Robert D. Putnam - American grace: how religion divides and unites us

ALSO BY ROBERT D. PUTNAM

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Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti)

Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (edited with Peter B. Evans and Harold K. Jacobson)

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The Comparative Study of Political Elites

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ALSO BY DAVID E. CAMPBELL

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Copyright 2010 by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Putnam, Robert D.
American grace: how religion divides and unites us /
by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. United StatesReligion1960 2. Religion and sociology
United States. I. Campbell, David E., 1971 II. Title.
BL2525.P88 2010
201.7097309045dc22 2010027838

ISBN 978-1-4165-6671-7
ISBN 978-1-4165-6688-5 (ebook)

To Kirsten, Katie, and
Soren and To Miriam, Gray, Gabriel, Noah, Alonso, and Gideon
Who grace our lives with their love

AMERICAN
GRACE

In the 1950s, the Fraternal Order of Eagles teamed up with movie director Cecil B. DeMille for a unique promotion of the epic movie The Ten Commandments. In a form of reverse product placement, the Eagles and DeMille donated monuments of the biblical Ten Commandments to communities all around the country. Rather than putting a product in the movie, the primary symbol of the movie was instead placed in prominent locationsin public parks, in front of courthouses, and in the case of Texas on the grounds of the state capitol. These monuments reflected the zeitgeist, as the 1950s brought public, even government-sanctioned, expression of religion to the fore in many ways. This was also the decade in which In God We Trust was added to American currency, and the Pledge of Allegiance was amended to include the words under God.

Those monuments stood for decades without causing a fuss. In recent years, however, they have led to court battles over whether their location on publicly owned land violates the constitutional prohibition on a government establishment of religion. In other words, fifty years ago these displays were so noncontroversial that they could safely be used as a marketing ploy for a big-budget Hollywood

Something has changed.

In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy had to reassure Protestants that they could safely vote for a Catholic. (At the time 30 percent of Americans freely told pollsters that they would not vote for a Catholic as president.) At the same time, Kennedy won overwhelming support from his fellow Catholics, even though he explicitly disagreed with his church on a number of public issues. In 2004, America had another Catholic presidential candidatealso a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, also a highly decorated veteran, and also with the initials JFK. Like Kennedy, John (Forbes) Kerry also publicly disagreed with his church on at least one prominent issuein this case, abortion. But unlike Kennedy, Kerry split the Catholic vote with his Republican opponent, and lost handily among Catholics who frequently attend church. Kennedy would likely have found it inexplicable that Kerry not only lost to a Protestant, but in George W. Bush, an evangelical Protestant at that. Writing about the religious tensions manifested in the 1960 campaign, political scientist Philip Converse described the election as a flash of lightning which illuminated, but only momentarily, a darkened landscape. Kerrys candidacy was another flash of lightning, but the landscape it revealed had changed significantly. In 1960, religions role in politics was mostly a matter of something akin to tribal loyaltyCatholics and Protestants each supported their own. In order to win, Kennedy had to shatter the stained glass ceiling that had kept Catholics out of national elective office in a Protestant-majority nation. By the 2000s, how religious a person is had become more important as a political dividing line than which denomination he or she belonged to. Church-attending evangelicals and Catholics (and other religious groups too) have found common political cause. Voters who are not religious have also found common cause with one another, but on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Again, something has changed.

This book is about what has changed in American religion over the past half century. Perhaps the most noticeable shift is how Americans have become polarized along religious lines. Americans are increasingly concentrated at opposite ends of the religious spectrumthe highly religious at one pole, and the avowedly secular at the other. The moderate religious middle is shrinking. Contrast todays religious landscape with America in the decades following the Second World War, when moderateor mainlinereligion was booming. In the past, there were religious tensions, but they were largely between religions (Catholic vs. Protestant most notably), rather than between the religious and irreligious. Today, America remains, on average, a highly religious nation, but that average obscures a growing secular swath of the population.

The nations religious polarization has not been an inexorable process of smoothly unfolding change. Rather, it has resulted from three seismic societal shocks, the first of which was the sexually libertine 1960s. This tumultuous period then produced a prudish aftershock of growth in conservative religion, especially evangelicalism, and an even more pronounced cultural presence for American evangelicals, most noticeably in the political arena. As theological and political conservatism began to converge, religiously inflected issues emerged on the national political agenda, and religion became increasingly associated with the Republican Party. The first aftershock was followed by an opposite reaction, a second aftershock, which is still reverberating. A growing number of Americans, especially young people, have come to disavow religion. For many, their aversion to religion is rooted in unease with the association between religion and conservative politics. If religion equals Republican, then they have decided that religion is not for them.