Christianity and Civil Society: The Contemporary Debate

Christianity and Civil Society: The Contemporary Debate. By Robert Wuthnow. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996. 103 pp. $15.00 (cloth).

Robert Wuthnow, Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Social Sciences and Director of The Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University, has authored 15 books and is recognized as a leading sociologist of religion. The present writing is part of the Rockwell Lecture Series at Houston's Rice University.

The focus here is upon those aspects of our social life not narrowly subject to such compelling influences as law, politics, or economics: it is instead upon our lives as we choose to organize and predispose them voluntarilyfor instance in light of our freedom of association. "The civil-society debate is vitally concerned with the extent and quality of social interaction, with relationships that build and sustain moral commitment and character, and with the collective values that implicitly or explicitly define us as a people" (p. 2).

Wuthnow's topic is not about the largely mythical "community" alleged by some to exist, or to be possible, in a nearly harmonious condition. He is concerned, rather, with civil society, in which personal values and preferences for establishing and maintaining our social selves are kept in tension with the values, attitudes, and behaviors of large collectivities around us. In society with others, we are exposed to such unpleasant realities as homelessness, crime, racism, neglect of the poor, and the like, and these press upon the consciences of concerned people. Public issues of humane implication and human consequence prompt three key questions for us these days, says the author, and he considers each of these in this writing.

"Is Civil Society in Jeopardy?" is Chapter One's subject, with account taken of such problems as widespread dishonesty (with its erosion of the trust necessary for society's agreeable functioning) and the apparent decline in civic-mindedness. Wuthnow presents statistical survey data purporting to demonstrate diminishment of voluntary citizen participation in society; then he contests this with contrary data. The role of religion in buttressing civil society is hard to specify with precision, so you have such luminaries as George Gallup and Robert Putnam proclaiming religion's fecklessness in this regard, but you also have Will Herberg's suggestion (quoted here with approbation) that the religious commitments of Americans have always tended to be shallow, so what's new? Bonhoeffer of course had foreseen the large problem when he observed that fewer of us any longer resort to the God notion as a "working hypothesis." When this happens religion becomes, in Stephen Carter's apt phrase, "trivialized." Wuthnow considers all this and pronounces the problem grave for U.S. adults and disastrous for our teenagers.

Churches can become "leaner and meaner" (p. 26), he says, and so can recover a role as contributor to the well-being of the larger society. Depressingly, the evidence for this Wuthnow finds most vividly in the "Christian Right"-expressly "Operation Rescue," "Moral Majority;" "Christian Coalition," and so forth. (He does not appear to commend the content of this activism, or its premises.) A question in the reader's mind at this point might be, Why haven't the progressives, or liberals, or however these folks think of themselves, bothered to do comparable organizing? Perhaps because it is more tasty to be right than effectively to challenge a system that privileges us. But the reviewer digresses.

Economic self-interest, job stress, mothers increasingly entering the work force, and similar factors, the author notes, weaken our prospects for a civil society. He neglects to delve into "underclass" concerns, however, which demonstrate the really hideous fruits of self-interest run amok. Notoriously it is difficult to survey the most disadvantaged, and perhaps these are not significant populations within religious congregations; but if so, that should all the more signify something about churches and civil society.

Wuthnow discovers that Christian preaching and teaching against greed tend to be anemic, and that clergy are notably mincing when money issues of any sort need to be addressed. We put our faith in one mental compartment and our money in another one, he says.

What churches can and should do is to proliferate small groups. Self-help groups, book discussions, Bible study, and other groups, the author believes, offer the possibility of learning how to have honest communication, how to build trust and mutual concern, and how to generate respect for differences. It should be noted that some of us have experienced the opposite in small groups, but we have more to gain than lose in trying all this yet again.

The book's second chapter avers that Christians can be more civil if thev give up both religious self-assertion (of the "identity politics" type) and "privatized spirituality" It decries the extremism of certain religious figures and the "abrasive style" of certain of their contemporaries upon public life. Liberals and conservatives alike are exhorted to listen respectfully to each other. Hard to disagree with any of this.