The Struggle for America's Soul

...But none of this data establishes causality as there are simply too many other possible causes for the decline of church membership during the 1960s, and civic involvement is just too vague a concept to be measured, much less measured against some other variable...

...SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, has just completed a memoir entitled My Secret Life: An Open Letter to the Late J. Edgar Hoover.te J. Edgar Hoover...

...His work has appeared in several publications including the Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, the Hudson Review, and the Sewanee Review...

...Much of The Restructuring of American Religion is virtually unarguable-Wuthnow has more data than anyone else, and he handles it impeccably...

...His most recent book is Choice of Schools in Six Nations (U.S...

...JAMES P. DEGNAN is professor of English at Santa Clara University...

...Marshaling and synthesizing huge quantities of data, Wuthnow described this shift within the context of such important external developments as the growth of higher education and the expansion of the welfare state...

...FRANCES FITZGERALD is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker magazine and the author of several books including America Revised (Atlantic Monthly...

...In his discussion of religion and science, for example, he proposes that the fact that few scientists-and even fewer social scientists-go to church can be explained by the fact that scientists need to create a boundary to protect the slippery paradigms and ill-defined "realities" of their own discipline...

...Wuthnow is perfectly entitled to this view, and he may be right...

...He is also so lucid a writer that he never really confuses the reader...

...Secular readers will therefore find this a somewhat puzzling book...

...TOM O'BRIEN, a member of the Society for Values in Higher Education, chairs the humanities department at Manhattan School of Music...

...Department of Education...

...And it is unnecessary, for Wuthnow's arguments are interesting in and of themselves...

...Wuthnow's new book, The Struggle for America's Soul, is a more personal and more interpretive work based on his earlier researches...

...Wuthnow begins by defining the social location of American churches, classing them, as de Tocqueville did, among the voluntary organizations which support American democracy, and as Jurgen Habermas does, as a part of the public sector that stands between private enterprise and the bureaucratic welfare state...

...To judge by the quotes from distinguished evangelical scholars on the back of this book, Wuthnow has succeeded in crossing the mainline-evangelical divide and establishing the dialogue he aimed for...

...But there is plenty to argue about in this book...

...But he has done so by breaking some of his own rules and confusing what he believes with what can be demonstrated empirically...

...He then sketches out how the liberal-conservative polarization occurred and describes how it rent the Presbyterian congregation he himself belonged to in New Jersey...

...As an argument this is not wholly implausible as science (and, goodness knows, social science) is a socially constructed endeavor...

...It is a major piece of empirical sociology...

...Wuthnow's argument is thus simply an hypothesis, and not the explanation he would like it to be...

...In it Wuthnow speaks not just as a sociologist but as a committed Christian-a Presbyterian and a theological liberal-concerned with the deep divide between mainline and evangelical Protestants...

...This is particularly unsettling given his choice of interlocutor...

...Frances FitzGerald A professor of sociolo-gy at Princeton University, Robert Wuthnow is respon-sible for the first major remapping of the American religious landscape since Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew...

...In support of these two propositions he offers an array of data about social spending and church membership and the civic involvement of church members...

...All the same, there are other possibilities, including the far simpler one that scientists, like most people, are not capable of pursuing more than one form of quest for truth at a time...

...As his choice of publisher indicates, he is here addressing himself principally to liberal evangelicals in the hopes that they will assist in creating some common ground between the warring camps...

...He goes on to explore the damage that has been done by the realignment and to assess the changes wrought by the growth of the state, the emergence of religious television, and the expansion of science-including social science...

...In The Restructuring of American Religion, published by Princeton in 1988, Wuthnow showed how since World War II the pattern shifted, and a world that had been divided along denominational lines became one polarized between liberals and conservatives and organized to a great degree around special purpose groups-political, cultural, and devotional...

...It cannot be done...

...The problem is that he attempts to prove these theses empirically...

...He proposes, for example, that the expansion of the state has caused the decline in church membership and therefore in civic involvement generally...

...Wuthnow is a sophisticated observer of the American scene, and one who is not afraid to ask the hard questions...

...Elsewhere in the book Wuthnow simply transmutes arguments into explanations...

...Wuthnow's view is that qualitative damage has been done to religious and civic life in this country both by secularization-in the form of the growth of the state and of higher education-and by the "religious populism" of the televangelists...

...REVIEWERS CHARLES L. GLENN has been responsible for civil rights and urban education for the Massachusetts Department of Education since 1970...

...He concludes with an exhortation to liberal evangelicals, and in particular to liberal evangelical sociologists, to help in the building of a religious center that will hold against the polarizing forces of the extreme right and the extreme left...

...his leaps to faith are clear enough for all to see...