CHAPTER 7
Faith Cultures
The conservative Protestants vying for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination left many mainline Protestants wondering what had happened to their religion, not to mention their country. For most of the United States’ history, science had been the helpmate of Protestants, who viewed it as a gift from God to help them learn about their world and make more pious choices. Those years of persecution back in Europe had also impressed upon them the benefits of building a high wall between religion and government.1
Yet here was Ron Paul, a Southern Baptist, rejecting evolution as just “a theory.”2 Rick Perry, who attends a Southern Baptist church, similarly told a schoolboy that evolution is “a theory that is out there—and it’s got some gaps.”3 Michele Bachmann, an evangelical Lutheran, dismissed not only evolution, but also climate change, calling it “voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.”4 Rick Santorum, a conservative Catholic with a stalwart conservative Protestant following, also called climate change “a hoax.”5 Mitt Romney, a Mormon, acknowledged that the weather is getting weird, but wondered whether humans were causing the change.6 And though he sometimes seems to believe in both climate change and evolution, Newt Gingrich, an evangelical Lutheran turned Southern Baptist now Catholic, nevertheless betrayed the scientific community by implying that researchers kill children for stem cell research.7
Meanwhile, conservative Protestants were wondering what had happened to their religion and their country. Unlike their mainline brethren, conservative Protestants consider the Bible the inerrant word of God, seek “born again” experiences that bring them closer to that God, aim to convert other people, and think that religious teachings should guide daily life, including education and politics.8 Understanding the United States to be “one nation, under God,” these Americans want their laws to reflect Christian values and beliefs, rather than scientific findings and theories. Yet here was their president saying that two men should be able to legally wed, even though the Bible often does not smile upon such configurations. Here was a Supreme Court upholding abortion, even though the Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill.” And here were legions of lawmakers enforcing the separation of religion and government, following in the footsteps of America’s only Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, who said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”9
Santorum reported that when he first read these words, he “almost threw up.”10
How is it that the two sides of the Protestant coin are now diametrically opposed? At the heart of their acrimony, we see yet another clash between independence and interdependence. Although both groups sail under the Protestant flag, their culture cycles make and mirror decidedly different selves. On the one hand, the group that came to be known as mainline Protestants were the original independent selves in the United States. Firing up the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Germany, their ancestors ditched the popes and priests of the Catholic Church in favor of direct relationships with a personal god. (See chapter 2 for more about the Protestant Reformation.) The Puritans brought their zest for independence with them when they settled the United States, where they formed the first of the mainline Protestant branches, which now include the Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Anglican/Episcopal churches. For some four centuries, mainline Protestant groups were the most popular religions in the country, and now claim some 18.1 percent of the population.11
On the other hand, the sects that came to make up conservative Protestantism took a turn for interdependence. In the conservative Protestant tent you’ll find evangelical and fundamentalist groups such as the Southern Baptist, Assembly of God, Church of God in Christ, and Pentecostal churches. Compared with their mainline counterparts, these interdependent selves have a greater yen for warm family relations,12 tight community bonds,13 clear social hierarchies,14 and traditional moral codes.15
Conservative Protestants also want more God in their lives, more of the time, than do mainline Protestants. Their God is the kind of deity you want to have around. As anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann relates in her book When God Talks Back, He is “a deeply human, even vulnerable God who loves us unconditionally and wants nothing more than to be our friend, our best friend, as loving and personal and responsive as a best friend in America should be.” The conservative Protestant relationship with this God is not like the distant, abstract ties that many mainline Protestants maintain with their God. Instead, it is “the free and easy companionship of two boys swinging their feet on a bridge over a stream.”16
But just as conservative fathers both hug and spank their children more than mainline fathers,17 the conservative God is at once warmer and more wrathful than the mainline God. In their book America’s Four Gods, sociologists Paul Froese and Christopher Bader recount that many conservative Protestants think of their God as angrier and more punishing, while many mainline Protestants conceive of their deity as more benevolent and forgiving.18 The conservative God uses his stormy side for interdependent ends, keeping His flock from wandering too far from traditional roles and rules.
