January 18, 2011 | Religion in America is innovative, flexible, diverse and remarkably tolerant, according to the new book “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us” by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell.

The authors examine extensive data about American faith and explain a number of trends, including the rise of the “young nones” -- people who are not part of organized religion -- the combination of diversity and tolerance, increasing polarization and the “Aunt Susan phenomenon.”

Putnam, author of the best-selling book “Bowling Alone,” is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government.

He spoke with Faith & Leadership about religious trends in America. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Q: Tell me about your writing about social capital in “Bowling Alone” and how that got you to the book “American Grace.” 

The core idea of social capital is simply that social networks have value. “Bowling Alone” was an effort to examine the trends in social capital and the trends in social attractions in America over the last half-century.

It turned out that for most of the 20th century, social capital was rising in America. In the period since the late ’60s/early ’70s, virtually all forms of social connection began to decline -- not only Rotary Clubs but also spending time with your family. Having family dinners, for example, began to decline, and bowling in leagues began to decline. People were bowling more, but they were not bowling in leagues. They were bowling alone or maybe with small groups of friends.

As a rough rule of thumb, about half of all social capital in America is religious. If you add up all the bowling leagues and Rotary Clubs and Boy Scouts and garden clubs and so on and put them in one pile and then you add up all the prayer groups and Bible study groups and congregations and so on and put them in a different pile, those two piles are about equally high.

So how we’re doing on religion makes a good deal of difference for social capital in America. I don’t mean how saintlike we are, but to what extent we connect with other people in our various communities of faith. That’s probably the most important reason why we decided to do this research on changes in religion in American life.

Q: What’s your outlook about American society in “Bowling Alone”?

In “Bowling Alone” we were recounting the fact that many forms of social capital, many of which had been created roughly 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th century were disintegrating. The next-to-last chapter of “Bowling Alone” pointed out how similar the periods at the end of the 20th century and the end of the 19th century were.

There were a lot of parallels, but one of them was that older forms of social capital at the end of the 19th century were mostly in disarray. As we moved from a rural to an urban population, the older forms of connections, quilting bees and barn raisings and so on, didn’t cut it on the Lower East Side of New York. So there was a similar period of declining social capital at the end of the 19th century.

Then, in about 20 years, we basically fixed the problem by inventing a whole lot of new ways of connecting: the YMCAs and the Boy Scouts and the 4-H. It’s hard to name a major form of social capital in American life today -- even though they’re mostly now declining -- that were not invented in about 20 years at the turn of the 20th century in response to this problem, much like the problem we have today.

In “Bowling Alone” I said -- and I continue to believe -- that we would go through another period in which people invented new ways of connecting.

I don’t mean that I predicted the Internet, but in some respects social network sites and so on could be seen as a contemporary equivalent to the invention of these organizations. Today, you know, it’s hard to think of anybody having to invent the Red Cross or Kiwanis. They seem like they’ve been around forever, but all those were inventions -- mostly by young people -- trying to replace the quilting bees and barn raisings and things that didn’t work anymore as social connections.

Q: Do you address those issues in “American Grace”?

Religion is a slightly different case, actually. I don’t want to make it sound like “American Grace” is simply the sequel to “Bowling Alone” with attention to religion. There are different issues that are raised in “American Grace.”

We talk about many of the ways in which religion divides Americans. We also address the rise of what we and other social scientists call the “young nones.” These are the young people who just in the last 10 or 15 years have been moving sharply away from religion.

One of the surprises to us, to me personally, as we were doing the research was to discover that even in the midst of the culture wars and the greater polarization, we’ve actually become more connected personally with people across faith lines, including the line between faith and no faith.

In personal terms we’re pretty remarkably tolerant. We’re a very tolerant people even though most places in the world that are as religious as we are and as divided as we are aren’t tolerant at all.

Q: You talked about the nones -- I think you said that the nones now are larger, percentagewise, than mainline Protestants.

I don’t think that the fact of that increase is a surprise to most people. I think understanding when and why it happens may be more of a surprise to people.

The first thing you have to understand is that it’s unlike the long-term secularization in Europe. That is a process that has been occurring for 100 years. It has gone on so steadily and so long that it has a big effect.

The American phenomenon is actually very different from that. It is less than 20 years old, and it has risen very sharply. If you look at the graph, it looks like a hockey stick.

The fraction of Americans who disclaimed religious identity until 1990 had been essentially flat for a very long time -- as long as we have records, actually. It was flat at about 5 or 7 percent.

But then, especially among young people, that has grown very rapidly since 1990. I think there’s a misunderstanding by all sides that it’s somehow to do with atheism. But it actually isn’t to do with atheism hardly at all. Most of these young nones say they believe in God. Most of them were raised in a religious home, and indeed most of them went to Sunday school or religious education of some sort. These are not people who have no exposure to religion, and they’re not people who reject the whole idea of religion. Many of them say that religion is important to them personally. A significant number of them even attend church occasionally.

