The pollsters look at U.S. Catholics: and are all too cheerful about their findings.

Happy the historian who, fifty years from now, sets out to portray the American Catholic church in the last decades of the twentieth century and discovers Laity, American & Catholic: Transforming the Church (William V.D. Antonio, James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hoge, and Ruth A. Wallace; Sheed & Ward, $15.95, 196 pp.).

She will, to begin with, light upon a stash of useful data about the views of the fin de siecle American Catholic laity. But equally important, she will find a book that is itself an important bit of data: a pristine specimen, preserved like a mosquito in amber, of the ideological outlook that animated much of what was then (that is to say, now) called progressive Catholicism.

That outlook informs Call to Action, We Are Church, the Association for the Rights of Catholics, Catholics Speak Out, Corpus, and any number of other groups on the church's left. It is the outlook that ripples through the American news media's approach to Catholicism and that shapes much of the coverage of the American church's major independent source of news, the National Catholic Reporter.

Laity, American & Catholic is, in fact, a summary and analysis of that paper's 1993 national survey of lay Catholics. It was designed by the authors and carried out by the Gallup Organization. An earlier book, American Catholic Laity in a Changing Church (Sheed & Ward, 1989), reported on a similar 1986 poll. Taken together the two polls show:

* American Catholics are increasingly unwilling to give unqualified assent to official church teachings on marriage and sexual morality. More and more Catholics believe either that they alone should determine what is right or wrong, using church teaching simply as a helpful guide, or that the determination of right and wrong must emerge from some unspecified interaction between individual judgment and church authority.

* American Catholics are increasingly disinclined to insist on clearcut standards for being "a good Catholic," notably such positive criteria as regular Sunday churchgoing, getting married in the church, believing in papal infallibility, and donating time or money to the parish or Peter's Pence; or such negative criteria as not remarrying after divorce, not employing artificial contraception, and not getting abortions.

* Weekly Mass attendance remains respectable but decreasing. Same for daily prayer. Same for how important a place that Catholics say the church has in their lives.

* American Catholics increasingly believe that they have a right to participate in decisions about parish budgets, choosing their priests, and shaping the church's teachings on divorce, birth control, and the ordination of women. The latter they increasingly favor along with the ordination of married men.

* Most Catholics believe it highly unlikely that they would ever leave the church. (The skeptical observer, looking at their relaxed standards for membership, might ask, "Why should they?" The cynical might wonder "How would they know?")

These findings are hardly news, but they are anything but insignificant. They do not represent, as some conservative Catholic leaders keep telling themselves, blips or spikes in a fluctuating course of opinion but massive and steady trends. Nor, as an even greater number of conservatives would like to believe, do they represent the views only of fringe or marginal Catholics. A convincing chapter on the responses of "The Most-Committed American Catholics" shows that among this group the same shifts in regard to church teachings and demands for lay participation are steadily occurring. A certain kind of tightly structured church, with precisely articulated doctrines, clearly differentiated roles, detailed codes of conduct, and sharply delineated boundaries, is passing into history. It would be foolhardy to suppose that it could be restored by an act of will or authority, at least not without a loss of members on a scale that would make the Reformation look mild.

But no less a sign of the times than these findings is the polar framework the authors use to formulate their study and interpret their results: A church that is democratic, egalitarian, open, embracing, tolerant, innovating, lay-led, diverse, and affirmative of American values is pitted against a church that is autocratic, hierarchical, dogmatic, discriminating, clerical, monolithic, and committed to a European past.

Given that choice, it is not surprising which side the authors are on. Which side would almost anyone, save a few incorrigible curmudgeons and devotees of the Syllabus of Errors, be on? The authors momentarily acknowledge that their either/or framework "oversimplifies real complexities," but it is a price they are willing to pay to emphasize "a fundamental polarity." So where others, including many committed to an open, more democratic church, might find a considerable mixture of good news and bad news in these findings, the book, with only the faintest dusting of caveats, argues that the state of the Catholic laity is essentially sound and its views in keeping with the best of a rather unproblematic set of American values. (The book's rendition of recent changes in American family life, for example, is neutral to upbeat, mentioning women entering the work force, the trend toward smaller families, and greater acceptance of interfaith marriage but nothing about divorce, domestic violence, or illegitimacy.) Clearly the authors feel that the church's presumably clerical leadership would be wise to accommodate recent shifts in lay Catholic opinion (and in American life) rather than resist or alter them.

With one exception, the authors display none of the self-consciousness now common among social scientists about how their own values and histories might have shaped their research. Yet the book reflects the preoccupations that emerged so dramatically in the decade after Vatican II. No less than the Vatican is Laity, American & Catholic focused on issues of (1) institutional control and (2) sex. Most of the questions in the NCR survey deal with authority, hierarchy, rights, and sex-related rules.