Numbers testify to the appeal of this more intimate, personal, and present divine: conservative Protestants have supplanted their mainline counterparts as the leading denomination in America, claiming some 26.3 percent of the population.19 That number jumps to 34.9 percent when scholars include both Mormon and historically Black churches, which share some of the same practices and beliefs as conservative Protestants.20
As conservative Protestants continue to challenge the mainline’s four-hundred-year-old foothold on the souls of Americans, we predict many more clashes of the Protestants. The tighter binding of religion and politics has not helped matters. Over the past three decades, many conservative Protestants and their interdependent allies (e.g., conservative Catholics such as Rick Santorum) have aligned with Republicans, while many mainline Protestants and their independent fellow travelers (e.g., the nonreligious, who make up a full 16.1 percent of the country,21 and secular Catholics and Jews) have sided with Democrats.22 Consequently, politics is no longer about how to steer the nation forward; it’s about who has the better soul. Because discussions about the relative goodness of souls rarely end well, the two sides of this cultural divide are now shouting past each other, rather than working together to lead the country.23
The United States can find some solace in its past. The nation has a long, relatively peaceful history of incredible religious diversity. Although Protestants have always been the majority religion, they have never been the only game in town. Catholics, who we shall show are a more interdependent set, carved out a niche from the start, and now make up 24 percent of the American population.24 Another interdependent religious group, Jews, was also present at the founding of the United States, with a band of twenty-three arriving from Spain and Portugal in 1654.25 At 1.7 percent of the population, Jews tie with Mormons as the third-largest religious community in the United States.26
When we look at the culture cycles of these groups, we see ways that mainline and conservative Protestants can mend their fences. Mainline Protestants and their independent allies must access their interdependence to detox their discourse with conservatives. Rather than scorning the more conservative set, mainline Protestant institutions, interactions, and individuals must extend empathy and respect so that the two sides can find common ground. In many cases, independent religions can easily tune their messages for more interdependent ears.
At the same time, conservative Protestants and their confreres must step up their independence to meet their adversaries halfway. Allowing dissent within their institutions, including debate in their interactions, and encouraging critical thinking among their individual members would all hasten the healing of religious rifts.
As mainline and conservative Protestants align their culture cycles, they can hone better ways to work with growing religious minorities, including Muslims (0.6 percent of the population), Buddhists (0.7 percent), and Hindus (0.4 percent)—all whose culture cycles sustain and stem from more interdependent selves.27 (See chapter 9 for more about Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.) Likewise, observers in other countries that are contending with conflicts between independent and interdependent religious groups can apply our approach to their own culture clashes.
Before delving into the details of America’s two sorts of Protestants, we drop back in time to examine how the culture cycles of different religions feed and flow from different notions of the self. This story begins long before the Abrahamic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) emerged, at a time when humans were dodging glaciers to become the species we know and love today.
Until the Late Pleistocene (about fifteen thousand years ago), people were still hunting and gathering. Because they lived pretty much hand to mouth, they did not amass wealth. And as everyone knew everyone else (indeed, most people were related), Pleistocene neighbors were “probably pretty nice to each other,” says psychologist Ara Norenzayan.28
Although these hunter-gatherers had deities, their gods were largely uninterested in what the humans were up to. They weren’t moral gods, says Norenzayan. Instead, “these gods seemed indifferent to human affairs. Many were like your crazy grandfather. You know he exists, but you don’t pay much attention to him. Sometimes he acts up and does crazy things. You try to calm him down. You give him food. But you don’t really take him that seriously.”29
But then Homo sapiens started settling in towns and growing food. With better nutrition and technology, populations boomed. Small bands of relatives became big towns of strangers who, like many people today, were loath to meddle in the affairs of people they did not know. With extra food, people now had stuff to accumulate and, thus, to covet. Lying, cheating, fighting, and stealing entered the scene.
To keep from self-destructing, these larger, anonymous communities needed an institution that would induce people to cooperate. A fatherly eye in the sky fit the bill. All of a sudden, “Watchful gods were everywhere,” says Norenzayan, “and they became much more serious. They started punishing wrongdoing. They became supernatural monitors who were intimately involved in human affairs.”
As cultures with these moral gods became larger and more successful, they crowded out the older, smaller communities with crazy-grandfather gods. Modern religion was born. And as it linked people in relationships, required them to adjust to a shared moral code, and rooted them in communities and traditions, religion became a major force for interdependence.
Fast-forwarding to the twenty-first century, Norenzayan and his colleagues show that contemporary humans still react to even subtle evocations of divinity by straightening up and flying right. In one study, for example, he and psychologist Azim F. Shariff first asked college students (and, later, older adults) to unscramble sentences that had either religious words (such as spirit, divine, and God) or neutral words embedded in them. All the participants then took part in a classic economics game where they divided ten dollars between themselves and another participant (who was actually a confederate in cahoots with the researchers). The researchers found that just reading a few random religious words led participants to divide the money more fairly than did reading the neutral words.30
Studies that measure personality also suggest that religious people are more interdependent than nonreligious folks. For instance, completing a meta-analysis of more than seventy-one studies from nineteen countries, psychologist Vassilis Saroglou and his colleagues discovered that the more religious people are, the more their personalities are agreeable and conscientious—that is, the more they wish to get along with others and do what is right. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that even the most stridently independent forms of Protestantism entail getting together with a community to worship the same deity, perform the same rituals, share the same beliefs, and preserve the same traditions.31
Although scientific studies cannot determine whether these exertions please a deity, they do show that religion confers health and well-being upon its practitioners. No matter their denomination, religious people have more friends, suffer fewer illnesses, feel more happiness, and live longer lives than their godless counterparts.32 Religion is good medicine for those who take it. And even for those who don’t, having religious neighbors can be a boon. Compared to people who are not part of a religious community, those who are give more money to charity, donate more of their time, and are more active in community life.33
Now let’s jump ahead some fifteen thousand years to another great parting of religious ways, this time between Christians and Jews. For many Americans, the closest association with the word Jewish is the word guilt. Yet if President Jimmy Carter is any indication, Christians also haul around their fair share of remorse. In a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine, Carter (then the governor of Georgia) confessed, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust.” So far, nothing unusual there. But then the Baptist leader concluded, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”
This way of thinking strikes psychologist Adam Cohen as strange. “For Jews,” he says, “if you’re just thinking about doing something bad, it doesn’t have moral significance so long as you don’t act on it.” In other words, as long as you do the right thing, contemplating doing the wrong thing is harmless.
