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AMERICAN EVANGELICALS are frequently bewildered by the aggressively hostile responses they elicit from the ideological left. Someone offers a generic prayer before a high-school football game, asking God to give the players courage, determination, and good sportsmanship. Immediately someone becomes apoplectic, as if America was on the verge of recreating 16th-century Europe's wars of religion. Soon, a civil liberties organization files a lawsuit to halt hazardous public piety.

Okay, that's a caricature. But good caricatures have recognizable features. Anyone who reads the newspapers will recognize the way some ideologues panic in the face of public religious expression and run to the courts to check the innocuous and perhaps beneficial pieties of the majority.

Sociologist Alan Wolfe's newly published book, The Transformation of American Religion (Free Press), is addressed in part to these panicked leftists. Calm down, he says, and lay off the lawsuits. Americans may be pervasively religious, but they are not in the aggregate dangerously religious. Go to India if you want to see that kind of religion.

Evangelicals might welcome a book like this. But unfortunately, this argument, designed to calm the Left, is disturbing for believers. Liberals should relax, Wolfe says, because the conservative Christians' rhetoric of biblical inerrancy and moral stringency is belied by their actual practice. Wolfe subtitled his book How We Actually Live our Faith, and he paints a picture of a privatized religion that lacks confidence and is eager to avoid offense.

This toothless evangelicalism, Wolfe says, is the result of market forces and peculiarly American cultural habits. "Christians and Jews … have ignored doctrines, reinvented traditions, switched denominations, redefined morality, and translated their obligation to witness into a lifestyle."

Doctrinal ignorance is one feature of American religion that amazes Wolfe most. He cites familiar statistics: 58 percent of Americans cannot name five of the Ten Commandments, and just under half know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible. But he sees such egregious ignorance as a parallel to American politics, in which few voters bother to learn the details before they vote.

Likewise, Wolfe notes the way in which market forces have combined with the ethic of expressive individualism to secularize religion. Savvy pastors take what the unchurched want most and offer a religious path to their desires. After interviewing a prominent Cincinnati pastor, Wolfe concluded: "Religion is [for him] not the alternative to such modern ideals as individualism, but a more effective way to realize them." And a nationally known megachurch pastor from Houston told him, "I take what is worldly and baptize it."

Indeed, the reshaping of the suburban landscape has largely erased truly public spaces for witness and has made it necessary for churches to offer incentives for people to come to them. "That process," Wolfe writes, "inevitably transforms the balance of power between institution and individual" as the unchurched "know that they have something the megachurches want." Some megachurches have made a serious attempt to reorient themselves against the prevailing cultural winds, but drifting with the current—"practicing the culture" rather than "practicing the faith" as one of Wolfe's critics put it—is surely a constant temptation.

By making religion not only attractive but easy, Wolfe says, we are experiencing "salvation inflation." The reference is to the well-known phenomenon of grade inflation, in which teachers give so many A's that top grades become meaningless. Likewise, as evangelical Christians expect less of people "to achieve salvation, the blessings of salvation are offered with fewer strings attached." Wolfe quotes another sociologist, who writes that most megachurches provde "high-intensity experiences of communality with relatively weak systems for insuring individual religious accountability—the assurance of right without the punishment of wrong."

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10