(Page 2 of 27) - Drawing the Line: Views of Atheists and Moral Boundaries in America authored by Edgell, Penny., Gerteis, Joseph. and Hartmann, Douglas.

Christiano 2000, Warner 1993). Simply put, religion in America provides a sense of
personal identity and meaning as well as the “habits of the heart” necessary for public
engagement and effective citizenship (Tocqueville 1994 [1840]; Bellah et al. 1991;
Warner 1961, 1962; Smith 1998, 2003).

Not only has religious pluralism been at the center of this story, recent work has also
emphasized that across religious boundaries there is increasing unity around a core set of
beliefs, leading Americans to trust that their co-religionists, of whatever particular faith,
are led by their beliefs to be both good people and good Americans. This point comes
through clearly in good ethnographic work, for example in Caplow and his co-authors’
revisit to Muncie, Indiana in the 1970s to replicate the Lynds’ earlier Middletown study
(Caplow, Bahr & Chadwick, 1983). Quantitative work with representative samples has
supported the point. Using national General Social Surveys data, Hout and Fisher (2001)
also found convergence across religious traditions around many of the same elements that
Caplow et al. termed the “common creed” – a belief in God, the regular practice of prayer
and belief that prayer is efficacious, and perhaps most centrally, the belief that there is a
strong connection between religiosity and personal morality.

Religious Boundaries in America

Remarking on religion in Jacksonian America, Alexis de Tocqueville was moved by the
country’s Christian piety. “It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-
American society … I would more particularly remark that its sway is not only that of a
philosophical doctrine which has been adopted upon inquiry, but of a religion which is
believed without discussion,” he wrote. Yet Tocqueville was also moved by America’s
religious pluralism. “Christian sects are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified,
but Christianity itself is an established and irresistible fact” (Tocqueville 1994: 6).

Religion has become far more pluralistic than in Tocqueville’s day, and yet its role in
American self understanding is no less central. A report on a recent national survey on
religion and public life conducted by Public Agenda suggests that many contemporary
Americans agree with those Tocqueville observed in regarding the private morality that
religion inspires as the basis for the good society. “If more Americans were more
religious, people believe that crime would go down, families would do a better job raising
their children, and people would be more likely to help each other. Indeed, most
Americans fear that the country would decline if people lost their religious faith” (Farkas
et al. 2001:10).

It is not that Americans necessarily want organized religion to have more of an influence
in the schools or in government or policy decisions.

Of course, some clearly do but the

issue is clearly contentious. Rather, the widely shared view of the Americans surveyed
for the Public Agenda report was the same as that of the people of Muncie in the 1970s:
“To be religious, in their eyes, means to be a moral human being” (Farkas et al. 2001:11).

Although the more strongly worded GSS item from 1998 sheds some light on this question. When asked

to respond to the statement, “The U.S. would be a better country if religion had less influence,” 12% of
Americans agreed with this statement, while 44% disagreed (the rest refusing to state an opinion).