The church of your political choice.

THE STORY of American religion since World War II is one both of convergence and of cleavage. Religious, social, and political dynamics are all converging on one side or the other of the liberal/conservative cleavage in American life, The ads used to say, "Go to the Church of Your Choice." Today that increasingly means political choice.

This is one conclusion to be drawn from two recent and important studies: American Mainline Religion, by Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney (Rutgers), and The Restructuring of American Religion, by Robert Wuthnow (Princeton). Wuthnow argues that the political polarization of religion today is in sharp contrast to the situation in, say, the 1950s. Then there was a remarkable religious peace, based upon confidence in a neat fit between religion and culture. Wuthnow writes, "The truths expressed in Biblical values were thought to be part of the unity of all truth, part of a system that was compatible at heart with physics, with poetry, even with secular philosophy. It was simply inconceivable, given this view, that religious truths would not be regarded as applicable to the entire culture. They would ultimately prevail. Religious people, therefore, could advance their values in the confidence that they were not having to oppose an alien culture but that the truth underlying culture itself was on their side. "

Wuthnow may underestimate the degree to which this confidence was peculiar to mainline (now oldline or sideline) Protestantism. Evangelicals and fundamentalists did, for the most part, perceive the regnant culture as alien, although they were not sure that there was much they could or should do about it. And most Roman Catholics and Lutherans, while theoretically affirming the compatibility of Christianity and culture, were far from feeling at home in the cultural ambiance of liberal Protestant America.

Meanwhile, that Protestant hegemony itself began to fragment, according to Wuthnow, when its social activists started to engage in direct action in an exercise of political power. This happened in the civil-rights movement and then, more radically, in the protest against the war in Vietnam.

Before that, liberal Protestantism had assumed a close connection between values and behavior. The church's mission, religious leaders had believed, was to shape and promulgate the values by which people would then live. In the 1960s this changed. The suspicion grew that the American "system" was not compatible with Christian values. The additional claim was made that the values professed by Christians had little to do with their actual behavior in connection with, for instance, race and war. The answer, therefore, was for the church to intervene directy, in the form of clerical activism, in the political arena.

Wuthnow downplays the growth of church bureaucracies in the politicizing of American religion: he notes, for example, that the percentage of denominational resources devoted to national bureaucracies has not increased significantly. What he fails to appreciate is the dramatic turn in the purposes to which these bureaucracies are devoted. Evangelization, overseas mission, worship, and Christian nurture all declined as the church-and-society curia of liberal Protestantism waxed strong. Typically, every aspect of the church's mission was redefined in terms of its contribution to "social change."

On firmer ground, Wuthnow argues that politicized religion is directly related to the expansion of state power in recent decades. There has been no requirement of a religious-impact statement, comparable to an environmental-impact statement, with respect to government interventions. But as the state has increasingly encroached on education, social welfare, and personal and familial relationships, the consequences for religion have hardly been as "neutral" as government frequently claims. According to the dominant interpretation of the "no establishment" provision of the First Amendment, religion must retreat wherever government advances. Christians of a liberal bent who favor the expansionist state must be deeply ambivalent about the consequent restriction of religion in public life. Conservatives, on the other hand, began in the early 1970s to marshal their resources to offer political resistance to state encroachment. The predictable twist, of course, is that conservative activism has contributed powerfully to the politicizing of religion that most conservatives deplore.

IN THE complicated churnings of American religion, culture, and politics, the upshot is that "liberal" and "conservative" in our churches have come to mean pretty much what they mean in the society at large. In an increasingly politicized society, religion does not inform so much as it reflects and inflames choices made in the political arena. Far from providing a common resource of belief, tradition, and moral judgment, politicized religion turns societal conflicts into crusades. This is bad for public life; it is worse for religion. Claims of transcendent truth are collapsed into partisan agitations, and unbelievers are confirmed in their assumption that ours is a self-contained and self-referring universe in which "God" is but a usable symbol in the service of political preference.