The Faith Instinct (38 page)

In no country today does religion play a more intricate political role than in the United States. Europeans are continually astonished that this most materialistic of societies, as they see it, remains far more religious than theirs have become. But it is not adherence to a single church, like that of the Irish or Italians to Catholicism, that gives the United States its religiosity. A multitude of faiths are practiced, often in strong competition with one another. How does religion operate in American society? Why have Americans remained such assiduous church-goers when the populations of European countries have become increasingly secular?

Religious schisms are usually about far more than differences in religious doctrine. The advocates of a new doctrine may genuinely believe their cause is divine, but as adherents are gained, the doctrine become
s a source of influence, a rallying cry for all who are dissatisfied with the establishment for any of a multitude of reasons. Groups that hold many grievances against one another may then find that none is so potent a cause as the religious difference that is now at hand. Religion can polarize a struggle more forcefully than any other cause because it stirs emotional drives to unite with one’s friends and oppose or kill one’s adversaries.

The Reformation had just such an effect in Europe, setting off a century and a half of wars between Protestant and Catholic powers. One small eddy in this maelstrom enveloped Tudor England, a non-Catholic country menaced by the larger Catholic nations of Spain and France. One of the Tudors’ successors, the Stuart king Charles I, polarized the country by ignoring parliament and flirting with Catholic authorities in France to keep himself in power. Religious schism became a focus for these political differences, and a particularly vehement sect within the English Protestant movement sought to purify the Anglican church of its Catholic-leaning tendencies.

These purifiers, otherwise known as Puritans, shared the core Protestant belief that the Bible, not Rome and its bishops, was the only impeccable source of religious authority. The Catholic church, not without good reason, had long sought to keep the Bible untranslated lest people develop their own ideas of how to interpret it and the text should become a source of schism. From their reading of the Bible, the English Puritans gleaned the idea that the English, and specifically themselves, were God’s chosen people. These beliefs spurred them to emigrate in large numbers from East Anglia to the Promised Land which, naturally enough, they called New England.

“Belief that the English were a Chosen People was especia
lly strong, and those who counted themselves among this elect body worried constantl
y about losing God’s favor through some shortcoming, especial
ly failure to promote moral reformation,” says the political writer Kevin Phillips.
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The Puritans’ religious views were not the only factor in their decision to emigrate. Bad harvests and epidemics were one stimulus for this unusual exodus. Hard times in the local cloth industry were another. A persecution of the Puritans was initiated by William Laud, a powerful cleric who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. But it was religion that shaped all these factors into an unusual course of action: between 1620 and 1640 some 80,000 English people, amounting to 2 percent of the population, braved the risks of emigration to the American colonies, the Caribbean or Holland, with some 20,000 ending up in New England.

The Puritans’ fervent faith continued to bind and motivate them in their new home. They were still the Chosen People, and the Promised Land turned out to be superbly extensible in a westward direction. When the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, linking the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, their descendants spearheaded the settlement of the Midwest. “From the earliest English settlement, Americans viewed themselves within the
great stream of salvation history: a New World people who were fully committed to completing the Protestant Reformation,” writes the historian Frank Lambert. “One of Americans’ most powerful and enduring myths is that of God’s choosing the American wilderness as the site of a special outpouring of grace.... Massachusetts was nothing less than the New Israel, a chosen people with whom God had entered into a covenant that promised his blessings as long as the people obeyed his commandments.” Proof of this belief was discerned in the British victory over the French and their Indian allies in the war of 1754-1763, interpreted as a Protestant t
riumph over Papists.
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The Puritan zeal gradually mellowed into the milder versions of Protestantism that followed it, such as Congregationalism and Presbyterianism. The Puritans did not help their own cause by excesses such as the Massachusetts witch trials and by persecuting other sects. But even though their movement lost momentum, many of their ideas passed into Americans’ political and cultural outlook. Among these is the belief in American exceptionalism, that the nation has a providential destiny, and that it has a covenant that guarantees the deity’s blessing in return for righteous behavior.

From an evolutionary perspective, the New England Puritans’ views of their practical mission in the world were ideally suited to territorial expansion and survival. Their religion supplied a divine justification for developing new territories. By punishing heretics they maintained a strong internal cohesion. Pro-natalist religious policies, such as dissolving marriages because of infertility, along with a favorable climate, spurred population growth, an essential engine of expansion. Though New England received fewer new immigrants after 1642, its population had already reached 120,000 by 1700 and continued to grow. Religion and politics were perfectly matched to the circumstances in which the Puritans found themselves, and enabled a once persecuted sect to expand vigorously and ensure its long-term survival.

