Let me begin with a passage that expresses in a few highly condensed words why I believe Protestantism has provided the fundamental structure of American culture. It is a warning from a Unitarian leader, Henry W. Bellows, to his fellow Unitarians in the middle of the nineteenth century. Historically Unitarianism is an offshoot of Congregationalism and carries tendencies within Congregationalism, and Protestantism more generally, to a kind of logical conclusion. Bellows named that conclusion “individualism.” As he put it, writing in 1859,

…the sufficiency of the Scriptures turns out to be the self-sufficiency of man, and the right of private judgment an absolute independence of Bible or Church…. No creed but the Scriptures, practically abolishes all Scriptures but those on the human heart; nothing between a man’s conscience and his God, vacates the Church; and with the church, the Holy Ghost, whose function is usurped by private reason; the Church lapses into what are called Religious Institutions; these into Congregationalism, and Congregationalism into Individualism—and the logical end is the abandonment of the Church as an independent institution…and the extinction of worship as a separate interest.11xHenry W. Bellows, as quoted in Conrad Wright, Walking Together: Polity and Participation in Unitarian Universalist Churches (Boston: Skinner House, 1989) 156.

That Bellows’ comments were prescient is indicated by a 1995–96 survey, which found that one third of Americans believe that “people have God within them, so churches aren’t really necessary.”22xWade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 318. I hope to show the price we pay for that ever more prevalent idea.

Andrew Delbanco’s recent book The Real American Dream has greatly helped me clarify the American situation by showing how our religious culture has changed over time.33xAndrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Delbanco organizes his small book into three chapters entitled “God,” “Nation,” and “Self.” These he sees, using Emersonian terminology, as “predominant ideas” that have successively organized our culture and our society, providing a context of meaning that can bring hope and stave off melancholy. Delbanco sees American Protestantism as leading first to nationalism, and then to individualism. In speaking of God as the predominant idea that first organized our culture, Delbanco is thinking primarily of the New England Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nation became the predominant idea from the time of the Revolutionary War until well into the twentieth century. Most recently self seems to have replaced, or if not replaced, subordinated, God and nation as the predominant idea of our culture. Delbanco argues for three loosely chronological epochs, though seeing many overlaps, but I will argue that all three ideas were present at the very beginning, and that, although changing in degree of dominance ever since, some of our deepest problems arise from the form of Protestant Christianity that first put its stamp on colonial culture.

Certainly the Puritans were focused on God; indeed they were God-obsessed. But from the beginning both nation and self were significant sub-texts. If one takes even so great a document as John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” preached on board the Arbella in Salem harbor just before the landing, we find a fusion of church and nation that leads Winthrop to a conscious identification of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with ancient Israel. If Winthrop took Moses’ farewell sermon (Deuteronomy 30) as his basic text, he had copious New Testament allusions to strengthen his case, perhaps the most famous (notorious?) being the metaphor of a city on a hill: “[W]e shall be as a City upon a Hill [Matthew 5:14]; the eyes of all people are upon us…44xJohn Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop Papers, vol. 2 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931) 295. It took Ronald Reagan to embellish the city with the adjective “shining,” found neither in Matthew nor in Winthrop, but suggestive of the long-lasting tendency to identify America with the City of God.

It has often been pointed out that the Protestant Reformation paved the way for modern nationalism by breaking the hold of the international church and replacing it with state churches instead. “The glory of God was replaced by the glory of the nation; by a curious dialectic the Reformation paved the way for this development,” as it was put in one essay.55xFrancisco O. Ramirez and John Boli, “On the Union of States and Schools,” Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual, ed. George M. Thomas, John W. Meyer, et al. (Newbury Park: Sage, 1987) 194. But the American case was extreme in fusing the glory of God with the glory of the nation in a sense of millennial hopes fulfilled: America as redeemer nation for all the world. A sense of the judgment of God hanging over the nation was evident in the closing lines of Winthrop’s sermon where he warned that we will “perish out of this good land” if we do not obey God’s commandments.66xWinthrop 295. A sense of God’s judgment was never more evident than in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, where he attributed the sufferings of the war to the judgment of God against slavery and quoted Psalm 19:9 as saying “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” But, as Roger Williams pointed out in criticism of the views of Winthrop, the problem came not from the absence of a sense of judgment (though that would be an often realized temptation), but from the confusion of the nation with the communion of the saints. For Williams the error was to confuse “a people, naturally considered,” with the millennial ark of Christ, which as a result would be “to pull God and Christ and Spirit out of Heaven, and subject them unto naturall, sinful, inconstant men….”77xSacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) 110. Although Williams had a very problematic view of the church, still he knew it could not be identified with a nation. For Lincoln, as far as we know, the church had lost all significance. It was only the nation that had to bear, unworthy though it was, the great mission.

