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The Transformation of American Religion The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith by Alan Wolfe Free Press, 2003 309 pp. $26

Authors are usually asked by publishers to help the marketing department locate the audience to which the proposed book is directed. Most professors write for colleagues in their own and adjacent fields, but the potential of sales to the dwindling ranks of rich university libraries and narrowing ranks of congenial private scholars is nowadays deemed insufficient.

To judge by the product, Alan Wolfe and his agent must have had an easy time of it pitching the idea for The Transformation of American Religion, his unflinching overview of contemporary religious life in the United States. Not only is Wolfe, a social scientist who teaches at Boston College, a prolific and increasingly influential writer. He also addresses two distinct nonspecialist audiences, both of which should (and likely will) pay attention to what he has to say.

The first audience is made up of people like himself, the sort of public intellectual who writes for (or would like to write for) The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The second audience is people of faith in America, especially but not solely the sort of evangelical with whom he became friendly in the course of his research. Both audiences, overlapping only in places like the readership of this review, are implicated in the book, albeit unequally, public intellectuals in the introduction and conclusion, people of faith in the eight chapters in between.

Wolfe's message for the first audience is that they need not fear the kind of people who make up the second. Religious people pose no threat to democratic institutions. In earlier times and other places, religion may have been a radical force or a repressive one, but not today in the United States. Religious Americans are overwhelmingly moderate, unwilling to press their ideas against those they perceive to differ with them. Indeed, "if anything, the problem American believers have is lack of confidence rather than excessive arrogance."

When Wolfe writes that "we are all evangelicals now," he knows that evangelicals are agents as well as victims of cultural accommodation.

Wolfe's purported message for the second audience is that because of their desire to please and their need to fill pews, they have become so comfortable in the surrounding culture that they ought to abandon any claims to being "resident aliens." Taking issue with what he hears Stanley Hauerwas telling American Christians, Wolfe says to them, "I would urge you instead to take pride in your flexibility and adaptability" in transforming faith to fit society.

Pride, however, is not the feeling Wolfe's account will engender in evangelicals who overhear him saying much less complimentary things. "For all their (often quite legitimate) denunciation of sex and violence in the popular media, evangelicals flourish amidst the celebrity-drenched, lowest-common-denominator, highly sentimentalized world of romance novels, daytime soaps, NASCAR races, and Opry-knockoff music that dominates America's entertainment industry." With well-chosen and telling detail, Wolfe applies this lesson across the board: Americans of all faith communities pose a decreasing ideological challenge to culture. "Evangelical churches lack doctrine because they want to attract new members. Mainline churches lack doctrine because they want to hold on to those declining numbers of members they have." Each in its own way, American religious communities are shown bending before American social pressures.

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