What Do We Believe? The Stance of Religion in America

Martin E. Marty, Stuart E. Rosenberg and Andrew M. Greeley.

Meredith Press/New York

Library of Congress number 68-26326

October 5, 1996

Having discovered Dr. Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago on a chance (and rare) listening to "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross one evening, I resolved to find and read a few of his books. The card catalog in the Los Angeles County Public Library system (of which La Canada has a member branch) listed several titles but little more and none, spare a preface to some commentary on the sermon on the mount by Luther, which I read on the spot, were in our branch. Working from titles only, I ordered this one through the system.

Reputable, scientific surveys of Americans were taken in 1952 and 1965 concerning their religious beliefs and habits. This book consists of three lengthy (multi-chapter) essays and a tabulation of the results. I read or skimmed all of the essays, the first of which was by Protestant Dr. Marty. He is surprised that religion still exists in the modern world, and seems, judging from the statistical data, to have some stability. The role and practice of religion is, however, changing. Indeed, all three authors warned against the "good old days" effects in interpreting reality. The good old days were not that good; they had their own struggles, nay-sayers, and doom-predicters. So yes, a revolution is underway, but current interpretations of it are a bit rash. Yes, the first Catholic President of a Protestant country has been elected, they all made a big deal of this. No, it didn't seem to mean more except that Protestants, Catholics, and to some extent, Jews were becoming more homogeneous in practice, function, and expectation of religion. For instance, local Rabbis, whatever they did before, are functioning in our society much more like parish priests or pastors now.

Rosenberg, the Jew, entertains us with over a chapter of slamming the whole method of collecting the data. How can you infer from only a few thousand responses? Indeed, the Jewish responses were numbered only 128 out of the about 5000 total. Well, why is he writing here at all?

I learned a little from this skimming. What I went in to get was comfort from some of Marty's thinking about his own Protestant faith that might help me. (He is a Lutheran and a scholar.) What I got (aside from the fact that he, too, seems to see God's hand in the fact that religion survives at all, through mutations, etc.) was a little historical information. For instance, the three groups have hated and hurt each other up to the recent past, but America is a nearly miraculous combination of four subcultures (Greeley say), Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and secularist. All coexist and although there is tension, we all manage our country together and don't kill or exclude each other all too much. This amounts to gains for the other three groups and a slightly distressing loss for the Protestants.

In all, it was barely worth the trouble to coast over this book. I've bought another, solely by Marty, "A Nation of Behavers." The Amazon catalog lists several other interesting titles (most of which must be quite dry) in graduate text price ranges. I doubt I will take this pursuit that seriously.