Religion in America: A spiritual supermarket

America, it turns out, is still “God’s country,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Atheist manifestos continue to glut the best-seller lists, while in Old Europe “Christian observance has slowly withered.” Yet a survey released last week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 84 percent of Americans still consider themselves religious, with 60 percent saying that faith is “very important,” compared to 25 percent of Italians and just 12 percent of the French. Troubling to some, however, was the finding that fully 44 percent of Americans have changed religions during their lifetime, either swapping one denomination for another or choosing to leave organized religion entirely to pursue their own spiritual path. This nation was founded on freedom of worship, of course. But it’s hard not to wonder if we haven’t crossed the line from religious diversity into “spiritual flakiness,” shopping for religion as if it were one more consumer product.

There are two ways to look at Pew’s findings, said Colleen Carroll Campbell in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Either we are “a nation of sincere spiritual seekers driven by our hunger for truth,” or we are a “nation of spiritual dilettantes more interested in finding a faith that suits our fancy” than one that truly challenges us to be better human beings. “God only knows,” said William Murchison in Human Events. Certainly, the idea of people trying out religions until they find one they “like” has a quintessentially American ring to it. After all, “the consumer model shapes everything else around us. Why not religion as well?” The answer, of course, is that religion is not just another product, but has a somewhat loftier purpose: providing a path to salvation, for starters.

Americans certainly are not giving up on God, said the Baltimore Sun. But the same cannot be said about “institutional religion.” The denominations that suffered the largest drop-offs, according to Pew, were the Catholic Church and mainline Protestantism. People have turned instead toward “more individualized forms of belief,” including the “personal relationship with Jesus” that many evangelical churches promise and the “do-it-yourself religions” of the unaffiliated, now the fourth largest category. “And why not?” In America, nobody tells us whom we can marry or vote for, or where we can live. “Little wonder that in a nation founded by people who wanted to practice their religion freely, so many of us move on from our ancestral faith.”

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