But to Carter, just thinking about sinning was a sin. Our former president isn’t alone, and he wasn’t just sharing his personal philosophy. Instead, he was quoting the New Testament: “But I say unto you,” Jesus commanded in his Sermon on the Mount, “That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”34 Perhaps reflecting the depth of his faith, Carter was quoting scripture to America’s favorite nudie mag.
Cohen wondered how deep these differences in religious dogma drill into individual psyches. So, with psychologist Paul Rozin, he set out to discover whether Christians (in particular, Protestants) and Jews indeed think about morality differently. In a series of studies, the researchers asked participants to read about characters who were thinking about doing something naughty (having an affair, poisoning a professor’s dog) and about a character who did nice things but had naughty thoughts (taking care of parents, but thinking ill of them). Next, participants gave their impressions of these characters.
Cohen and Rozin found that the Jewish participants evaluated characters with bad thoughts but good deeds much more positively than did the Protestants. This was not because the Jewish participants let sinners off lightly; indeed, Jews disdained an actual adulterer just as much as did Protestants. Instead, what drove the differences between Protestants and Jews were their beliefs: Jews really don’t care what’s happening under the hood as long as people’s deeds are good. Protestants, in contrast, pay just as much attention to the action between a person’s ears as to their actions in the world.35
In addition, Cohen and his team find that Protestants more firmly believe that people can control their thoughts, and that thoughts compel actions, but Jews see thoughts as less controllable and less consequential. “Judaism says that people have good and bad impulses,” says Cohen, “and you just try to do the best you can.”
Another set of Cohen’s studies highlights that, in matters of religion, Jews pay more attention to the traditions and people surrounding them (an interdependent tendency), while Protestants pay more attention to what’s going on inside themselves, and between themselves and God (a more independent way of being). In one study, Jewish and Protestant adults talked about a moment that changed their lives forever. Cohen’s research team then coded whether these narratives mentioned God, community, both God and community, or neither.
In this narrative, for example, a Protestant participant offers a God-centered story:
The most important experience in my life was the moment that I first accepted that Jesus Christ really was God Himself…. I was angry because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go on living however I wanted…. In spite of all my anger and frustration, I put my trust in Him for the first time.
And in this narrative, a Jewish participant focuses on his community:
When my brother died my father started attending minyan [Jewish services] every day. He said it comforted him greatly. I was aware that it was the rituals and other men there that made him feel better—not any idea that God had intended this…. I understood then that my human relationships were all that gave meaning to my life.
Across 126 participants, Cohen found that Jews shared more stories about community, while Protestants shared more narratives about God.36
Jews and Christians come by their different selves honestly. The daily interactions of both religions scaffold their distinct ways of being. This is all the more remarkable considering how many daily interactions Jews and Christians originally had in common. Both Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism share a foundational text—what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Tanakh. How they use this text, however, diverges. Christians feel free to interpret the Bible themselves—no fancy scholars are necessary. This results in a more literal, concrete interpretation of scripture.
In contrast, for Jews, “there are multiple levels of interpretation of religious texts,” says Cohen. For instance, in one interpretative method, called gematria, scholars substitute letters with numbers, and then look for patterns. Another method entails looking for connections between the same word across different texts. “These methods are helpful because there are parts in the Bible that seem to conflict,” Cohen notes, such as the two creation stories in the book of Genesis.
Was Eve made from clay or Adam’s rib? Was the world created in six days or one? Was God pleased or displeased with his handiwork? Jewish scholarship is more about grappling with such questions and inconsistencies than about resolving them, argues psychologist Edward Sampson. In contrast, much of Christian scholarship, especially Protestant scholarship, is about finding the single correct answer among the inconsistencies.37
Jews’ greater emphasis on questioning, relative to Christians’ greater emphasis on answering, is apparent not only in religious practices, but also in earthlier pursuits. The studies of psychologists Kaiping Peng and Richard Nisbett suggest that Jews more readily employ “dialectical thinking”—accepting contradictions—than do Christians.
