US President George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as a Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic, and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, though his kids consider themselves Jewish.
Wesley Clark's father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood he converted to Catholicism, but he recently told Beliefnet.com, "I'm a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian church."
What other country on earth would have three national political figures with such peripatetic religious backgrounds? In most of the world, faith-hopping of this sort is simply unheard of. Yet in the US, it's simply taken for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and they always have.
Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville was bewildered by the mixture of devout religiosity he found in the US combined with the relative absence of denominational strife, at least among Protestants. Americans, he observed, don't seem to care that their neighbors hold to false versions of the faith.
That's because many Americans have tended to assume that all these differences are temporary. In the final days, the distinctions will fade away, and we will all be united in God's embrace. This happy assumption has meant that millions feel free to try on different denominations at different points in their lives, and many Americans have had trouble taking religious doctrines altogether seriously. As the historian Henry Steele Commager once wrote, "During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt."
This tendency to emphasize personal growth over any fixed creed has shaped the US' cultural and political life. First, it's meant that Americans are reasonably tolerant, generally believing that all people of good will are basically on the same side. In London recently, Bush said that Christians and Muslims both pray to the same God. That was theologically controversial, but it was faithful to the national creed.
Second, it has meant that we relax severity. American faiths, as many scholars note, have tended to be optimistic and easygoing, experiential rather than intellectual.
Churches compete for congregants. To fill the pews, they often emphasize the upbeat and the encouraging and play down the business about God's wrath.
The small-groups movement, from which Bush emerges, emphasizes intimate companionship and encouragement. Members of these groups study the Bible in search of guidance and help with personal challenges. They do not preach at one another, but partner with each other.
The third effect of our dominant religious style is that we have trouble sustaining culture wars. For some European intellectuals, and even some of our own commentators, the Scopes trial never ended. For them, the forces of enlightened progress are always battling against the rigid, Bible-thumping forces of religion, whether represented by William Jennings Bryan or Jerry Falwell.
But that's a cartoon version of reality. In fact, real-life belief, especially these days, is mobile, elusive and flexible. Falwell doesn't represent evangelicals today. The old culture war organizations like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition are either dead or husks of their former selves.
As the sociologist Alan Wolfe demonstrates in his book, "The Transformation of American Religion," evangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.
So we have this paradox. These days political parties grow more orthodox, while religions grow more fluid.
If George Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they'd probably embrace.
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