To all appearances, these authors are not radicals but the kind of moderate reformists who believe that a social organism like the church can pass relatively easily from one state to another with no real threat to its substance or essential character. Thus, their questions also avoid inquiring into anything that might be truly jarring.

They confidently report, for example, that "among lay people there are high levels of consensus on core faith issues such as the Trinity, Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and Transubstantiation." Quite possibly so. But apart from an uninformative reference to two unpublished research papers, one wonders how they know. They never inquire into these matters themselves and most surveys of Catholic opinion, in keeping with the media's lack of interest in matters theological, have focused almost entirely on "practical" questions of sex, ordination of married men and of women, approval of the pope, and politics. When the New York Times, at my request, added to this standard survey repertoire a question about how Catholics understood what happened to the bread and wine at Mass, the results were startling (see, "Signs & Numbers," Commonweal, January 27, 1995).

Consider again the authors' set of questions inquiring whether "you think a person can be a good Catholic without...[going to church every Sunday, obeying church teaching on birth control, divorce and remarriage, abortion, etc.]." What if they had added a few items like "without believing that Jesus rose bodily from the dead" or "without believing that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist under the appearances of bread and wine"? As optimistic believers in moderate change, the authors have shied away from probing at its less acceptable edges.

They are a little more forward but still circumspect about another area of possible disappointment, the laity's attitudes toward the social justice concerns obviously important to the authors and to likeminded Catholics. They did not inquire whether one could be a good Catholic and support capital punishment or oppose unions or try to avoid paying your legal share of taxes. In the one relevant query, helping the poor is acknowledged as an essential mark of being a good Catholic by more respondents (44 percent) than obeying the ban on contraception (24 percent). But this figure, too, is down from the 51 percent of six years earlier, and young Catholic adults, unlike their parents, now resemble their pre-conciliar grandparents in thinking concern for the poor peripheral to Catholicism. The authors occasionally recognize with regret that the dynamic making the laity laissez faire toward sexual teaching may be doing the same toward social teaching. The point is not pursued.

Their dichotomous framework is embedded within a quickly sketched but equally stark historical narrative, the story of the struggle of "Americanizers" against "Europeanists" (read, the Vatican). The former are natural freedom-lovers and democrats, the latter act out of fear, suspicion, insecurity, intolerance, and attachment to clerical power and "top-down authority." This history assumes, as mainline Protestantism largely has, that Christianity and American freedom, democracy, and liberal individualism are convergent, and that the hordes of suspect Catholics washed ashore in the last century could be redeemed by the melting pot of assimilation.

Occasionally this perspective results in statements with a startlingly nativist flavor. Claims like the pope's to doctrinal authority are, the book says, "in tension with the American temper and the very thing the U.S. Constitution was written to restrict." But generally it is simply naive history in a triumphalist mode, without shadow or irony.

What other stories might have framed, in part or in whole, the authors' research? One is the moving story common to many religious or ethnic groups who have struggled to balance the benefits of assimilation in the United States with the desire to retain the distinctive identity essential to their very survival. This story has a minor place in Laity, American & Catholic, but only in regard to Latino Catholics, where it is multiculturally correct to sympathize with the losses entailed in assimilation. Otherwise that possibility is ignored or quickly dismissed.

There is another obvious story in which the authors might have set their study: the precipitous decline of the very mainline Protestant denominations whose point of view this book implicitly adopts. Not a few scholars have concluded that the post-conciliar Catholic church is well embarked on a similar trajectory. The absence of all but the most oblique references to this Protestant story is especially puzzling because one of the authors has made an outstanding contribution to its study. There are fleeting references in the text to Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Westminster/John Knox, 1994) written by Dean R. Hoge along with Benton Johnson and Donald A. Luidens, but nothing indicates the sober warning it contains for Catholic reformers.

Vanishing Boundaries studied a representative sample of baby boomers (between thirty-three and forty-two years old, late enough for the return to church that frequently accompanies having a family) who had been confirmed as teenagers in the Presbyterian church. Two decades or more after their confirmations, only 52 percent of this group were "churched"--members of a church who attended services at least six times a year. Only 39 percent were Presbyterians, and most of these, the authors concluded, were not likely to sacrifice time, energy, or resources to church concerns, whether liberal or conservative. They did not challenge traditional church teachings, but merely reinterpreted them in terms not very different from the tenets of agnostic baby boomers: Take care of your family, try to live by the Golden Rule, but also don't carry your selflessness to any extreme.

Moreover, it is "likely that their children will be even less committed to Christianity or to the church than they themselves," the authors stated. "Few of their children will rebel, for there is little to rebel against; they are more likely to be marginally involved in church life or to drift away."

Now recall that this is a study of confirmed Presbyterians--a church that ordains married men and women; does not condemn contraception, abortion, or remarriage after divorce; is inclusive in its criteria for membership; prides itself on affirming American values; and emphasizes democratic decision making and the laity's rights to participate in congregational spending, selecting pastors, and determining official church positions. In other words, a church that has long since institutionalized the kinds of concerns that Laity, American & Catholic highlights as crucial to American Catholicism's future.

