Christianity in the Twenty-First Century.

Robert Wuthnow would be a valuable participant in any symposium on American religion. He has a broad knowledge of religious studies as well as a rich trove of personal anecdotes from the lives of church members and leaders. He would present all of this in an irenic and respectful manner that would encourage dialogue. These qualities are evident in Christiani in the Twenty-first Century, which constitutes a kind of updating of The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton), his 1988 treatment of religion in post-World War II America.

This new book might be better titled, The Future of Liberal American Protestantism, for, though both fundamentalism and the "religious Right" are given considerable attention, Wuthnow betrays a need to explain the two mainly as challenges to mainstream Protestantism. Catholicism is treated only in passing, though readers concerned with its future will benefit from Wuthnow's reflections on the social and cultural forces affecting religious believers and the churches as well as from his description of church dynamics set in play when responding to these forces.

Wuthnow's concern is with the maintenance of individual and communal identity, in the midst of institutional, ethical, doctrinal, political, and cultural challenges. These challenges can be met, respectively, if the church can be a community that is: mutually supportive, compassionate, inclusive, able to mediate religious values and public life, and ground a secure personal identity. The obstacles are, in the culture, individualism, mobility, and materialism; within the churches themselves, a preoccupation with bureaucratic needs and the polarization between liberals and conservatives; and the temporary and utilitarian character of commitment that is a common problem to both church and society.

Community is central and Wuthnow considers it progress that, where family or state once determined one's religious community, the church itself must now warrant that choice and commitment. But there is little precision about what constitutes community. The features he looks for in church community seem to boil down to mutual personal support and care among those who live near each other. This immediacy of community is perhaps finally expressed in the Epilogue where he expresses his fear that the churches may be ill-suited to provide community, unrealistically expecting people to "forge some intimate bond" [emphasis added] when meeting only once a week. It is surprising then that he is skeptical of the small group movement for fostering Christian community. He wonders if they are adequately Christian or sustainable without institutional support.

What then will help? Wuthnow turns to stories as the ground for a "community of memory" that would meet institutional challenges as well as ethical ones. The stories he finds significant are those of compassion. Unfortunately this reduces ethics almost entirely to compassion - not the worst thing - but it hardly provides an adequate treatment of ethical norms or behavior. Even so, the function of stories remains elusive. His data, assembled from interviews, suggest that stories provide people with lessons for living. Yet the evidence presented is that one's own stories, one's own memories of being treated with generous compassion by others have some impact. Consequently, while simply-put narratives are recommended as the best kind of preaching, he offers no evidence that vicarious experiences have the power to shape moral behavior.

If ethics is reduced to compassion, doctrine is even more narrowly construed. Again stories are central: "Elaborate philosophical and theological doctrines sometimes supply rational answers that satisfy canons of logic and empirical evidence....But in daily life the enduring questions of human existence are more likely to be addressed through narratives, proverbs and maxims, and iconic representations rich with experiential connotations." The problem is that stories as a strategy and medium for communicating doctrine and motivating response seem to be self-validating. How are they grounded in revelation and theology?

Having urged stories, Wuthnow then devotes most of the section on doctrine to fundamentalism as though the challenge of fundamentalism is that it insists that doctrine is more than metaphor. (Curiously, although Wuthnow criticizes liberal Protestantism for becoming "reactionary" by letting fundamentalism "set the agenda," he himself devotes a quarter of the book directly and many pages indirectly to what is variously and confusingly called "fundamentalism, the Right, and conservatism.") Wuthnow's own take on doctrine may be best expressed in a chapter headed: "Living the Question," where he writes: "It seems to me that Christianity does not so much supply the learned person with answers as it does raise questions." I cannot resist the temptation to compare this with Vaclav Havel's concern with "living in truth."

Wuthnow marshals scientific evidence for his diagnoses and prescriptions. Yet just as he makes a leap of faith regarding the impact of stories on moral formation, so he draws inferences from his data which seem doubtful, mainly because of what I would call misplaced significance. For example, he links the development of compassion with personal crisis: 38 percent of those who had a personal crisis became involved in charitable or social service activities, compared with only 28 percent of those who have never had a personal crisis (who are these people?). Yes, that is statistically significant. Yet that means that the remaining 62 percent of those who have had a personal crisis are not involved in compassionate work. The more important inference is that personal crises are but marginally effective in fostering compassion. There are other examples in the book of mistaking statistical significance for significance indeed. In other words, Wuthnow's arguments often seem circumstantial, assembling pieces of evidence no one piece of which, nor all of which, is conclusive, but whose assembly offers a plausible account of a reality with deeper causes and needing deeper analysis.

More than disagreeing with Wuthnow's analysis, I found myself noticing how much was missing: the essential components of community, ethics, doctrine, public life, and personal religious identity seem to be so watered down that the really tough questions of social solidarity, of ethics as virtue, of doctrine as truth, of public policy as justice, and of identity as integrity are not dealt with. When he gets down to cases, Wuthnow knows that there must be more to the church than he has accounted for in his analysis: "The middle class needs the moral guidance of the churches in charting its material commitments [and other commitments?]....the bold voice of moral authority [emphasis added] in limiting its commitments to the workplace and the countinghouse....It needs to know that it is right, good, worthy, legitimate, proper - whatever words are used - to hear the laughter of children, to alleviate the anguish of the poor, to explore the inner depths of our souls, and to seek God." The word authority this late in the analysis (page 201) is as startling as the even later (page 216) statement that "Christianity in the future will continue to be pluralistic, but will remain committed to the assumption that some perspectives come closer to representing divine truth than others" [emphasis added].

These citations reflect the tension between Wuthnow the believer and Wuthnow the social scientist - this is the work of a man who cares about the future of individuals, community life, and the church. Yet a fuller analysis of Christianity in the twenty-first century would have to tackle more directly its claims to truth, the supernatural. and worship, moral authority and individual conscience, and other central questions, and would have to look a little deeper into many of the forces that Wuthnow describes.