Peng and Nisbett stumbled upon this finding by accident. In one of their early studies, they discovered that an encyclopedia of Chinese proverbs contained far more dialectical sayings—“too humble is half proud,” “beware of your friends, not your enemies”—than did a comparable American proverb book, which almost exclusively contained more straightforward adages such as “for example is no proof” and “one against all is certain to fail.”38
The researchers wanted to test whether Chinese participants preferred the dialectical proverbs while European-American participants preferred the consistent ones. Being good scientists, though, they needed a control group of proverbs that were neither Chinese nor American, to rule out the possibility that participants simply preferred whichever proverbs were more familiar to them. To their delight, the researchers discovered that a book of Yiddish proverbs also featured many dialectical sayings. As was the case with Chinese proverbs, Chinese participants liked the Yiddish dialectical proverbs more than the Yiddish nondialectical proverbs.
“Jewish folk beliefs seem to be very much like Chinese folk beliefs: there are two sides to everything, and the world is full of change and uncertainty,” says Peng. He sees a connection between this more dialectical way of thinking and a more interdependent view of the self: “When your self is defined by relationships, contexts, and histories, you don’t think of yourself as fixed. Instead, you have different aspects of your self, and some aspects may be contradictory.”39
The finding that Jews and Christians hold different worldviews and self-views is not surprising, writes Sampson. Like a younger sibling fighting his way out of an older sibling’s shadow, Christianity had to find its own niche in the Jewish world. It did so partly by promoting a more independent notion of self, one that could arrive at truth by itself, rather than by relating with others, the past, or the environment.40
So Christians ditched Jewish dietary laws and many Sabbath customs. Though they did not discard the Old Testament, their New Testament revised many of the Old’s teachings. For instance, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is a rejoinder to the Ten Commandments. Whereas the old text stressed behavior, the new text stressed feelings and thoughts. For Jesus, it was no longer enough not to kill; you must not even feel hatred toward people. It was no longer enough not to sleep with your neighbor’s wife; you must not even think about sleeping with your neighbor’s wife.
In response to Christianity, Judaism dug in its heels, holding fast to its own, more interdependent doctrines and practices. As Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, “Because of our tradition, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”41 And though Tevye is no Jewish scholar, the Yiddish playwright who created him, Sholem Aleichem, channeled Jewish culture’s regard for history and ritual.
That regard starts before birth; Christians can be made, but until recently, Jews could only be born. As a religion of descent rather than assent, Orthodox Judaism holds that a person is a Jew only if his or her mother is a Jew. End of story. No individual choice here, no conversion option, at least not until the nineteenth century. Likewise, when an adolescent boy becomes a Bar Mitzvah (and, more recently, an adolescent girl becomes a Bat Mitzvah), he does so mostly to learn about the roles, responsibilities, and traditions of Judaism so that he may completely participate in the Jewish community.
Being a Christian, on the other hand, requires individual choice. Just because your parents are Christian does not mean that you are. Instead, your parents must choose to baptize you. And sometimes even that isn’t enough; conservative Protestant denominations require adherents to “accept Jesus Christ as [their] personal savior” through confirmations, adult baptisms, and public testimonials.
“In Judaism, doing something because it’s tradition is enough and even valued,” Cohen concludes. “But in many Protestant denominations, you have to find a personal reason to do what you’re doing.”
Cohen, Peng, Sampson, and other scholars who compare Jews to other groups do so gingerly, and with good reason. Centuries of anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, show how such comparisons can turn invidious. As a result, many well-intentioned people have worked overtime to argue that Jews are no different from anyone else.
Yet a careful examination of the culture cycles at work among Jews and Christians reveals that the ideas, institutions, interactions, and I’s of these two groups are decidedly different. Shining a light on Christian ways further reveals why these differences may have been interpreted as essential, racial, and therefore grounds for violent action: the independent ways of thinking to which Protestants hew can lead to essentialist thinking. Many Christians, especially Protestants, think behavior comes from stable internal traits, see group behavior as the sum of individual behaviors, and thus view group differences as internal and stable.
Perhaps by applying a more interdependent style of thinking to the question of why people are different, Christians and Jews alike can better appreciate how contexts, histories, environments, and one another shape and reflect individual psyches. This more interdependent approach may then lead to more peace-promoting culture cycles.
Some 1,500 years after Jews and Christians went their separate ways, Protestants and Catholics set off on different paths. As we shall see, Protestant culture cycles produced and proceeded from a more independent self, while Catholic culture cycles reinforced and resulted from a more interdependent self.
