‘American Grace’
IUR lecturer explains how religion divides and unites the US

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

How religion divides and unites Americans was the theme Robert Putnam addressed as he presented findings from his new book, “American Grace,” Monday night at Rice University. Putnam was on campus to kick off the Institute for Urban Research’s fall lecture series and detail his comprehensive surveys on religion and public life in America.

	ROBERT PUTNAM

“The average American is only slightly more religious than the average Iranian,” said Putnam, a pre-eminent political scientist and professor at Harvard. “How can America be religiously devout, religiously diverse and religiously tolerant? Most places in the world that are those first two things are intolerant.”

He discussed two major social “earthquakes” and their aftershocks that have changed American religion over the past 50 years and created a stronger polarization in the population. In 1959, he said, America was at the peak of its religiosity at 60 percent; by 1966, TIME magazine featured a cover that read “Is God Dead?”

“That’s a radical change in just seven years,” Putnam said. “Church attendance fell by about 10 percentage points in less than a decade. People were way less religious in terms of their observance. The percent who said premarital sex was OK doubled from 25 to 50 percent.”

Putnam recalled his college experience in the early ’60s. When he graduated in 1963, the basic rule was that men and women could not be in the same dorm room except between 3 and 4 p.m. on Sundays and the door had to be open, he said.

“That same university, just three years later, had co-ed dorms,” he said. “What that captures is how that change in thinking occurred. It was a big earthquake that sent some Americans in secular directions.”

Aftershocks

However, the ramification of those new ideas was that in the 1970s and ’80s, more Americans moved toward religion as they saw the freedom of the ’60s as a collapse of moral truths. That gave way to the religious right, he said.

According to Putnam, the next paradigm shift occurred in the 1990s when a number of young people moved away from religion entirely. He said young people were beginning to see religion as only a function for conservative republicans.

“Even as late as the 1960s and into the 1970s, there were plenty of Democrats in pews and unchurched conservatives,” he said. “Those types are now vanishing, and we end up with a much stronger correlation between our religion and our politics.”

His recent study, which he co-authored with David Campbell, showed that now about 17 percent of Americans say they have no religion; Putnam calls these people “none.” That’s up from the 7 percent that had been more or less steady for decades, he said.

“What the nones are saying is that organized religion is not for them,” he said. “The best predictor of people who became nones is how they feel about homosexuality.”

He said that young people, beginning in the 1990s, became tolerant of homosexuality, even though older generations were not.

“Basically what happened is that the leaders started going off in one direction and their young followers did not go with them,” he said. This does not mean that America will become secularized, he said; rather it will give rise to an entrepreneurial spirit within religious leaders.

“America is a pretty innovative place religiously,” Putnam said. “Religious leaders are always looking for untapped souls to save, and we have a very large and rapidly growing number of young people who are not in church. That means there’s a pool with lots of fish, and I suspect there will be a lot of religious anglers trying a lot of lures.”

Tolerance grows

As America has become more religiously polarized and diverse, it has also become more tolerant, he said. He cited his research that showed about 80 percent of all Americans — even 74 percent of the most religious Americans — say religious diversity has been good for America.

Few Americans are true believers, he said. According to his study, only 12 percent of Americans believe that their one religion is the only true religion; 7 percent say there is very little truth in any religion; and 80 percent say there are basic truths in many religions.

“What’s happened over the last half century is that personal barriers across faiths are becoming much more porous,” he said. “Those lines have become much less important in our daily lives. Half of all marriages in America cross religious lines. … About a third of all Americans are in a different religion than we were raised in.

“Almost everyone loves someone who’s in a different religion,” he said. “Not only do you become more tolerant of that faith, you become more tolerant of all faiths. We call that American grace.”

After his lecture, Putnam opened up for a Q-and-A session with the audience and then offered a book signing.

About IUR

The Institute for Urban Research (IUR) was officially launched in February 2010 under the direction of sociology professors Stephen Klineberg and Michael Emerson. It seeks to advance understanding of the most critical issues faced by Houston and other leading national and international urban centers. The scholars, researchers and students of the institute offer a new approach to the study of cities by engaging in empirical research that is directly informed by the concerns of public officials, businesses and community leaders and is made accessible to them. The institute engages Rice University and Houston in a model of how great universities and cities can work together to strengthen urban life.

The institute also serves as the permanent home for the Houston Area Survey, the nation’s longest-running study of any metropolitan area’s economy, population, life experiences, beliefs and attitudes. For almost 30 years, the annual surveys have provided an ever-richer, ever-changing picture of the region’s economic and demographic patterns, and they have measured area residents’ beliefs and attitudes regarding the region’s quality of life, its burgeoning ethnic and cultural diversity and the growth of its urban centers.