But they reject the existing menu of organized religious alternatives in America. Most of the explanation for the rise -- and this is another misunderstanding -- by far the largest single cause, is that these are young people who are moderate to liberal.

The most distinguishing characteristic predicting which young people become nones and which don’t is their view on homosexuality. Because this is the generation, going back to about 1990, that has become substantially more open-minded about homosexual people. This very sharp generational change in attitudes toward homosexuality among young people coincided with a sharp move to the right on the issue among the most visible religious leaders.

Obviously, not all religious leaders or not all religious organizations, not all denominations or whatever, have made a big deal out of homosexuality. But the most visible religious leadership was zigging to the right just exactly as these young people were zagging to the left.

Many of them -- actually, I think most of them -- say they pray fairly often. So they’re not hostile to what you might call religious sentiment, but they certainly are hostile to organized religion.

Q: So they’ve rejected not religion but religious institutions.

Yes. I would say that they’ve rejected the existing array of religious institutions.

Some will actually come back to religion, because in general as people get married and have kids and settle down, there’s a modest increase in their religious affiliations. That’s always been true, and I’m sure it will be true for these people.

But these people are beginning at a level of disdain for and rejection of organized religion that is way higher than in any previous generation. So even if some of them move back toward religion, it won’t begin to change the trajectory away from religion, because it just can’t. The life-cycle effects as people get settled down and so on aren’t nearly as great as this huge increase from about 5 to 7 percent up to about 30 percent now, 25 to 30 percent.

Still, unlike the trends in Europe, we don’t think that it’s at all inevitable that this youthful rejection of religion will continue. Actually, [co-author] David Campbell and I are very impressed with the degree to which American religion has been adaptable and innovative over the centuries. That’s what is almost unique about American religion compared to religion in other parts of the world where there’s a lot of continuity.

Historically, we’ve invented a lot of new religions, and we’ve certainly invented new ways of doing religion, and I personally think that’s pretty likely to happen here. I think it’s likely that as religious leaders see the consequence of having gotten so close to politics, they’ll change. And for the religions that don’t change, the ones that stay really involved in politics, I think the handwriting is on the wall, frankly.

I would bet that 20 years from now, this period of a close entanglement between conservative politics and religion will be seen as a kind of a passing phase of American religion, and one which was in the long run quite harmful to religion.

I can’t say that I know what’s going to happen, and I do not know exactly which brand of religion -- that is, which denomination or whatever -- will take this lead, but what I’m mainly saying is I’m disassociating myself from any view that this rise of secularism among young people is an ineluctable, inevitable long-term trend.

Q: What do you think of the likelihood of attracting those nones back to the mainline church?

That’s a very good question. I understand the importance of the question, of course, and also, of course, I am not a church-growth adviser.

Remember, we’re talking about a third of all young Americans who are basically unaffiliated with any religion at all, and, as I say, somebody is going to reach that group.

I do think that avoiding conservative politics is crucial for that audience. I don’t think that you necessarily have to be a flaming liberal as a denomination to reach this group, but I think probably you have to make clear that you’re in the religion business and not in the politics business, because that’s why they were turned off -- by the confusion of religion and politics.

I want to be careful about using marketing metaphors here, because I know we’re about things that are fundamentally deeper than marketing. But there is maybe an analogy here that is relevant from marketing, and that is brand identification.

Most of the existing mainline or liberal Protestant churches’ brands were forged in the Reformation, roughly speaking. No matter how able and how farsighted and creative and so on Sears is, if you’re the Sears executive, it’s hard to become Wal-Mart overnight, because people associate Sears with other things than they do Wal-Mart.

I don’t want to say it’s impossible, but I do want to say it’s a complicated task to reposition a denomination or a religion that’s been around for a long time.

Q: To what degree is it the organization or the institution that is the carrier of the social capital? I was intrigued by the notion that the religious are better citizens but it’s not the theology but the network that makes them that way.

We were shocked to discover that. Specifically, we find that people who are active in religious communities are systematically more generous, better neighbors. They’re more likely to work on community projects. They’re more likely to give to secular causes as well as religious causes. They’re much more likely to volunteer for secular causes as well as religious causes. They’re more likely to give blood. They’re more likely to let a stranger cut in front of them in line.

They’re better neighbors and they’re better citizens. But it turns out that -- and we were shocked at what I’m about to say -- that virtually none of that seems to have anything to do with the context of people’s theology.

That is, it isn’t how strongly people believe in God. How strongly you say you assert your belief in God actually isn’t that related to these good deeds, and it doesn’t depend on whether you believe in justification by faith or justification by deeds. That’s irrelevant to this finding. It doesn’t even depend upon whether you say that you’re a religious person.