For much of U.S. history, Protestant Americans considered Catholics to be the foreigners in their fold. This perception wasn’t completely wrong. The American Catholic Church is largely made up of successive waves of immigrant groups: first Germans, then Irish people, then Italians, then Latinos and Filipinos.42 Partly because of their large immigrant contingent, Catholics have also been the poorest religious group in the United States.43 Yet since the election of Kennedy in 1962, Catholics have secured their place in the American mainstream. Non-Hispanic Catholics are now among the most upwardly mobile people in America.44
Nevertheless, Catholics still feel slightly out of step with the United States’ predominantly Protestant ways. In the 1990s, cultural psychologists began bottling exactly what is different about Catholics. They are finding that, for all their assimilation and mainstream success, Catholics harbor a more interdependent sense of self than do mainline Protestants.
Among the first to examine Catholics’ more interdependent selves under the bright lights of the laboratory was psychologist Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks. He invited Protestant and Catholic men to complete a task while dressed either in dress shirts and ties (the business condition) or in Hawaiian shirts (the casual condition). Thus bedecked, the participants listened to recordings of positive-emotion words (for instance, lively, hope, and laugh) and negative-emotion words (for example, rude, evil, and horrid). After each word, participants had to judge whether the word’s meaning was pleasant or unpleasant.
The catch was this: sometimes, the word’s intonation did not match its meaning. For example, evil lilted with brightness and cheer, while laugh sank with dread and despair. In these cases of mismatched sound and meaning, Sanchez-Burks wanted to know how much the word’s social and emotional connotations interfered with participants’ ability to judge its meaning.
In the casual condition, Protestants and Catholics struggled equally with the mismatched tones and meanings. But in the business condition, Protestants showed a unique ability to tune out the socioemotional input and home in on the information. Catholics, in contrast, could not as easily ignore the human, feeling side of the recording, and had much slower reaction times when words and intonations did not match no matter what they were wearing.
Sanchez-Burks concludes that, while on the job, Protestants check their hearts at the door. As we will discuss in the next section, they aren’t doing this to be unkind. Instead, they are simply following what Sanchez-Burks terms the Protestant relational ideology: that is, “beliefs dictating that attentiveness to relational concerns ought to be restricted in work-centered contexts.” With limited exposure to this ideology, Catholics more readily wear their hearts on their sleeves in the workplace.45
Relative to Catholics, Protestants’ greater independence is also apparent in how they describe everyday behavior. As we discussed in the introduction and chapter 2, making so-called situational attributions for everyday behavior is a more interdependent style that assumes people are driven largely by relational concerns and environmental influences. It’s okay to say that your mother or the devil made you do it. Making so-called dispositional attributions, in contrast, is a more independent style that assumes people are driven largely by their internal traits and preferences. For this sort of self, it’s best to say that your behavior sprang from inside.
To study the attribution styles of Catholics and Protestants, Cohen and colleagues asked participants to read about two characters who did something good (a pharmaceutical executive who donated malaria medicine and a professional baseball player who volunteered at a camp for poor kids) and two characters who did something bad (a doctor who hid a mistake that led to a patient’s death and a public official who took bribes). Participants then rated how much they agreed with internal explanations for each character’s actions (e.g., character, attitude, temperament) and external explanations (e.g., social atmosphere, social norms).46
The researchers found that Protestants made more internal attributions than did Catholics, as predicted. They also dug a little deeper to figure out why Protestants have this attributional style, and discovered that Protestants believe more strongly in souls, and worry more about their condition, than do Catholics. “Protestants had been handed a fearsome mandate by Luther,” the researchers write. “They as individuals, and not the church, were now responsible for the condition of their own souls.” So Protestants tend to pay more attention to the inner working of themselves and other people than do Catholics.
Of course, Catholics also believe that people have souls, and they also worry about them. But Catholic teachings hold that participating in the sacraments is a fine way to attain salvation. Indeed, the researchers report, the Catechism of the Catholic Church includes fifty-four entries for the words sacraments and sacramentals but only six entries for the word soul.47
Although more interdependent than Protestants, Catholics seem not to be quite as interdependent as Jews. The most direct evidence for Catholics’ more interdependent notion of self comes from Cohen’s studies on self and religion. As was the case with Jews, Catholics felt that religion was more about participating in rituals, traditions, and community and less about having a personal relationship with God. On a few measures, Catholics even tied with Jews on the more interdependent measures. But on most indices, Catholics were between Protestants and Jews.48
Examining the different practices, artifacts, and institutions of Catholics and Protestants has been the pastime of many social scientists. Plotting these findings reveals several forces that have maintained and reflected an independent self among Protestants and an interdependent self among Catholics.
Perhaps the most famous work on the ways of Protestants was Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber’s jumping-off point was a slightly indelicate question: Why are Protestants so much richer than Catholics? His answer was that Protestants harbor a special set of beliefs called the Protestant work ethic. One of these beliefs is the notion that people have a “calling,” a heaven-chosen line of work. Because the idea of the calling elevated work from a necessary evil to a moral imperative, everyone was suddenly willing to work a lot harder.
