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What Wolfe says to his audience of secular intellectuals is irenic and calming. They should be willing to engage religious people in debate and not attempt to use the courts to rule them out of public life. What he says to his religious audience is, despite his own reluctance to offend, ironic and alarming. People like me, he says just between the lines, can live with people like you because you do not truly take yourselves seriously. He thus invites people of faith to prove him wrong by becoming the fearsome cabal they are imagined to be.
Wolfe reached his conclusions through a prodigious effort of watching, listening, and reading. He visited churches, synagogues, and mosques from one end of the country to the other, surfed the web, and especially studied scores of the ethnographies of American religious communities that have appeared in the past generation, seamlessly weaving into his narrative observations made by over a hundred of my fellow sociologists of religion. (He is scrupulous to give proper credit in the endnotes and in an unusually thorough index.) The literature he draws upon represents a choice in favor of empirical social science and against so-called "cultural studies." What Wolfe and his sources document are folkways by which American lay people--Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, but especially evangelicals--actually live their religion, not the texts through which their spokesmen and their scriptures officially define it.
The illustrations Wolfe has chosen are rich in themselves--the book is one of the most assiduous reviews of a new and growing literature that I know of--and they are punctuated with thoughtful insights. He writes about post-Vatican II Catholic liturgies, Pentecostal practices in black mainline denominations, Jewish women recruited into "Modern Orthodoxy," white Americans converting to Buddhism, and Muslim immigrants who get a few minutes off the job for midday prayer but cannot find a proper place to do their ritual washing. Reflecting on the need for suitable religious facilities, Wolfe writes, "Money is not always alien to faith; in some cases it makes possible its exercise." Linking Protestants' habit of denominational switching to immigrants' need to adapt to a new country, he observes that "because of its immigrant history, the United States is, in a very basic sense, a nation of switchers."
The special attention Wolfe pays to evangelicals is occasioned not only by his newfound familiarity with them (he is careful to distinguish them from fundamentalists) but also by their vulnerability to his scorn and their centrality to his narrative. It takes little effort to find instances of "insipid," "simplistic," and "narcissistic" praise music and pop theology in seeker-sensitive megachurches and feel-good small groups. Wolfe respects his new evangelical friends too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture. But he also recognizes the extent to which the deep-seated individualistic and anti-formal currents in American culture, and even the fashionable mantra that lauds "spirituality" over "religion," are themselves the product of evangelicalism. When he writes that "we are all evangelicals now," he knows that evangelicals are agents as well as victims of cultural accommodation.
The trouble is that Wolfe's recognition of the many ways the evangelical tradition has influenced American religious life for two centuries does not figure in his overall thesis: "In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture--and American culture has triumphed." It is true, of course, that evangelicals have both shaped and been shaped by American culture, but in Wolfe's telling these acknowledgments come off as contradictions and their dual recognition as so much theoretical waffling. I wish Wolfe had spent more time at his desk to decide just where and when evangelicalism's respect for individual conscience and its suspicion of institutions had spread through American culture, which in turn lent its conformism and spirit of toleration back to today's evangelicalism. Theorizing religious change as a one-way street does not permit Wolfe to make full use of what he is too good an observer to ignore.
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