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You say, "More Americans than ever proclaim themselves born again in Christ, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens self-esteem."
I find that a lot. And again, I think there's both a positive and a negative side to that. The positive side is that this self-esteem, the sense of empowerment that so many people talk about, shows a dimension of evangelical religion that my secular friends are completely unaware of. My secular friends will tell me that evangelical Christianity is patriarchal to the core—it's all about men oppressing women, going back to the most traditional kinds of gender roles and so on. And I see something entirely different. I see people being encouraged to develop as individuals, truly experiencing a sense of empowerment. In that sense, I think it's an enormously positive transformation of traditional evangelical religion.
Were you surprised when you found that?
That was one of the biggest surprises. But there's also a dangerous side to this change. There's something wrong with too much self-confidence. I would have expected a little more doubt. Now, I'm married to a Dane, and there's a Kierkegaardian culture in my family. Kierkegaard is largely missing in American religion. I don't think there's enough brooding going on.
You say: "In no other area of religious practice, especially for evangelicals, is the gap between the religion as it is supposed to be and religion as it actually is as great as it is in the area of sin. … Somehow I am not pleased with this retreat from sin." Why is that?
I'm not a great phrasemaker, but there is one phrase in the book I like—Salvation Inflation, which I compare to grade inflation. I define grade inflation by the fact that over the 30 years I've been teaching, every year I assign less and less, and every year the grades get higher and higher. It's a two-stage process. To some degree, we've seen that with salvation as well. People confess fewer and fewer sins, and are rewarded with more and more.
Doesn't your book leave readers with the impression that the trend you are tracking is more pervasive than it actually is?
I do say at various times that what I'm describing has various counters to it. On the question of sin, for example, I do say that the Southern Baptist Convention—which is after all the largest of the Protestant denominations—is one church that has not given up sin. But I think in spite of those caveats, the other impression does come across, and I think that's probably because I didn't pay as much attention to the South as I probably should have. And of course there are seriously committed Orthodox Jews who run against much of what I'm saying.
But the logic of your argument suggests that there's a certain inevitability to the direction of this transformation, that this is the train of American history and if you get in its way you'll be flattened.
In the book, it's true, that would be the main argument. But who can tell for sure? I would put my bets on "probably." "Inevitably" is a strong word. What is inevitable, I believe, is the process by which culture shapes other forces, including religion. It's possible that the culture could change, and in that way, we could go back to an older form of religion. But I admit that it's hard for me to imagine how that would take place.
In some ways your book goes against the grain of what Dean Kelly wrote many years ago about why conservative churches are growing. Those churches were growing, Kelly argued, because they were committed to Christian orthodoxy and to strong doctrine. And you are finding that those same churches have capitulated to the culture.
I believe what's going on in my re-interpretation of the Kelly thesis really has to do with the difference between quantitative and qualitative social science. If you simply look at the numbers, as Kelly did, and find that conservative churches are the ones that are growing, it's easy to conclude that their strict teaching is the critical factor. But when you look at what's happening qualitatively through ethnographic research, and what those churches are really doing, they don't look so strict. They look more and more as if they are fitting the kind of patterns I've described.
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