A Generation of Seekers.

I was born into the baby-boom generation and the Methodist Church. Since A Generation of Seekers is about baby-boomer spirituality, while The Churching of America is, in large part, about the rise and fall of Methodism, I read them with special interest. But they draw larger, and opposite, conclusions about the fate of religion in America.

Wade Clark Roof and his assistants interviewed several hundred randomly selected baby-boomers, with emphasis on seven individuals they considered representative: three Protestants, two Catholics, one nothing, and a Jewish hippie. Of these, "Mollie Stone," the hippie, is the most fun. She is "into" Quakers, "turned on" to Alcoholics Anonymous, has an Indian sweat lodge in her yard, and yearns for an "alternative" Judaism (clearly, one without a First Commandment).

Roof's essential sympathy for do-it-yourself mystics of Mollie Stone's sort does not prevent him from recognizing their problems. Their beliefs are "difficult to sustain," "not easily passed on from one generation to the next," and "incoheren[t]." They call spirituality from the vasty deep, but does it come when they call? Yet Roof argues that a feeling of diffused spirituality permeating everything, especially those activities that involve recovering, discovering, or pleasing the self, has touched all baby-boomers, even the most conservative. He quotes one evangelical in Southern California who "surfs for the Lord." Can you really do that, the interviewer (who is obviously not from Southern California) asks. "Absolutely," she answers. "He's the one who makes the waves."

Roof found his subjects clustered into three groups - loyalists who never left the pews (33 per cent), prodigal sons (25 per cent), and dropouts who have stayed out (42 per cent - and tested various hypotheses explaining why a baby-boomer might go one way or another. Neither a baby-boomer's economic performance, his parents' religiosity, nor his level of education seemed to make much difference. Settling down and having kids made some. But the strongest factors keeping a baby-boomer in church or luring him back were a strict upbringing and a close relationship with his parents, while the strongest factor pulling him away was the degree of his exposure to the counterculture. Roof's advice to American churches is aimed at attracting those the counterculture pulled away, particularly the middle group of returnees. They are all in the church basement, attending Al Anon meetings and lectures on Goddess worship, because that's what they want out of religion, thanks to the Sixties. The Lord leadeth them to greened pastures. So, says Roof, should the churches.

The Sixties the Sixties the Sixties the Sixties the Sixties. When will my peers and our exegetes ever get over it? Baby-boomers, writes Roof at one point, "look like veterans, having been through a war together." Eight thousand men died in two hours at Cold Harbor, and he calls the Sixties a war? Sexual intercourse began in 1963, Philip Larkin said, ironically. So did everything else, we say, seriously.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark try to supply some missing historical perspective. They view history through the lens of economic analysis. "Where religious affiliation is a matter of choice, religious organizations must compete for members ... The |invisible hand' of the marketplace is as unforgiving of ineffective religious firms as it is of their commercial counterparts." What makes a religious firm ineffective is social success, whether it be grounded in law, as was the case with established colonial and state churches in the eighteenth century, or conferred by the wealth and sophistication of its members. When a church blunts the tension between it and the world, it loses its own intensity. Thus "mainline bodies are always headed for the sideline."

Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, according to Finke and Stark, were the first complacent churchly IBMs. Their market share was captured by the religious Silicon Valleys of the nineteenth century: Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics. All three churches had odd and demanding doctrines, low-life target audiences, and eager salesmen (preachers and priests). But Methodists began moving up in the world by the 1850s, and disgruntled true believers were leaving "Methodism's church of mammon" before the century was out.

Finke and Stark are especially tart on the role clergymen and divinity schools play in a church's decline. "For the clergy, the costs of remaining [in] a high-tension sect are especially high. They often receive less pay and community respect than their counterparts in |mainline' denominations, even though they face more stringent demands on their belief and behavior." This is fine, so long as they are zealous and uneducated. But credentialed seminarians, proud of their training and their sophistication, want something better. As a result, "well-educated clergy" are among "the first to support a lowering of the tension with the surrounding culture."

Starting in the 1960s, Catholics went the way of Methodists. Finke and Stark argue that the accommodationist reforms of Vatican II were as damaging as Humanae Vitae. Extreme decentralization has so far kept Southern Baptists healthy, but education creeps apace even among them, and troubles loom.

If history is the hole in Roofs book, then content is the hole in Finke and Stark's. They claim to be mindful of doctrine, identifying a "vivid otherworldliness" as the best religious market strategy. But that is not very specific. They note in passing that the Mormons are doing very well these days, but Mormon otherworldliness is quite different from Catholic or Baptist otherworldliness, to say nothing of Catholic and Baptist differences from each other.

Be mellow, counsels Roof. Hang tough, shout Finke and Stark. Is there any basis for deciding between them? Roof and his team re-interviewed their seven case studies as their book went to press, and wrote a where-are-they-now epilogue. Mollie Stone had yet to find her alternative Judaism; both Catholics, two of the Protestants, and the unbeliever were at least as far away from church membership as when they were first contacted. Only one boomer Protestant, the lone evangelical, held firm to her faith; she was praying that Roe v. Wade would be overturned.

Mr. Brookhiser, an NR senior editor, is a columnist for the New York Observer.