The Protestant temptation to confuse church and nation was linked to the very same conception of the church that would open the door to the confusion of God and self. On the face of it nothing could be further from the Puritan mind. The conquest of the self so as to make oneself transparent to God was the center of Puritan piety. And yet the very focus on the individual struggle was, as Sacvan Bercovitch points out in his book The Puritan Origins of the American Self, finally a form of self-assertion:

…the individual affirming his identity by turning against his power of self-affirmation. But to affirm and to turn against are both aspects of self-involvement. We can see in retrospect how the very intensity of that self-involvement—mobilizing as it did the resources of the ego in what amounted to an internal Armageddon—had to break loose into the world at large.88xBercovitch 20.

Just as Lincoln represents a critical step toward a nation that has replaced the church, so Emerson represents a critical step toward a self that has replaced the church, one ratified by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, which is Puritan in its fascination with individual religious experience, and not only free from, but inimical to, any “institutional form” that that religious experience might take.99xWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987) 34.

James divides religion into two “branches,” the personal and the institutional. He chooses to focus entirely on personal religion, leaving institutional religion aside as it lives “at second hand upon tradition.”1010xJames 35. Yet in this case, too, the Puritans foreshadowed later developments. Delbanco quotes John Cotton in the seventeenth century as saying: “If…the Papists aske, where was the Church visible, before Luther? The answer is, it was visible, not in open Congregations…but in sundry members of the church,” that is, individual members who were persecuted by the church in their day.1111xAs quoted in Delbanco 27. When John Donne said in a sermon that every believer “hath a Church in himself,” he was certainly not speaking of the natural self, but of the converted self.1212xBercovitch 11. Yet the locus of the church in the individual, with the church as an association only coming into existence through the voluntary action of the already converted, was the very notion that opened the door not only to the elevation of the self, but of the nation, to transcendent status. With respect to the fatal notion that the church consists only of the already converted, Roger Williams was, if anything, even more extreme than John Winthrop, however right he was to reject the conflation of church and nation.

Delbanco sums up his story about America near the end of his book:

The history of hope I have tried to sketch in this book is one of diminution. At first, the self expanded toward (and was sometimes overwhelmed by) the vastness of God. From the early republic to the Great Society, it remained implicated in a national ideal lesser than God but larger and more enduring than any individual citizen. Today, hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone.1313xDelbanco 103.

What I am arguing, moving beyond Delbanco’s argument though stimulated by it, is that the entire story of declension, that good Puritan word, is present in germ, so to speak, in the very form of Protestant Christianity of the first colonists. A fundamental critique of the premises of American society and culture, then, would require not only a critique of ontological individualism and its strange complementarity with the confusion of God and nation, but a critique of the Protestant Reformation itself, at least in its most influential American forms. That critique would be at the same time theological, ethical, and ecclesiological. My point of entry, as I have already indicated, is the Protestant doctrine of the church—from problems there, I think, flow the correlative theological and ethical problems that haunt not only Protestantism, but any culture, certainly American culture, that has developed from a Protestant basis.

I don’t want in any simple sense to paint Protestants as the bad guys and Catholics, the obvious contrast term, as the good guys. In the history of religion one finds much to praise and much to blame but no one completely innocent or completely guilty. In particular I want to emphasize that the achievements of Protestantism have been major, and that, whatever the mistakes, the Reformation was, in my view, a necessary movement in the spiritual history of humanity, although I think ultimately it needs to be transcended.