A second wealth-accruing belief peculiar to the early Protestants—also known by their less fun name, the Puritans—is that people’s spiritual fate was predestined, that God had already chosen who would go to heaven or hell. On its surface, this idea would seem to be bit of a buzz kill for the laboring Protestant. Instead, though, its effect was to make people not only work harder, but also consume less, and less conspicuously. This was because Protestants came to view worldly success (that is, wealth) as a sign of spiritual fitness and, conversely, to view worldly failure (that is, poverty) as a sign of spiritual bankruptcy.
A third belief that contributed not only to Protestants’ success, but also to their slightly frosty work style, was that concerning oneself with the feelings of coworkers would detract from one’s calling. So Protestants adopted the Protestant Relational Ideology, which is, in short: Don’t mix business with pleasure. All work and no frivolity makes for a lot of productivity. This is why Protestants quickly became the most successful capitalists and the richest Europeans, Weber argues.49
More recently, economists Sascha O. Becker and Ludger Woessmann identified a different route from Martin Luther to Protestant prosperity. During the Holy Roman Empire, clerics did most of the reading in Europe. And they did it in Latin. The early Protestants realized that if they were to have an unmediated relationship with God, they needed to get literate. As a classical education was a luxury that most could not afford, the early Protestant Church undertook to translate the Bible into local languages. It then set about teaching converts to read by building schools and haranguing parents. Consequently, Becker and Woessmann show, the emerging Protestant world had much higher rates of literacy than the surrounding Catholic world—a trend that persisted until the twentieth century.50
Reading does not have to be a solitary activity. And books do not have to be individuating artifacts. Likewise, prosperity does not necessarily lead to a more independent way of being. Yet in the hands of the early Protestants, the practices and products of literacy and prosperity fed and were fed by the ethos of self-reliance. Consequently, Protestants were able to turn more and more inward in their pursuit of spiritual fitness, and more and more away from religious leaders and communities.
Meanwhile, back in the Catholic realms of Europe, the Catholic Church continued to mediate adherents’ relationship with the divine. Then as now, the Church held that the pope is Christ’s ambassador on earth, and that the pope realizes Christ’s will through the hierarchy of cardinals, bishops, and priests. To know and act upon the will of Christ, parishioners must participate in the institutions of the Church. Yet historically, the Church offered masses and the Bible only in Latin, which left parishioners highly dependent on clerics and one another for guidance on how to be good Catholics. To this day, being a good Catholic entails performing rituals, observing sacraments, and tithing (that is, contributing 10 percent of one’s income to the Church). With hundreds of feast days, saint days, celebrations, and masses, Catholics have a reason to interact with their church almost daily.
Once at church, Catholics can enjoy opulent paintings and sculptures, lush music, and fragrant incense. Rich decorations tell the life of Christ, the Stations of the Cross, and other Bible stories. Mother Mary uplifts parishioners with her patient beauty. Jesus himself is present, most notably in depictions of his suffering on the cross. In contrast, Protestant churches offer a starker aesthetic. The cross in Protestant churches is always empty—a sign that worshippers should invest their energies in the future, when Jesus returns, rather than in mourning the past or seeking solace in the present.51
American Catholicism and Protestantism have diverged considerably from their European roots. Indeed, some sociologists argue that the American branches of the two churches have more in common with one another than they do with their modern European counterparts.52 Nevertheless, the culture cycles at play in the fields of modern American Catholicism and Protestantism still encourage the use of different selves.
The latest arrivals to the American religious landscape are modern-day conservative Christians. The United States has undergone several “religious awakenings,” during which speaking in tongues, hallucinating, and going through other unusual and immediate experiences of the divine were more commonplace. The first of these periods dates back to 1730, recounts Luhrmann. But the current interest in the direct, personal experience of God “exploded in the 1960s,” she writes.53
One reason behind this newfound enthusiasm for the ecclesiastical is that the nation as a whole was opening itself to more emotional and intuitive experiences. Another impetus was the social upheaval of the time, including loosening sexual mores and widespread rebellion against mainstream institutions.54 The turmoil that these changes wrought left many people feeling adrift. Some turned to the Church for a sense of community and order.55 With its warm God and clear rules, the conservative Protestant Church was just the institution that many were seeking.
Psychologist Ian McGregor and colleagues captured these dynamics in a set of experiments. In one, for example, the researchers frightened undergraduates by making them read a graduate-level statistics lesson that had been edited to be incomprehensible. Compared with students who had read a nonthreatening passage, these aggravated undergrads reported greater religious zeal, more fervently endorsing statements such as “I would support a war that defended my religious beliefs” and “My religious beliefs are grounded in objective truth.”56
No one has directly measured the selves of conservative Protestants, but many scholars have examined the personalities of political conservatives, whose circles overlap with those of religious conservatives. Psychologist John Jost and his colleagues conducted a sweeping meta-analysis of eighty-eight of these studies from twelve countries. They discovered that, compared with political liberals, political conservatives are less open to new experiences, need more closure and order, and have lower self-esteem.57 As we discussed in previous chapters, these personality features are more typical of interdependent selves.
