Faithful community life.(Bird's Eye)

Over the last generation, many historians, politicians, and journalists have labored to downplay the significance of religion in making American society what it is. That's not easily accomplished, though. There's just too much concrete evidence of the importance of our religious roots.

Nearly half the men who signed the Declaration of Independence had some seminary training, and John Adams's description of the American Revolution was that it "connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity." In their marvelous story starting on page 20 (built on a year of research) Michael and Jana Novak debunk today's conventional portrayal of George Washington as a man influenced mightily by Greek and Roman paganism but not much touched by Christian ideals. To the contrary, they report, Washington's Christianity was critical to his fathering of our nation.

David Gelernter looks at different historical evidence and finds that America is deeply stamped with the Judeo-Christian ideas and practices first brought to this continent by Puritan settlers. Stepping back even further in Western history, professor Rodney Stark concludes that Christian principles were decisive in allowing Europeans to vault out of the static misery that most humans had to cope with through the centuries. Not just compassion, moral equality, and democracy, but even seemingly secular innovations like liberty, limited government, and science were products primarily of Christian insights. And these religious understandings made Western civilization more successful and more humane than other societies.

This issue of The American Enterprise doesn't concern itself with all of the ways Judeo-Christianity has influenced us, but focuses specifically on how religion creates social bonds--how it knits people and communities together. The common view among liberal intellectuals today is that religion is something that divides people, a "wedge," a force that corrodes unity. Everything from today's "culture wars" to the recent marauding of disaffected Muslims through European cities is blamed vaguely on "too much religion."

That is a crude reduction of the actual effects of religious belief on most people. It's true that religion is a potent influence on all aspects of a civilization. "The beginning of culture is cult," reminds Michael Novak. Often, religious views have soaked so deeply into the social fabric that most citizens are no longer conscious of them, even as their culture continues to be shaped by echoes of faith.

In particular, it is the religious impulse that makes typical men and women capable of concern for their fellows. The verdict of history, says Novak, is that "apart from the worship of God, human beings cannot transcend themselves in the large numbers needed to sustain a civilization. Unless human beings have a vision of something beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot be pulled out of themselves."

America has a richer and more varied tradition of religious community-making than any other country on Earth. The Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, and other persecuted believers who first arrived on these shores came specifically to set up faithful societies denied to them elsewhere. Anabaptists, Shakers, Jews, Moravians, and many others followed them across the ocean so they could cohere with other worshippers in congregations, neighborhoods, and towns. Then there were rafts of homegrown religious communities: pioneer Methodists, Christian Scientists, the Oneida Movement, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lubavitchers, Latter-Day Saints, and many others.