Among the many contributions of Protestantism, I have only learned recently of the relation of Protestantism and environmentalism. David Vogel, my colleague in the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, in an as yet unpublished paper, has looked at the twenty-one richest nations in today’s world. The purpose of his study was to understand why, although all rich nations have embraced the cause of environmentalism, some have done so much more enthusiastically than others. He divided the twenty-one nations into two groups: eleven he denominated as light green, concerned mainly with the quality of air and water that directly affect their population; and ten he denominated as dark green, concerned with the whole ecosphere, with endangered species, rain forests, ozone holes, and all the rest. Now his stunning discovery was that all but one of the ten dark green countries (the exception is Austria) are of Protestant heritage, and none of the eleven light green countries is. The latter include six Catholic countries, one Greek Orthodox country (Greece), one Jewish country (Israel), and three Confucian/Buddhist countries (Japan, Korea, and Taiwan). But the correlations don’t end there. Vogel found that, compared to the non-Protestant countries, the Protestant countries are the richest (Japan is an exception here) and have been rich the longest, are the most modern and have been modern the longest, are the most democratic and have been democratic the longest, and in addition have the most vibrant civic cultures. So it seems Max Weber’s argument was even more general than he thought: there is a correlation of Protestant heritage not only with modern economic prosperity, but also with successful democracy, and, as Vogel discovered, strong environmentalism as well.1414xDavid Vogel, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism: A Comparative Study of Environmental Policies and Politics” (Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley) unpublished manuscript.

Vogel’s discovery led me to take the next step in my argument, namely the recognition that there are cultural codes embedded in national cultures and that those cultural codes, however transformed over time, are ultimately derived from religious beliefs. The language of cultural code is not uncommon today, but I have not previously used it. I’m not sure of the derivation of the phrase, but perhaps it can be traced back to Clifford Geertz’s argument that culture patterns operate something like genetic programs.

I want to push beyond Geertz and use a dangerous analogy from Chomsky to argue that there are “deep” cultural codes and surface ones, and that the deep cultural codes, the ones most likely to be derived from religion, are far less malleable than the fads and fashions that inundate us daily. This is because deep cultural codes are so taken for granted, and operate at such a level of generality, that they may be effective even when, perhaps especially when, they are not recognized as such.

I want to illustrate my point by drawing further on Vogel’s article and on the environmental historian, Donald Worster, whom he cites. It is important not to confuse a Protestant heritage country with a Protestant country. Vogel argues that historically Protestant culture overrides religious pluralism: “for the purpose of this analysis all Americans are Protestants regardless of what particular religion they do or do not practice, just as are all Germans….” Vogel seems to be confirming G. K. Chesterton’s famous remark that “in America, even the Catholics are Protestants.”

But the relation between Protestantism and “dark green” ideology gets even more interesting when we learn that the religious group least concerned with the environment in America today is Evangelical Protestants, from whose tradition Vogel argues, such ideology derives. Evangelical Protestants are more likely to evince an older Protestant mastery-over-nature orientation. How then does Vogel explain the correlation of Protestantism and dark green environmentalism? He does so in two ways. Following Worster he shows that the origin of modern American environmentalism was in Evangelical Christianity. Worster has a fine essay on John Muir, tracing his development from fervent Evangelical Protestant to pantheistic environmentalist.1515xDonald Worster, “John Muir and the Roots of American Environmentalism,” The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 184–202. But even more important to Vogel’s point is the structural continuity even when explicit religious connection is disavowed:

Contemporary dark green environmentalism should be understood, in part, as [a] secularized version of Protestantism. Without necessarily making or acknowledging any explicit connection to religious beliefs or practices, it draws on the rhetoric and imagery of Protestantism.

Vogel points to several structural similarities:

First, both dark green environmentalism and Protestantism can be said to share a relatively pessimistic view of the world, one in which man is wicked and has committed multiple sins. For Protestants, the sins are against God; for environmentalists, they are against nature. For the former, the “wages” of this sin are eternal damnation; for the latter, it is the impending destruction of the eco-sphere. Both share an essentially apocalyptic vision. Thus if we continue in our present behaviors and values we are doomed. It is only by radically changing our ways—which include both our behaviors and our values—that we can possibly be “saved.” The notion of Calvin and other Protestant reformers that we live in a depraved world filled with sinners bent on their own destruction is echoed in much contemporary “dark green” environmental rhetoric.

