Faithful Community Life
By Karl Zinsmeister

Over the last generation, many historians, politicians, and journalists have labored to downplay the significance of religion in making American society what it is. That's not easily accomplished, though. There's just too much concrete evidence of the importance of our religious roots.

Nearly half the men who signed the Declaration of Independence had some seminary training, and John Adams’s description of the American Revolu­tion was that it “connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil govern­ment with the principles of Christianity.” In their marvelous story starting on page 20 (built on a year of research) Michael and Jana Novak debunk today’s conventional portrayal of George Washington as a man influenced mightily by Greek and Roman paganism but not much touched by Christian ideals. To the contrary, they report, Washington’s Christianity was critical to his fathering of our nation.

 

David Gelernter looks at different historical evidence and finds that America is deeply stamped with the Judeo-Christian ideas and practices first brought to this con­tinent by Puritan settlers. Stepping back even further in Western history, professor Rodney Stark concludes that Christian principles were decisive in allowing Europeans to vault out of the static misery that most humans had to cope with through the cen­turies. Not just compassion, moral equality, and democracy, but even seemingly secu­lar innovations like liberty, limited government, and science were products primarily of Christian insights. And these religious understandings made Western civilization more successful and more humane than other societies.

This issue of The American Enterprise doesn’t concern itself with all of the ways Judeo-Christianity has influenced us, but focuses specifically on how religion creates social bonds—how it knits people and communities together. The common view among liberal intellectuals today is that religion is something that divides peo­ple, a “wedge,” a force that corrodes unity. Everything from today’s “culture wars” to the recent marauding of disaffected Muslims through European cities is blamed vaguely on “too much religion.”

 

That is a crude reduction of the actual effects of religious belief on most people. It’s true that religion is a potent influence on all aspects of a civilization. “The beginning of culture is cult,” reminds Michael Novak. Often, religious views have soaked so deeply into the social fabric that most citizens are no longer even conscious of them, even as their culture continues to be shaped by echoes of faith.

 

In particular, it is the religious impulse that makes typical men and women capa­ble of concern for their fellows. The verdict of history, says Novak, is that “apart from the worship of God, human beings cannot transcend themselves in the large num­bers needed to sustain a civilization. Unless human beings have a vision of something beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot be pulled out of themselves.”

 

America has a richer and more varied tradition of religious community-making than any other country on Earth. The Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, and other persecuted believers who first arrived on these shores came specifically to set up faithful societies denied to them elsewhere. Anabaptists, Shakers, Jews, Moravians, and many others followed them across the ocean so they could cohere with other worshippers in congregations, neighborhoods, and towns. Then there were rafts of homegrown religious communities: pioneer Method­ists, Christian Scientists, the Oneida Movement, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Lubavitchers, Latter-Day Saints, and many others.

 

Religious communities in the U.S. are not just some his­torical remnant. Mormons, Chabadniks, various Anabaptists, orthodox Catholics, and broad spectrums of evangelical Prot­estants are burgeoning in number and prospering within close-knit home places sprinkled from New York City to Nashville; Wheaton, Illinois to Moscow, Idaho; Grand Rapids, Michigan to Waco, Texas. There are entire cities in this country—as dif­ferent as Provo, Utah and Kiryas Joel in upstate New York—that are built on religious fraternity. Informal groupings of believers lean on their fellow saints in towns like Santa Paula, California (profiled on page 33), inside hundreds of megachurches in a range of U.S. localities (page 28), and even in brand new com­munities built around a religious core—like Ave Maria, now being constructed on Florida’s prosperous Gulf Coast.

 

Religious communities continue to attract people because they function differently, and feel quite distinct from other places. In a statistics-laden paper given at the American Enter­prise Institute, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber recently pre­sented some pioneering documentation of this. People who reside near co-religionists not only participate in worship at a higher rate than more isolated believers (as you might expect), but also conduct themselves differently in other ways. Being surrounded by a community of believers inspires more work, study, and marriage, and less divorce and freeloading. A 10 per­cent increase in the density of co-religionists in your neighbor­hood, Gruber found, leads to an extra half year of education, an increase in income, a 4 percent rise in marriages and equivalent decline in divorces, and 16 percent less welfare use.

“Religion…is more needed in democratic republics than in any other,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. The untrammelled individual autonomy fostered by U.S.-style gov­ernance needs to be balanced by a sense of responsibility and communal loyalty. Only when religious parameters discipline personal appetites and imbue citizens with authentic concern for others will a people be able to live entirely free, without despots over them, Tocqueville concludes.

 

Thankfully, some invisible spring (which has gone dry in Europe and other places) keeps refilling American breasts with religious convictions and truths. As early as just a few decades after our nation’s founding, people like Ralph Waldo Emerson were gloomily predicting the death of Christian principle in America. Yet everyday believers have repeatedly confounded the authori­ties—religious passion remains alive and well in the contempo­rary United States. To take just one indicator: sales of religious books have jumped 20 percent in the last five years (while sales of all other books have fallen 7 percent over that same period).

 

Of course, enemies of religion cite this bubbling passion as something to fear in American society. They obsessively warn that our nation is in danger of being swept by a dark “religious fundamentalism.” However, the facts of daily life in the U.S. bear out Tocqueville’s judgment that deep and yeasty religious feeling is a good thing in a free culture like ours. Evidence I assembled in TAE’s previous issue (SCAN) indicates that reli­gious believers continue, right to the present day, to do most of the altruistic work that keeps our communities healthy—every­thing from blood donation, to philanthropy, to military service, to childraising, to volunteer work.

 

Contrary to the claims of skeptics, religious enthusiasm has actually proven to be a unifier of Americans. In an article explaining why Muslim immigrants have been much more comfortable in America than in Europe (and therefore vastly less likely to become alienated from their fellow citizens, and radicalized), New Republic contributor Spencer Ackerman finds that America’s religiosity actually reinforces our tolerance and pluralism, rather than impeding it. He quotes a Muslim-American leader saying that when he ventures into America’s religiously conservative heartland “it is true that, for some peo­ple, the way I pray is peculiar. But they don’t think I’m halluci­nating when I say, ‘It’s prayer time.’”

 

This same Muslim immigrant notes that America’s Bible Belt is indeed the place he feels least threatened. “Where’s the heart of the Islamic Society of North America? Plainfield, Indiana! That place hasn’t been bombed. It’s not in the heart of cosmo­politan America. It’s in rural Indiana!” states Eboo Patel. “For American Muslims,” Ackerman concludes, “the opportunity for a publicly visible expression of religion removes a tremendous source of frustration” that leaves many young men in more sec­ularized countries dangerously disaffected.

 

Serious religious conviction thus need not be a “wedge” at all. Rather than a force for division, it is more typically a way of uncov­ering common humanity with others. Even when creeds block agreement on specific details of conviction, common belief under God provides citizens with the mechanism for accepting and encouraging their fellows to pursue a good life in their own way.

 

There are a great many forces today—from complex cultural clashes to simply the frantic pace of modern life—that discour­age human fraternity. Amidst all that, religious faith is one of the most reliable inducements to unity, an orderly and whole­some society, and real feelings of community. Isn’t that some­thing to be guarded, not tossed away?