American Religion: Contemporary Trends. By Mark Chaves. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011. xiii + 145 pp. $22.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)American Religion: . By Mark Chaves . Princeton, N.J : Princeton University Press , 2011. xiii + 145 pp. $22.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesOn the face of it, a slim volume carrying the subtitle Contemporary Trends would seem to be an unpromising candidate for addition to the library of a professional historian or to a course syllabus. But Mark Chaves's tightly written, levelheaded, and greatly informative book is such a work. Those who follow and contribute to the literature on U.S. religious institutions will be enlightened by it, and those who teach U.S. religion could well assign it, as I have, as required background reading.Chaves's period is the past four decades, following the tumult of the 1960s, in the wake of the apex of once-dominant mainline Protestantism, coinciding with the rise and imminent decline of politicized evangelical Protestantism, and leading into the rise of religious nones. These were also years of increasing presence of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other non-Christians in American society, of the advent of women clergy in Protestantism and Judaism, and of growing controversy over homosexual rights in all religious bodies. In other words, Chaves's contemporary period spans a stretch of historical ground fraught with change.Chaves's methods are those of the sociologist. Although he avails himself of the same kind of sources that historians use--for example, formal records produced by denominational bodies and stored in their archives--his principal source is social survey data, above all those collected by NORC, the National Opinion Research Center in the form of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Congregations Study NCS). The GSS uses randomized sampling methods (to preclude sampling bias), and employs highly trained interviewers who query subjects face-to-face to elicit answers to an elaborate, standardized battery of question about family status, employment, education, and religion, as well as a wide range of attitudes. Since 1972, the GSS has produced by all odds the best survey data on religion in the United States.Chaves, a member of the GSS's board of overseers, is personally responsible for the NCS, a major increment to the kind of information survey methods can produce. Beginning with a standard question about the subject's membership in a church (or other religious institution), GSS interviewers ask those who claim such an affiliation to identify the congregation in question. In this way, the representative sampling methods of the GSS produce a representative sample of American congregations. Periodically since 1998, NCS researchers have contacted a key informant in these congregations to ask another battery of questions about their membership, finances, programs, worship and other matters. Thus sociologists of religion, of whom Chaves is one of the foremost, routinely have at their disposal high-quality information on the individuals and local religious communities that populate American religious life.As a guide to the present state of American religion and its grounding in the recent past, Chaves is therefore in a position to see behind the latest religious scandal, conflict or innovation (114) to the realities of much continuity of belief and practice and some institutional erosion but no evidence of religious resurgence. …