Second, Vogel notes the common importance of asceticism, expressed by the environmentalists in a concern for recycling, walking rather than driving, and so forth. Third is moralism: both Protestants and environmentalists are quick to make strong moral judgments. “By contrast,” he writes, “non-Protestant cultures tend to exhibit a higher degree of tolerance for inconsistency.” Fourth, he notes, Protestantism is a “highly egalitarian religion.” This is a feature that links Protestantism to democracy. What the environmentalists do is extend the concept of the rights of man to include the rights of nature: “If people are equal in God’s eyes, then so are natural objects such as whales, trees, animals, and rivers.” Fifth, Vogel argues, just because Protestantism has a weakened sense of liturgy and sacramentalism, it is open to an aesthetic appreciation of nature. Indeed, it is largely on Protestant soil that Romanticism as an aesthetic movement has evolved. Environmentalism clearly has inherited the nature mysticism to which Protestants have been prone. Finally, and ironically, Protestantism and environmentalism are connected in that they both share an ethic of mastery, the very ethic that, Vogel says, “has, correctly, been associated with the ruthless subjugation of nature.” But environmentalism gives the notion of mastery a new twist, or, we might say the cultural code undergoes a mutation. As Vogel puts it, “if one believes that control or mastery of the world is possible, one can just as readily choose to treat it well as dominate over it. In any event, it is people who are ultimately responsible for nature.”

To sum up what I think the connection between Protestantism and environmentalism means for the understanding of how cultural codes operate, let me quote Donald Worster:

Protestantism, like any religion, lays its hold on people’s imagination in diverse, contradictory ways and that hold can be tenacious long after the explicit theology or doctrine has gone dead. Surely it cannot be surprising that in a culture deeply rooted in Protestantism, we should find ourselves speaking its language, expressing its temperament, even when we thought we were free of all that.1616xWorster 200.

But much as I want to recognize the positive contributions of Protestantism, I do not intend to preach American triumphalism and to laud the beneficence of Protestantism for giving our country wealth, democracy, and environmentalism. Instead I intend to put a twist on the idea of a deep cultural code. Just as a genetic code can produce a highly successful species, successful because specialized for a particular environment, but then, perhaps at its moment of greatest success, because of a dramatic change in that environment, the code can lead to rapid extinction; so a cultural code, which has long enjoyed remarkable success in many fields, can lead a civilization into abrupt decline if it disables it from solving central problems, perhaps problems created by its own success. And yet the cultural code, however deep, is not a genetic code: it can be changed, although sometimes it takes a catastrophe to change it.

So far I have focused on the positive contributions of the Protestant tradition. Let me now begin to assess the costs that have been exacted. The costs became increasingly evident when, to put it in Delbanco’s terms, the self began to become the dominant idea in American culture, and the mitigating idea of the nation, in the absence of strong challenge from without, weakened. In his sobering book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam gives an incisive analysis, based on an extraordinarily extensive collection of data of what we have come to in our society today.1717xRobert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Claude Fischer, perhaps the ablest quantitative sociologist in my department, affirms the validity of Putnam’s analysis. The picture is not entirely news; in one sense it is a massive empirical confirmation of the argument of Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), although it is more than that.

In the book Putnam describes the sharp decline of what he calls “social capital” in just about every sphere of American life for the last 30 years or more, all the more remarkable since the first 60 or 70 years of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in social capital. By social capital Putnam means social connectedness of almost every sort and finds all of them—from voting, to political activism, to membership in a wide variety of civic organizations (he takes his title from the stunning decline of bowling leagues), to informal socializing (including even having dinner with one’s own family), to church-going, membership, and giving—weaker today than they have been for decades. But more is changing than a decline in belonging of all sorts. Social capital also consists in norms and expectations—that we stop at boulevard stops, for example, or that we expect that most people can be trusted—and all those measures are dramatically down as well. Anyone serious about understanding our society today will have to read Bowling Alone carefully to find out how we have changed in each different sphere. In a nutshell I can summarize it by saying we live in a very different society from the one I grew up in. Loyalty to others is not high on the agenda of most younger Americans, who can, not entirely inaccurately, be caricatured as sitting alone at their computers calculating how to maximize their self-interest. Rather than give the bad news across the board, let me turn to the most relevant field for our topic, the field of religion. For a long time many people, including me, thought that religion was relatively immune to these trends, that both church membership and church attendance were remarkably stable except for the unusual bump up in the 1950s, but, as it turns out, both membership and attendance have been in decline over the same period as other forms of engagement, that is, since 1960. Though a wide variety of groups, for example the PTA and the League of Women Voters, but also the Jaycees, the Kiwanis, and the Shriners, have been in precipitate decline in this period, the decline in the churches has been more gradual and has taken a bit longer to become evident. In fact, church giving has declined more sharply than church membership or church attendance, but all have steadily fallen for 40 years.

