This article irst appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 3, 2011 - About midway through his lecture about religion and American life Wednesday night, Harvard's Robert Putnam proved he was a professor by giving his audience at Washington University a pop quiz:
How often do you say grace?
In keeping with a survey he has conducted during his extensive research on the role religion plays in the lives of Americans, Putnam asked for a show of hands on three different options: most of the time, once or twice a week, occasionally or never.
The response from the crowd at Graham Chapel, he said, was close to the answers from Americans at large: 46 percent said occasionally or never, 44 percent said daily or even more often, and 10 percent said once or twice a week.
Putnam, best known for his book "Bowling Alone," on the importance of community in American life, used the results to illustrate the basic theme of his most recent book, "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us," written with David Campbell.
The book, and Putnam's lecture, explore a three-part puzzle about the prominence of religion in our everyday lives: How can America be religiously devout and religiously diverse yet still be religiously tolerant?
Those attributes don't often co-exist, Putnam said, pointing out the sectarian strife that has torn apart regions from Bosnia to Belfast. And given the history that he traced over the past several decades, his conclusion wouldn't necessarily be what anyone would expect.
But, as Putnam showed with statistics, charts and real-life evidence from congregations he has studied to flesh out the numbers, the United States has achieved a remarkable state of tolerance in the face of what would seem to be an intolerable situation.
To prove his first point, how devout Americans are, he cited statistics on weekly attendance at religious services that showed a range from Jordan, at more than 90 percent, to Japan, at less than 5 percent. The United States registered at 36 percent, slightly more than Iran -- a level that Putnam said puts Americans as the most religious advanced civilization in the world.
Rebellion and religion
He then placed that finding in the context of the last 60 years. The 1950s, he said, was the most religiously observant decade in U.S. history, when 60 percent of Americans said they had attended religious services in the previous week. But when the iconoclastic '60s arrived, with questions raised about everything from race to gender to politics, religion and morality were not spared.
Putnam recalled his college years in the early '60s, when the rules about when male and female students could be together in a dormitory room were very strict -- from 2-4 p.m. on Sunday afternoons, with the door open and three feet on the floor. Within just a few years, he said, that rigid separation gave way to coed dorms, coed rooms and all sorts of activities going on behind closed doors
"There's a group of guys all across America who are going, 'If only I had been born a few years later,'" Putnam said.
But this great sense of liberation from old rules also brought a religious schism. Some left faith behind and moved into a far more secular life, while others took comfort in the strictures that religion provided and were appalled at the collapse of rules that they believed had governed civilization for 2,000 years.
Then came aftershocks in the 1970s and 1980s, when religious movements became more political -- not by design, Putnam said, but when candidates for office realized they could capitalize on religious differences and preferences. The Religious Right was born.
"This did not begin as a political movement," he said. "It began as a moral and religious movement, but once they were there and stressing moral values, people attracted the attention of politicians."
For Americans who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, the movement created yet another backlash, Putnam added, with many young people saying, "If that's what religion means, I'm out." This increased alienation brought a sharp increase in the number of Americans who answered the question of religious preference by saying "none."
These "nones" historically had made up 5-7 percent of the population, but the rise grew to about 18 percent as of this summer, Putnam said; of Americans under the age of 30, the portion is even higher, at 31 percent.
But viewing them as what Putnam called "a group of hard-nosed atheists" would be misreading the statistics, he said.
"Most of them say they believe in God," he said. "Most of them pray. Some of them attend religious services, and most of them express at least some sympathy for religion in general or spirituality in general."
Still, he said, the diversity and polarization that the numbers indicate are likely to grow even sharper as older, more religious Americans die and younger ones with less religious feeling take their place. As this shift occurs, Putnam added, the correlation between political views and religious views has changed and hardened. In the past, he noted, most left-wing reformist movements had deep religious roots, but that has changed dramatically in recent years.
Devout and tolerant
So if Americans are more devout, yet religiously more diverse and polarized, why are they still more tolerant of people with other religious views?
Putnam's statistics showed that Americans feel most warmly toward Jews, followed by mainline Protestants and Catholics; at the opposite end of the scale are Muslims -- but right above them are Buddhists.
That juxtaposition, he said, shows that the underlying reasons aren't necessarily political -- "there's not much fear about Buddhist terrorism" -- as much as it is a wariness of the unknown.
But even that emotion doesn't stop Americans from showing tolerance toward those whose religious beliefs are different. To the question of whether a person without religious faith can be a good American, 98 percent of secular Americans say yes and 82 percent of highly religious Americans say the same.
Even more surprising, Putnam said, were the answers to the question of "can good people of other religions go to heaven." Mainline Protestants topped the list with a positive response of 96 percent, down to 83 percent for evangelical Protestants. Asked the question about non-Christians, 83 percent of Catholics say yes, as do 54 percent of evangelical Protestants. Those responses puzzled Putnam, who pointed out:
"That is not the right answer. The Bible is very clear about this."
What does it all mean? The key, Putnam said, lies not only in his most recent book but in his most famous one. In our private lives, we are becoming more diverse. Most marriages in the 21st century have been between people of different faiths, and most people have close friends of other faiths. About a third of Americans practice religions different from the ones they grew up in.
"Almost all Americans love someone who is of another faith," Putnam said, "and it's hard to demonize someone of another faith in those circumstances."
And it's not belief in God that makes people more tolerant, but attendance at religious services. Putnam said regular church-goers are more generous, more likely to volunteer, more likely to give blood and are in general better neighbors, better friends and better citizens.
"The more friends you have in church, the more deeply you are involved in religious networks, the nicer you are," he said. "Church friends turn out to be remarkably powerful. Church friends are in some sense supercharged friends."
His conclusion:
"The bottom line of 'Bowling Alone,' in terms of your personal well-being and your community's well-being, was that bowling in leagues is better than bowling alone."
And bowling in church leagues is even better.