
What would be some examples of those adaptations?
The individualism of our culture, the populist quality of our culture, its short attention span, and its anti-intellectualism. All those things influence all the other kinds of institutions we have: they influence sports, they influence politics. Politics today doesn't resemble what it was 50 or 70 years ago; the same is true of sports. How could religion be immune to these cultural forces? It too will take new forms—what some people might call "mutations." I was looking for neutral terms, so I called them "transformations."
I wonder if someone from a megachurch might say in response to your book, "Well, it's true that our services have been influenced by trends in secular entertainment, but look what we've done: we've grown, many people have had their lives transformed by Christ. There are former alcoholics attending our AA groups. People with broken marriages are now healing their lives."
I am very sympathetic to that. I'm not sitting here saying these changes are horrible things. First, I am in no position to do that; I'm not religious myself. I see it more as a dilemma, and I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the person who has to respond to that dilemma. What do you do if you're strongly convinced that the truth you want to communicate should be expressed in a certain way, yet you recognize that this approach simply isn't drawing many people to it? I'm enormously impressed by Rick Warren at Saddleback and his homiletic style, which I think is extraordinary. I describe him not only as the best preacher, but as simply the best public speaker I have ever heard. As I was sitting there listening to him say, "Avoid sin," and making jokes, the question that occurred to me was this: are these people better off here, or are they better off watching television or a football game? And they are definitely better off in Saddleback. On the other hand, conservative critics of Rick Warren would propose a third alternative: a more old-fashioned church.
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