While it is the quantitative data that are most reliable, there are some things we can say about the quality of participation as well. We can discern in the life of religious communities something that is going on in the society in general: participation is less about loyalty and a strong conviction of membership and more about what one will get out of participating. Even evangelical churches that used to be able to count on their members now have to offer incentives, to “sell” their programs as adding value to the participants. Attachment to all groups, including churches, but even families, is increasingly evaluated in the following terms: What will I get out of it? What’s in it for me? Before making the connection between all this and my theme of the Protestant structure of American culture, which I think is a close one, I want to look at Putnam’s effort to explain what has happened to us in the last 30 or 40 years.

Putnam’s primary explanation is generational change. On almost every variable in which he is interested, each generation starts lower than the one before and stays lower. On the other hand, those who started high have stayed high. My generation (note: not Putnam’s generation—he is not just an old man being nostalgic), that is, those born between 1925 and 1930, which Putnam calls the most civic generation in American history, started out voting and we still vote, started out going to church and we still go to church, started out reading newspapers and we still read newspapers, and so on down the line, but each succeeding generation has started lower and remains lower. Another important variable in Putnam’s analysis, one that overlaps with generation, is television watching. The number of hours spent watching television per person has gone up through the whole period when almost every form of participation has been declining, and again, the increase by generation is clear. But the correlation is not just general, it is quite specific: that is, within every generation, those who watch more television participate less in politics, civic life, informal socializing, and religion. Looking more closely, not all television watching has these negative effects. Watching educational television or network news (network news now has a largely geriatric audience) is not negatively correlated with participation, but, like newspaper reading, is positively correlated. The kind of television that is negatively correlated with participation, and is by far the most common type, is television as entertainment, television for its own sake, simple channel hopping to find something to watch. Thus, I think what we can say is that attentive watching, or reading in the case of newspapers, does not undermine social connectedness. But it is the decline of attentiveness across the board that is problematic.

What I am suggesting is that the kind of people Americans are becoming, and increasingly so with each succeeding generation, makes it ever more difficult for them to sustain commitments to religious communities, to understand ritual, to organize their lives around sacred texts, and even to understand why some texts are sacred at all. (Let me remind you that we are talking about statistical trends here—among every generation, including the youngest, there are many civically minded, socially responsible, and religiously active people; there are just fewer of them.) Dense, multistranded commitments to many kinds of communities are being replaced, as Putnam puts it, with “single-stranded, surf-by interactions” so that “more of our social connectedness is one shot, special purpose, and self oriented.”1818xPutnam 183–4. This shift obviously is closely related to the dramatic change in the economic orientation of our society from an inadequate welfare state in the early postwar period to an increasingly marketized, privatized society at the end of the century. Someone recently asked a group of college students what makes their generation different, and their response was “we’re more entrepreneurial than our parents.” That says it all. If everything is commodified, if even religion is just one more consumer preference, then why do we need churches? Why not just buy our religious goodies on the web?

If we see a variety of symptoms that all is not well in our society, in spite of surface appearances, what is there about our deep cultural code that might be a significant part of the problem? Just when we are in many ways moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because of the fact that our invincible individualism, deriving as I have argued from the Protestant religious tradition in America, is linked to an economic individualism which, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is more money. What economic individualism destroys and what our kind of religious individualism cannot restore is solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body. In most other North Atlantic societies, including other Protestant societies, a tradition of an established church, however secularized, provides some notion that we are in this thing together, that we need each other, that our precious and unique selves aren’t going to make it all alone.

