Things Seen and Unseen
Shopping for Faith
The Lord Will Gather Me In
After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s

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Nobody disputes Americans' religious passion. Surveys show that 95 percent believe in God, 86 percent consider themselves Christian and 66 percent believe religion can "solve all or most of our problems" -- figures that rank Americans among the most religious peoples on earth. And the fact that spirituality is the fastest growing sector of book publishing suggests that we are becoming more religious, not less. (If these figures seem high to you, it may be because America's image-makers, including journalists, intellectuals and artists, belong to the professions with the highest incidence of atheism.) But just what terms like "Christianity," "God" and "spirituality" actually mean is a matter of some controversy. Faith has kept itself alive in America like a great plague -- mutating in each new bloodstream, a massive, private experience that authorities may attempt to exploit but can never fully control.

Yet even within this epidemic of individualism, certain trends emerge. Moderate Christian churches, once the bedrock of American religious life, are losing their flocks to two greener pastures: eclectic spirituality and fundamentalism. The untended meadows of eclecticism, New Age and Eastern belief systems are sprouting new shoots between larger institutions -- often fertilizing old-fashioned churches with newfangled beliefs. This process started as early as the '70s, when a demoralized Catholic church began to host mystical retreats. And according to a new anthology, "Faces of Buddhism in America," Buddhism is currently one of the fastest growing faiths in the country.

Other believers are less idiosyncratic, perhaps, but far more numerous. They travel the road to discipline, grazing the carefully bordered lawns of the new orthodoxy. Christian fundamentalism has exploded since the 1980s; youthful converts have led a recent revival of Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism as well. Finally, a combination of conversion and immigration has led to a sharp increase in Islamic fundamentalism. For fundamentalists, rules, scriptures and moral absolutes offer an antidote to a nation overrun by flaccid, self-indulgent spiritual relativism.

In "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville predicted something like this split between orthodoxy and unconventionality. Noting the irony that traditional Roman Catholicism was growing in popularity in do-it-yourself America, he theorized that religious life in America would "tend more and more into a division of only two parts -- some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the Church of Rome." In fact, however, religious fundamentalism and spiritual eclecticism are not necessarily opposed. They are both as American as apple pie -- and often they simmer together in the same individual soul.

Even within the most authoritarian religious institutions, the big, organized fundamentalist churches, individual believers often reflect the idiosyncracies of our spiritual smorgasbord. Fundamentalism may be just another pit stop on their soul's wayward journey; tomorrow or next year they may move on. Likewise, those who have rummaged through the farthest-flung religions of the world in search of enlightenment sometimes end up returning to the church of their childhood -- even as they continue to differ with its basic doctrines.

This collision of fundamentalism and individuality is both weirdly American and difficult to comprehend. From the perspective of the individual believer, each life of faith tells a logical story -- of faith found and lost, values forming and shifting with the times -- but seen as a whole, the nation's spiritual life is maddeningly complex, a Rashomon tale with millions of narrators.

Richard Cimino and Don Lattin's "Shopping for Faith: American Religion in the New Millennium" (Jossey-Bass) tries to make sense of this story by using capitalism as a metaphor. Arguing that Americans have simply applied the principles of modular consumerism to faith, Cimino and Lattin view eclecticism as a kind of spiritual comparative shopping, in which believers mix 'n' match outfits like they're trolling for bargains at Ross. They also show how churches and other religious groups have adapted by reinventing themselves according to consumer needs. In a similarly ambitious undertaking, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow argues in "After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s" (University of California Press) that in the 1950s a "spirituality of inhabiting," practiced by suburbanites for whom godliness meant clean appliances and their name on a church pew, was replaced in the 1960s by a "spirituality of seeking," in which lost souls sought the Almighty in a hash pipe and a Herman Hesse novel. Like Cimino and Lattin, Wuthnow sees the current fundamentalist craze as part and parcel of this "seeking." And although he steers clear of defending or attacking any beliefs in particular, he does subtly advocate a new style of faith: the "spirituality of practice," where individuals enact their faiths within a community.

But neither the metaphor of the journey nor that of the shopping spree can quite account for just how astonishing the spiritual revolution of the last 40 years has been. People have always converted to new religions, but usually only under duress. For the most part, even in America, spirituality, like class and profession, has been something you inherited from your family, not something you chose. Now, however, Americans choose their faith. As much as free speech or civil rights, this is a startling triumph of democracy.

In reading these two vibrant portraits of our national spirituality, it's tempting to simply revel in the boundlessness of the American imagination: How fabulous that so many faiths exist under one flag! But this sanguine perspective is a little like watching a battleground from a mountaintop -- every stab and stampede is part of the same harmonious picture. When you look at individual stories, the picture doesn't seem quite so pretty. From airy-fairy relativism to fascist fundamentalism, fiery terrorism to perennial indecision, individual faiths lead to drastically different lives, different political choices and ultimately different Americas.

N E X T+P A G E+| The melodramatic allure of tradition

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