In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change

11. American Lived Religion

205 11 American Lived Religion In America, “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom . . . are intimately united and . . . reign in common,” as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early nineteenth century (1835/1946: 308). We strongly concur with Tocqueville’s perceptive assessment of American religion, and we argue that it applies equally well now as in the mid1800s . One would be hard pressed to find in Europe, the ancestral home of almost all our study participants, anyplace, before or after the 1960s, that would have offered its residents the range of churches available to the families of our study participants in the 1930s and 1940s—despite the fact that our study participants were living in one of the less churched regions of America. Their neighborhoods provided diverse religious choices, options that undoubtedly contributed to the vibrancy of the church for so many of these people during the formative years of their adolescence, and for their parents too. As our findings revealed, long before the dawning of the 1960s, many of our study participants were generally free to choose which church or Sunday school or religious youth group to attend, and some even crossed ProtestantCatholic lines in doing so. Access to diverse denominational traditions in America has long been matched with an everyday vocabulary of religious choice. Again, 206 AMERICAN LIVED RELIGION our findings indicated that many ordinary Americans in the decades preceding the 1960s readily invoked a language of individual autonomy in talking about church and their own religious habits. This autonomy enabled them to selectively arbitrate among churches and denominations , to invoke a morality not explicitly tied to theology, and to appreciate the sacred whether churched or not. This same autonomy has allowed variation within American families, both between parents and among parents and children, in their church habits. And beyond the family, the tug of religious autonomy allowed individuals to drift in and out of church as they negotiated their own life transitions and social roles as well as the larger culture, a context that, at any given time, may or may not be conducive to religious or spiritual investment. Although religious practices have certainly become more varied since the 1960s, the language of personal autonomy and choice in which they are framed has continuity with the remarkable religious independence of earlier generations of Americans. The localized congregational basis of so much of American religion both today and in the past (see, e.g., Warner 1993), the doctrinal variation that can characterize two neighboring churches of the same denomination , and the doctrinal and political variation that exists among members of the same church (see, e.g., D’Antonio et al. 2001) all attest to one of the deep sociological truths about America: Americans are a religious people, but whether in church or beyond church walls, they believe that their choices and opinions are their own business, and they are not easily swayed by the opinions of others. Regardless of what their parents or peers may believe, and regardless of the pronouncements of religious and secular elites, Americans tend, like Michael Perry ’s grandfather (see chapter 4, page 60), to make up their own minds about things. Importantly, making up one’s own mind does not breed agnosticism among Americans, nor has it brought about the demise of religion. On the contrary, this autonomy appears to accentuate religion’s vitality. A modern-day Tocqueville might be surprised to find that the decline in religiousness experienced in many western European countries (see, e.g., Davie 1994) has not affected America. She might be even more surprised by the debates in America over whether creationism should be taught in schools alongside, or even instead of, the theory of evolution —a debate hard to imagine in any western European country—and by the cultural legitimacy allowed to “intelligent design” arguments for the existence of God.1 Yet on reflection, these differences between AMERICAN LIVED RELIGION 207 America and western Europe are a direct corollary of America’s emphasis on individual autonomy, an ethos institutionalized in its laws and public policies and embedded in everyday language (see, e.g., Glendon 1987; Bellah et al. 1985). The cross-Atlantic religious and cultural differences we see today, therefore, should not be that surprising. After all, the privileging of personal preference in choosing a place of worship implies also a primacy of personal experience in the evaluation of evidence concerning the...