America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (review)

I write this review as the political debate on immigration is in full fury (April 2006) – a good time to consider religious diversity, which is often the subtext of the rapidly burgeoning literature on immigrant religion in the United States. And yet, one of the things that makes this book so appealing, at least to me, is that Robert Wuthnow does not confine himself to a simple equation of immigrants = diversity. While immigrants bring new religions to this country now as in the past, non-Christian immigration is not the sole source of contemporary religious diversity. The individuation and privatization of religion – also an historical reality – has increased in the United States since the social and cultural changes of the 1960s. Thus, religious experimentation, or "spiritual shopping," may involve engagement with Buddhism, Islam or Sikhs, but it need not. Plenty of Americans are constructing their own bricolage of faith from Judeo-Christian sources, and this diversity, Wuthnow argues, has significant cultural implications as well.

Wuthnow studies the sources and consequences of religious diversity in the contemporary United States. He examines where diversity comes from, who is attracted to it (or not), how it affects American culture – from national identity formulations of a "Christian nation" to the ability of people to manage religiously-mixed marriages, and how we might best go from the demographic facts of "diversity" to the cultural valuing of "pluralism."

In what I found to be a bit of a strange decision, the book is organized so that the opening chapters focus on the consequences and significance of religious diversity, then come chapters on Americans' relative openness to diversity, then a chapter on the social sources of exposure to and acceptance of diversity, then chapters on two key sites for managing diversity, then a conclusion on producing a "reflective pluralism." While Wuthnow writes in an accessible style, and the consignment of many scholarly details to endnotes shows that the press hopes for a certain amount of trade sales, I found that the organization kept the argument from flowing as smoothly as it might have.

Also, while Wuthnow uses a new data set (Religion and Diversity Survey) to explore the causes and consequences of religious diversity, the presentation of the data was not as systematic as I would have liked. In much of the first half of the book we get data in the form of interview quotes or respondents' personal stories and anecdotes; there are occasional sections from a (presumably pseudonymous) respondent that narrates his or her religious biography. Not until Chapter 7 is there a systematic presentation of the data in a way that provides the reader with more generalizable information on relative exposure to diversity, assessments of it, religious participation and beliefs, etc.

Nonetheless, the argument is solid, if at times unsurprising. Religious diversity matters, claims Wuthnow, because we have a national mythos as a "Christian nation." At the same time we are proud of our public civic language of tolerance and respect for differences. Historically, there has been in the United States a "theology of exclusivism" vs. a "civic code of pluralism." (10) On top of this, "religion is something people care enough about to fight over." (302) To the extent that we take any two of these elements seriously, the third one is problematic. Too often, balancing this has often resulted in a either or both a thin commitment to pluralism (usually an avoidance of truly confronting differences) or to religious commitment (often a non-reflective "all religions are basically the same"). The modern liberal solution of keeping the public open and officially pluralist, while religious commitment remains private, is foundering on the increasing range of religious diversity, and the fact that many forms of religious identity must be public to be meaningful.

Wuthnow offers a typology of Americans' response to religious diversity. There are "spiritual shoppers," who experiment, explore and individualize their religion. Not surprisingly, they are comfortable with and often intrigued by diversity. "Christian inclusivists" consider themselves decidedly...