Several years ago, when the results of his study first became public, I asked Dean Hoge, himself a Presbyterian who has long been on the faculty at The Catholic University of America and has published many influential studies of Catholicism, whether he thought the bleak prognosis applied to Catholics as well as Presbyterians. Probably not to the newer waves of Latino or Asian Catholic immigrants, he replied, but certainly to those Catholics in the same demographic categories as Presbyterians: middle-class or better, well-educated, eager for their children to attend the best schools, unwilling to cut themselves off from sympathetic and broadening contacts with other cultures and beliefs. I remember being impressed with his social scientist's dispassionate attitude toward what seemed to be the inevitable demise of his church in any recognizable form, and doubted that, were his prediction to prove accurate, I could summon the same equanimity toward the demise of mine.

Perhaps this detachment explains why he no more than the other authors of Laity, American & Catholic saw fit to relate their investigation in some way to what the very first sentence of Vanishing Boundaries says "has been a central fact of religious life in the United States for a quarter of a century."

Two chapters of this book stand out as exceptions to much of what I have said. They are the ones on "Three Generations of Catholics: Pre-Vatican II, Vatican II, and Post-Vatican II" and especially the following one devoted wholly to young people, "Post-Vatican II Catholics." Both are written by James D. Davidson, a sociologist at Purdue University and the one author who, in the chapter comparing generations, indicates his own place in recent church developments.

In those chapters, we learn that 59 percent of the pre-Vatican II generation stated that the Catholic church is either "the most important part" or "among the most important parts" of their lives, compared to 48 percent of the Vatican II generation, whose formative years spanned the council, and 29 percent of the post-Vatican II generation, who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. Members of the older, pre-Vatican II generation were also two to three times more likely than the post-Vats to have heard of the American bishops's pastoral letters on nuclear arms, the economy, and the concerns of women.

Younger Catholics, Davidson writes, "place a higher priority on being good Christians than they do on being good Catholics." They distinguish sharply between God's law and church law and "put higher priority on God's law." They "tend to have a deinstitutionalized and democratic view of the church."

All of which might be good news, signs of a more profound form of Christian discipleship than their elders'--until one notices how much these responses coincide with those of the lukewarm baby boomers of Vanishing Boundaries. In fact, when Davidson reports that "Post-Vatican II Catholics view God as an all-loving and forgiving friend who wants us to be nice to others," he is fully aware of the housebroken status of a God of niceness.

Doubts about the depth of the post-Vats' discipleship grow when Davidson reports that, in fact, members of this younger generation know relatively little about the faith--and rightly resent their ignorance. "They feel shortchanged by the church," he says, quoting one post-Vat, "As far as the Bible goes, I couldn't even tell you what's in the Old and New Testaments"; and another, "I'm appalled by what I was (not) taught in CCD"; and another, "I didn't know what parts of the Mass mean"; and another, "We just shot paper wads in religion class."

Finally, Davidson reports that post-Vats simply "lack a vocabulary to help them form a Catholic identity and interpret their Catholic experiences." He contrasts this with an older generation's fund of terms, from mortal and venial sin to holy days of obligation, confession, and Stations of the Cross--"a common language with which to communicate with one another about their Catholic experiences." Lacking "a Catholic word bank upon which to draw," Davidson concludes, post-Vats can scarcely be distinguished from members of any mainline Protestant denomination.

The value of this chapter is not only its unvarnished presentation of sobering news. Based more on Davidson's own research rather than the NCR poll, it surfaces themes like the younger generation's meager knowledge of Catholicism, its Nutri-sweet image of God, and its impoverished religious vocabulary that go beyond the book's general preoccupation with sex and church organization. At the same time, Davidson also draws attention to a paradox demanding further examination. As church leaders might have hoped, young Catholic adults who have undergone Catholic education at all three stages, from elementary school to college, "have high levels of religious commitment": Compared to others their age, they are much likelier to be Massgoers, have a positive reaction to recent developments in the church, and be most familiar with the bishops' pastoral letters. Yet they also are more likely to question traditional church views on morality and authority.

If more of Laity, American & Catholic had probed the existing data in this way, the book would have at least unsettled assumptions cherished by both conservatives and liberals, Americanizers and Europeanists; and it would provide a much more realistic guide to the choices the church confronts. Those choices include matters of worship, spirituality, education, theology, belief, and disposition that are not separate from the distribution of decision-making authority in the church but cannot be reduced to it either.

One of the drawbacks of the stark, good-guys-versus-bad-guys framework informing this book is that it encourages an atmosphere where merely to raise these qualms immediately qualifies one as a "restorationist." That is positively silly--and intellectually counter-productive. The historian who looks back may shake her head in wonder at how the ideological commitments that made these scholars highlight one set of very real issues became blinders that kept them--and many others in their camp--from examining so much else.