Roger Williams was a moral genius, but he was a sociological catastrophe. After he founded the First Baptist Church, he left it for a smaller and purer one. That, too, he found inadequate, so he founded a church that consisted only of himself, his wife, and one other person. One wonders how he stood even those two. Since Williams ignored secular society, money took over in Rhode Island in a way that would not be true in Massachusetts or Connecticut for a long time. Rhode Island under Williams gives us an early and local example of what happens when the sacredness of the individual is not balanced by any sense of the whole or concern for the common good.

Let me make two suggestions about how certain central Protestant beliefs have been vulnerable to distortion. Max Weber credited the great universalistic religions that arose in the first millennium B.C.E. with a strong rejection of magic. The Jewish prophets taught us that no worship of idols, no propitiation of spirits with sacrifice or incense, would save us. As Micah says “And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Mi 6:8). The Reformers took the opposition to magic very seriously, attacking the doctrine of transubstantiation and other Catholic practices that they deemed magical. In their fear of idolatry, they, in effect, pushed God out of the world into radical transcendence. With the doctrine of predestination, Calvin (or if not Calvin, as some scholars now believe, then some of his followers) described a God who had preordained everything that can occur before the beginning of time. It was natural for some philosophers and scientists to move from that idea to a deterministic physical universe without a personal God at all: “I have no need of that hypothesis,” as one of them said. So Calvin’s powerful doctrine of divine transcendence paradoxically opened the door to atheistic naturalism. Even more ominously, into the empty space left by the absence of God came first, as we have seen, the idea of the nation replacing the idea of God as the sovereign, and then an understanding of the self as absolutely sovereign that applies an essential attribute of God to the self. Since Calvinism as a consistent doctrine hardly survived the eighteenth century, I am arguing for this aspect of the Protestant cultural code as having made its ambiguous contribution quite some time ago.

There is a second Protestant source of our problem that is, however, very much alive and well today not just as part of the cultural code but as part of contemporary piety. This is the near exclusive focus on the relation between Jesus and the individual, where accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior becomes almost the whole of piety. When this happens the doctrine of the God-Man can slip into the doctrine of the Man-God. The divinization of the self is often called Gnosticism, and Harold Bloom in his interesting book The American Religion, sees Gnosticism as the quintessentially American religion.1919xHarold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). He says so not as a critic but as a believer, for he proclaims himself a Gnostic. He sees the Evangelical Protestant focus on the personal relation of the believer to Jesus as one of the major sources of American Gnosticism. If I may trace the downward spiral of this particular Protestant distortion, let me say that it begins with the statement “If I’m all right with Jesus, then I don’t need the church,” which we heard from some of the people we interviewed for Habits of the Heart. It progresses, then, to the Sheilaism that we described in that book. A woman named Sheila Larson defined her faith as: “It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”2020xBellah 221. But Sheilaism seems positively benign compared to the end of the road in this direction, which comes out with remarkable force in an interview recounted in Robert Wuthnow’s book Loose Connections: A man in his late twenties, who works as a financial analyst, describes the individualism that “you’re just brought up to believe in” as follows:

The individual is the preeminent being in the universe. There’s always a distinction between me and you. Comity, sharing, cannot truly exist. What I have is mine, and it’s mine because I deserve it, and I have a right to it.2121xRobert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 250, n. 25.

Let us hope he knows not what he says. The general tendency of American Evangelicalism toward a private piety pulls everyone influenced by it very much in this direction. Some may think that Jesus-and-me piety is very different from the individual as the preeminent being in the universe, but I am suggesting that they are only a hair apart.

If I have located our problem rightly, then religious faith has a particularly central responsibility for the present state of our common life. Especially when combined with the ideology of economic freedom with which it has long been linked, religious faith has contributed the deep cultural code that has led us into our present perilous situation. The connections I am trying to make are so deeply embedded in our history, so unconscious and even counter-intuitive, that I think it is a major task of religious intellectuals to uncover them and then to suggest a possible transformation, dare I say “reformation,” of the deep cultural code. For if I am right, and our present deep cultural code is leading us toward grave catastrophes, such a transformation may be our most urgent necessity. I must also caution, however, that the code has escaped the control of religious groups, as I have suggested, and so a transformation of the deep cultural code at the religious level would be only the beginning—though I think it to be the most important beginning—of the transformation of our American code altogether.