The emotional lives of conservative and mainline Protestants likewise seem to divide over the independence-interdependence line. Psychologists Ingrid Storm and David Sloan Wilson followed eleven conservative Protestant teens and thirty-nine mainline teens over the course of one week. Roughly every two hours, a preprogrammed personal digital assistant (PDA) cued these participants to answer questions about what they were doing and how they felt about it.
Storm and Wilson found that, consistent with a more interdependent self, conservative Protestant teens spent less time alone and were happier when they were with other people. They were by themselves only 17.5 percent of the time, as compared to 26 percent for mainline Protestants. All by their lonesome, conservative teens reported feeling lonelier, weaker, and more bored and self-conscious than when they were in the presence of others, including friends and family.
For the mainline Protestant teens, being with other people had little effect on their feelings, except that being with family made them feel slightly lonelier.58
Storm and Wilson also analyzed data from a survey of more than three hundred respondents. True to the interdependent practice of observing hierarchy and tradition, conservative Protestant teens reported that their parents had more control over which friends they spent time with and which people they dated than did mainline Protestant teens. And true to the independent practice of cultivating uniqueness and self-expression, mainline Protestants more readily agreed that their families made them feel special on birthdays and holidays, and let everyone express opinions—even when they differed.59
Conservative Protestants spend more time not only with friends and family, but also with Jesus. As a member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship Church, Luhrmann explored how conservative Protestants develop their friendly, loving relationships with their savior. She discovered that conservative Protestants invite the divine into their lives many times a day. Interactions such as pouring coffee for Jesus, setting aside a weekly date night with the Lord, and learning how to differentiate His voice in your mind from your own voice are just a few of the regular practices that conservatives undertake.60
Conservative Protestants reveal and reinstate their interdependence not only in how they raise their teens and talk to God, but also in what they do with their money. An extreme act of interdependence is to forgo personal gain for the sake of your community. Conservative Protestants do just this: of all religious groups in the United States, they donate the greatest portion of their wealth to their churches.
By giving away so much of their wealth, conservative Protestants are hewing closely to the reported words of Jesus Christ, finds sociologist Lisa Keister. About 10 percent of New Testament verses are about finances, she notes,61 including verses such as “Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine” (Proverbs 3:9–10). Likewise, the conservative Protestant writer Randy Alcorn noted in his 2003 book, The Law of Rewards, “[Jesus] spoke about money and possessions more than heaven and hell combined.”62
With a literal interpretation of the Bible as their distinguishing feature, conservative Protestants more strongly endorse statements such as “The purpose of church is to give money back to God,” “Money is the root of all evil,” and “I think a great deal about the connection between religion and personal finances.” This holds true for both White and Black conservative Christians. “If you remember Hurricane Katrina,” Keister says, “there were a lot of people who didn’t have $40 to rent a car and drive away.” Among this stricken lot were many conservative Protestants.63
One side effect of giving away so much wealth is that conservative Protestants are among the poorest Americans. Using data from more than six thousand respondents to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Keister shows that conservative Protestants had a median net worth of $26,000 in 2000, whereas the sample as a whole had a median net worth of $66,200. She also demonstrates that these differences in net worth were due more to conservative Protestants’ failure to accumulate assets than to their starting out with less wealth. And though other cultural practices in conservative Protestant circles—getting less education, having more children at younger ages, and sending fewer women into the workforce—certainly add up to less in conservative Protestants’ coffers, religious beliefs and the financial practices they promote also exert a strong influence.64
The humbler circumstances of conservative Protestant culture cycles push I’s in a more interdependent direction. As we examined in chapter 5, poorer Americans tend to use their interdependent selves more than do wealthier Americans. The reasons for this are many: the less money a person has, the more she must rely on friends and family to meet daily needs, the fewer resources she has to act on personal preferences and realize personal goals, the less control she has over her environment, and the more she must accept things as they are. When combined with the institutions and interactions of conservative Protestantism, lower socieconomic status supports and reflects a particularly robust form of interdependence.
“When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” So warns a Ugandan proverb. Likewise, as conservative Protestantism has grown to be the largest religion in America, its clashes with mainline Protestantism (and the latter’s independent allies) are eroding public discourse and the ties that bind Americans to one another.