As Puritan zeal faded into Congregationalism, other Protestant sects emerged in its wake. The Methodists rose to prominence, with a cadre of vigorous preachers who held revivalist meetings around the country. But then the Methodists became prosperous, their ministers developed a greater interest in theology than in stirring a crowd, and their meetings grew more sedate. “Their clergy were increasingly willing to condone the pleasures of this world and to deemphasize sin, hellfire and damnation.... This is, of course, the fundamental dynamic by which sects are transformed into churches, thereby losing the vigor and the high octane faith tha
t caused them to succeed in the first place,” note the sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark.
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After steady gains from 1776 onward, Methodist numbers peaked around 1850. They were overtaken by the Baptists and by a new competitor in the religious marketplace, the Catholics. Not only were Catholic numbers enhanced by new immigrants, but the American Catholic church was much more aggressive than those of European countries. Indeed American bishops complained about the poor instructional work of their European counterparts. “It is a very delicate matter,” wrote Bishop Thomas Becker of Wilmington, Delaware, in 1883, “to tell the Sovereign Pontiff how utterly faithless the specimens of his country coming here really are. Ignorance of their religion and a depth of vice little known to us yet, are the prominent characteristics.”
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The Catholics in their turn have started to falter, a slide that may have been inevitable but which some critics say was hastened by ill-considered reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council of 1962. Although 31 percent of Americans were raised in the Catholic faith, only 24 percent today describe themselves as Catholic, the greatest net loss of any religion.
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In countries with an established church, s
ects are suppressed and dissident prelates seldom become bishops. In the turbulent a
rena of American religious life, nothing seems fixed except a
dynamic cycle whereby sects displace mainstream churches, lose
their enthusiasm and become establishment themselves, and yield in turn to more vigo
rous new sects. In the period from 1940 to 2000, mainstream sec
ts suffered heavy losses, as measured in their share of overall church membership, M
ethodists declining by 56 percent, Presbyterians by 60 percent,
Episcopalians by 51 percent and Congregationalists by 66 percent. The winners in th
e religious marketplace were the evangelical churches, the Mormons and Jehovah’
s Witnesses.
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These movements too, if the pattern conti
nues, will eventually lose momentum and give up market share to insurrectionist sects.

The American religious scene is unlike that of any other country. It may owe much of its special quality to the absence of an official, government-backed religion, as specified in the First Amendment. This has allowed development of a “free market” for religion, to use an analogy invoked by a school of economists and sociologists. They believe the economic laws that govern the rise and fall of firms in the marketplace offer many insights into the equivalent process with religions.

In nations with established churches, the argument goes, the clergy’s salaries are guaranteed and the official religion has a monopoly or at least unchallenged dominance. Hence priests have little incentive to push the brand or increase market share of their product. The upshot has been a steady decline in church attendance in Britain, Sweden and most other European countries.

In the United States, by contrast, religions must evangelize to survive, or competitors will lure away members of their flock. The overall size of the market for religious products is much greater than it otherwise would be because consumers’ demand is stimulated by the incessant competition between different religious brands, argue the sociologists Finke and Stark. As a result the number of Americans who actually belong to a church—a better measure of belief than asking them for their religious affiliation—has steadily risen throughout American history. Just 17 percent of the population were church members in 1776, rising fairly steadily to a peak of 62 percent in 1980, a proportion that was the same in 2000, according to figures assembled by Finke and Stark.
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The religious marketplace thesis has been criticized on the grounds that it doesn’t explain the extent of religious participation in other countries. Ireland, Italy, Poland, Colombia and Venezuela all have high levels of church attendance despite the fact that in each a religious monopoly—that of Catholicism—prevails. The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart surveyed modern countries with several active religions and found “no support to the claim of a significant link between religious pluralism and participation.”
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Norris and Inglehart propose an alternative explanation for the extent of religiosity in a country, suggesting it is related to people’s feeling of insecurity during their formative years. The proposal owes something to Marx’s idea that religion is an opiate to dull people’s suffering. If people grow up in conditions that make them feel secure, both politically and economically, they will see less need to belong to a church, Norris and Inglehart suggest. Contrary to the religious market theory, they argue, the demand for religion should be highest in poor countries with high poverty and political unrest, and lowest in stable countries with a generous and dependable welfare system.

The Norris and Inglehart proposal explains quite plausibly the low level of church attendance in politically stable countries with a strong welfare system, like Sweden or England. But why is religiosity so high in a prosperous country like the United States? Norris and Inglehart argue that life is in fact quite insecure for the poor in America, given the inef ficient nature of the welfare system, and that Americans turn to religion because they face higher economic uncertainty than do Europeans.

Their thesis may plausibly account for the extent of church-going in other countries. But for the United States, the religious marketplace theory seems a better explanation. Its central premise, that there is vigorous competition among religions for market share, is supported by a recent survey reporting that Americans switch religions with surprising frequency: no less than 44 percent of people profess a religious affiliation different from that in which they were raised. (This statistic includes switches among branches of the same denomination, i.e. from one kind of Protestantism to another.)
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The United States has made itself in some respects into a fine laboratory for the study of religion. Because of free competition without government interference, religious change seems to proceed at a much brisker rate than usual, with new sects rising to prominence in a matter of decades and declining almost as fast.

The rise of Mormonism has been particularly rapid, despite many apparent disadvantages. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all developed over many centuries, and were able to shape their founding myths and sacred texts in the relative obscurity of the distant past. But Joseph Smith lived in the nineteenth century, a well-documented historical period, and his claim to have transcribed sacred texts at the behest of a visiting angel, though little different from Muhammad’s revelation, is not the most plausible of attestations. Nor is Mormonism as a creed well regarded by the Christians who are its most likely potential converts, given the seemingly strange elements it grafts onto conventional Judeo-Christian beliefs.

Nonetheless, Mormonism has been immensely successful in terms of its growth and cohesion. The persecution of the church in its early days doubtless strengthened the survivors’ resolve and commitment. Its strictness is probably another ingredient of success. Unlike many liberal mainstream churches that require little of members, Mormonism requires members to donate not just a tenth of their incomes to their church but also a tenth of their time. According to the rational choice theory described earlier, a high entry price deters free riders who otherwise degrade a community’s advantages for other members. And the heavy commitment of time leaves members little time to associate with outsiders.