So far I have assumed the answer to the question that my title asks—”multiculture or monoculture?”—and I have come down pretty firmly on the monoculture side. Does that mean I think cultural pluralism doesn’t exist in America? I am not so foolish, but I am also convinced that the ideology of multiculturalism is much stronger than multiculturalism itself, and that the ideology of multiculturalism operates primarily as an agent of assimilation into dominant American culture. I would argue that genuine cultural pluralism is difficult to sustain in America and badly needs to be nurtured. It is the strength of our common culture that we need to worry about, not the allegedly disintegrative consequences of our cultural diversity.

For a talk I gave at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in 1997, I was given the title, “Is There a Common American Culture?” I began by asking the question not whether there is a common American culture but rather how it is that a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion could be devoted to this question in a society with so powerful and monolithic a common culture as ours. The answer, I said, is obvious: it has become part of the common culture to ask whether there is a common culture in America.

In a review of Nathan Glazer’s book We Are All Multiculturalists Now (whose very title makes the point), K. Anthony Appiah quotes the book as saying, “The Nexis data base of major newspapers shows no reference to multiculturalism as late as 1988, a mere 33 items in 1989, and only after that a rapid rise—more than 100 items in 1990, more than 600 in 1991, almost 900 in 1992, 1200 in 1993, and 1500 in 1994….”2222xNathan Glazer, as quoted in K. Anthony Appiah, “The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding,” rev. of On Toleration by Michael Walzer and We Are All Multiculturalists Now by Nathan Glazer, The New York Review of Books (9 Oct. 1997): 32, n.5. Appiah adds, “It seems that when it comes to diversity, we all march to the beat of a single drummer.”2323xAppiah 32, n.5.

It is important to understand the sociological reason why there not only is but has to be a common culture in America: culture does not float free from institutions. A powerful institutional order will carry a powerful common culture. The United States, surely, has an exceptionally powerful institutional order. The state in America, even though it is multi-leveled and, to a degree, decentralized, has an enormous impact on all our lives. The state is even responsible to a degree for the construction of multiculturalism through the little boxes that must be checked on a myriad of forms.

If the state intrudes in our lives in a thousand ways, the market is even more intrusive. There is very little that Americans need that we can produce for ourselves anymore. We are dependent on the market not only for goods but also for many kinds of service. Our cultural understanding of the world is shaped every time we enter a supermarket or a mall. I taught a senior seminar of about 20 students during the last semester before I retired, roughly divided into one-fourth Asian-American, one-fourth Hispanic-American, one-fourth African-American, and one-fourth Anglo-American. What was remarkable was how easily they talked together because of how much they shared. Beyond the ever-present state and market, they shared the immediate experience of coping with a vast state university, with its demands and its incoherence.

Education, which is linked largely though not exclusively to the state, and television and increasingly the Internet, which are linked to the market, are enormously powerful purveyors of common culture, socializers not only of children but of all of us most of our lives. Not only are we exposed from infancy to a monoculture, we are exposed to it monolingually. The cultural power of American English is overwhelming, and no language, except under the most unusual circumstances, has ever been able to withstand it, which is what makes the English Only movement such a joke. As Appiah notes, 90 percent of California-born Hispanic children of immigrant parents have native fluency in English, and in the next generation only 50 percent of them still speak Spanish.2424xGeoffrey Nunberg, as quoted by Appiah 30–1. One more generation and you can forget about Spanish. When third generation Asian Americans come to college, they have to learn Chinese or Japanese in language classes just like anyone else—they don’t bring those languages with them. When language, which is the heart of culture, goes, then it becomes extremely difficult to sustain genuine cultural difference. Serious multicultural education would begin by teaching native English speakers a second language, but that, unlike most of the rest of the world, almost never happens in the United States. The half-hearted effort to teach Spanish in California public schools results in very few native English speakers with a secondary fluency in Spanish. Why don’t most Americans speak another language? Because we don’t have to—everyone in the world speaks English, or so we think.

If I am right, there is an enormously powerful common culture in America, and it is carried predominantly by the market and the state and by their agencies of socialization: television and education. What institutions might withstand that pressure and sustain genuine cultural difference? Immigrant communities have been able to sustain genuine cultural difference for a generation or so, but the power of American institutions leads to rapid cultural assimilation in the second and third generations, even when a significant degree of identity difference is sustained. But, I want to argue, culture in the strong sense is not the same thing as identity.