Culture cycles twisted us into this stalemate, and culture cycles can wind us out. Although mainline Protestants are now the numerical minority, their deeper roots in American institutions put them in the better position to offer the olive branch to their conservative counterparts. To elevate the national conversation on religion, mainline Protestants and their allies should welcome conservative Protestants into their institutions. The U.S. National Institutes of Health blazed this trail by appointing geneticist Francis S. Collins, a self-described “evangelical Christian,” to be its director in 2009. The former head of the Human Genome Project, Collins weds faith with evolution in a viewpoint he calls BioLogos, which holds that God created the universe fourteen billion years ago, put in place the processes that would lead to human life, and then sat back and watched.65
Mainline Protestants, in contrast, should take a more active role in helping conservatives feel more welcome in their midst. A first step in building warmer interactions is to stop trying to convince conservative Christians that their values and beliefs are wrong. Most people think and speak poorly when they feel that the core of their self is under attack. So creating a safe space for cross-faith conversations means checking the collected works of Christopher Hitchens at the door. Although the daedal argumentation and searing rhetoric of Hitchens (and of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other verbally adroit atheists) score points with the Oxbridge set, they only alienate conservative Protestants.
Instead, the better tactic is to discover what goals you already share, and then go from there. Or, as the psychologist Morton Deutsch put it, “Learn the difference between ‘positions’ and ‘interests.’ The positions of the conflicting parties may be irreconcilable, but their interests may be concordant.”66 What you will miss in the way of converting a few people to your way of thinking, you will enjoy in the way of mobilizing a lot of people toward a better way of acting. As the old adage says, “An insincere peace is better than a sincere war.”
For Reverend Richard Cizik, this means appealing to broadly shared Christian ethics when stumping for the planet. “My message really isn’t to persuade anybody of the science of climate change,” explains Cizik, the president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. “It’s rather to persuade them of their own biblical responsibility…. There’s no way you can love God and your neighbor if you’re polluting his or her air.”67
Political candidates who are less popular with conservative Christian voters should likewise change their messages to emphasize interdependent concerns over independent ones. Mainline Protestants and their allies often talk about their policies in terms of serving self-interest, maximizing economic returns, protecting individual rights, and expanding choices. Instead, Luhrmann recommends, “They could talk about the way their policy interventions will allow…those of us who support them [to] better ourselves as we reach out in love. They could describe health care reform as a response to suffering, not as a solution to an economic problem.”68
Individuals can also work on their own psyches to make way for better interfaith conversations. One quick cognitive intervention is to consider that valuing fairness, equality, and freedom above all else is itself a moral code. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt gives this code a name, the morality of autonomy, and points out that it is unusually prevalent in wealthy, educated, industrialized, and rich democracies. In the rest of the world, and among conservative Christians, two other ways of being good (the moralities of community and divinity) command larger audiences.69 It’s easy to keep ourselves blind to these other moral codes. But if you wish to build bridges between religion and, increasingly, politics, you must at least dip your mind into the possibility that all three moralities are, as Haidt writes, “manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.”70 This sort of good faith can go a long way.
While mainliners are harnessing their interdependence to reach out across the religious divide, conservatives must access their independence to think for themselves and speak up for their beliefs. Conservative Christians have already created several institutions and interactions that support the free flow of ideas within their faiths. For instance, the Evangelical Environmental Network hosts an active debate about climate change research. One of the organization’s most successful projects is its “What Would Jesus Drive?” bumper sticker campaign. The nonprofit also publishes Creation Care magazine and operates an institute “to equip, inspire, disciple, and mobilize God’s people in their effort to care for God’s creation,” according to the organization’s website.71 The evolution debate likewise has a flagship evangelical-led organization, the BioLogos Foundation, which hosts an online forum where dissenters and supporters of theistic evolution can air their views.
At the individual level, conservative Protestants should take the trouble to read the Bible, rather than relying on church leadership to tell them what to believe. Through this act of independence, many have discovered that the scripture’s list of dos and don’ts is not so clear-cut. For example, the Bible does indeed mention sex between men in a few passages, going so far as to call it an abomination (an unclean act) in Leviticus. Yet as biologist Joan Roughgarden documents, Jesus never mentions homosexuality, and no scripture mentions sex between women. Moreover, Roughgarden contends, the Bible’s many inclusive statements about eunuchs and intense same-sex friendships (Naomi and Ruth, Jonathan and David), and the church’s embrace of “transvestite saints” such as Thecla and Joan of Arc, suggest that sex and gender are rather bendy in Christianity. Grappling with these and other complexities, rather than hiding them under half the story, may strengthen both individual faith and the institution of the Church.72
The founding documents of the United States are likewise inconsistent about exactly how religion should fit in to the fabric of our nation. On the one hand, the Declaration of Independence puts a deity front and center: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” On the other hand, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention God at all. Instead, its first amendment cleaves church from state: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
In a pluralistic society with a growing population and diminishing resources, deciding how to interpret these unclear messages, how to balance church and state, is a crucial project. Understanding how the clash of independence and interdependence can sidetrack that project can put it on a more productive course. The devil isn’t in the other side’s values and beliefs; it’s in the details of how to harness independence and interdependence for a more productive peace.