In spite of the tendency of the advocates of multiculturalism to ignore it, the only institution that can sustain strong cultural pluralism over the generations, and that only with great difficulty, is religion. For example, African Americans have distinct traditions of cuisine and music, but I would argue that the black church is the heart and soul of any lasting African-American culture. I would argue that religion is the only sustainable basis for cultural pluralism in America and that the church or its equivalent in other religions is the only institution capable of sustaining such pluralism. Since I have argued that American culture is Protestant to the bone and has affected every cultural and religious group more than they realize, I am putting a special burden on all non-Protestant groups, and particularly on the largest one, namely Catholics, to nurture a genuine multiculturalism in a very hostile environment.

It is with this background in mind that I think we can understand why multiculturalism as an ideology is so appealing to Americans today, but why the reality is so problematic. In a culture that tends to eliminate all genuine difference and assert the autonomy of the radically independent individual, but that still demands to know who each distinct individual is, it is tempting to assert an identity even with little actual content, and then to claim the right to equal respect in the name of that identity, which we imagine is cultural. I think Appiah gets it right when he says:

But if we explore these moments of tension [between groups in contemporary America] we discover an interesting paradox. The growing salience of race and gender as social irritants, which may seem to reflect the call of collective identities, is a reflection, as much as anything else, of the individual’s concern for dignity and respect. As our society slouches on toward a fuller realization of its ideal of social equality, everyone wants to be taken seriously—to be respected, not “dissed.” Because on many occasions disrespect still flows from racism, sexism, and homophobia, we respond, in the name of all black people, all women, all gays, as the case may be…. But the truth is that what mostly irritates us in these moments is that we, as individuals, feel diminished.

And the trouble with appeal to cultural difference is that it obscures rather than diminishes this situation. It is not black culture that the racist disdains, but blacks. There is no conflict of visions between black and white cultures that is the source of racial discord. No amount of knowledge of the architectural achievements of Nubia or Kush guarantees respect for African-Americans. No African-American is entitled to greater concern because he is descended from a people who created jazz or produced Toni Morrison. Culture is not the problem, and it is not the solution.2525xAppiah 35–6.

If the problem is disrespect for the dignity of the person, then the solution is to go back to that deepest core of our tradition, the sacredness of the conscience and person of every individual. And that is what a great deal of the ideology of multiculturalism is really saying: We’re all different; we’re all unique. Respect that. But if this is true, then multiculturalism is more of an expression of the common culture—the common culture at its best to be sure—than a challenge to it. I am certainly not the first to say that multiculturalism, which has become so widely accepted in America, is part of the process of assimilation into the dominant culture, is indeed the very mechanism of the assimilation into the dominant culture today, and thus not in any real sense the expression of a genuine cultural pluralism.

The effort to invigorate a genuine cultural pluralism is part of the search for the common good in America, something we have almost lost, because, paradoxically, the common culture that we have inherited doesn’t even know that the common good exists. Without a deep understanding of the common good, even the idea of the dignity of and respect for the individual, critically important though that is, will not be able to sustain itself. Without solidarity, loyalty, civic friendship in Aristotle’s terms, without a conception of the church as something much more than a voluntary association, the dignity of the individual is swept away in a jumble of isolated, fragmented individuals, ruled only by the market, which doesn’t understand the dignity of anything but money.

I am arguing that something is wrong not on the surface of American life but deep in the core of our common culture. So the real mission of cultural pluralism would be to offer an alternative to the radical Protestant individualism that has dissolved the Church into the messianic nation, such that once the messianic mission is lost, there is nothing left but the individual as the preeminent being in the universe, nothing left but “What I have is mine, and it’s mine because I deserve it, and I have a right to it.” We need the non-Protestant traditions, and the most thoughtful and self-critical sector of the Protestant tradition, to remind us that we are citizens of a deeply flawed city of man and that we badly need to recover an idea of the common good toward which we can aspire in the face of the disintegrative tendencies not of cultural pluralism but of radical individualism. Breaking the hold of the monoculture is, in my opinion, our greatest and most urgent challenge. A fundamental turn of direction would involve changes in our economy, our institutions, our culture, and in the core of our religious faith. There are not many signs at the moment that Americans are prepared to rise to that challenge.