A divide still exists between the religious and the non-religious and between members of different religions. In this country, we tend to ignore the divisions because we work and live with others outside the religious boundaries. But when the divisions seem to be too wide to navigate, how do we fix it?
According to Harvard University scholar Robert Putnam, author along with Professor David E. Campbell of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, “ . . . Americans honor their neighbors’ religious differences largely because they’ve cultivated personal ties across sectarian lines.”
Jeffery MacDonald, writing for RNS, writes that Putnam is “intentionally shortening distances between Jews and Christians, Americans and Internationals, heartland believers and coast skeptics.”
Even though he is now in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Putnam is well-remembered in his home town, Port Clinton, Ohio. Virginia Park, a friend who has known him for almost 50 years through the Methodist Church there says that “. . . he’s never lost touch . . . He reaches back to the community and communicates with people.”
Putnam has experienced the secular Cambridge and a conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation in Texas, feeling equally comfortable in both settings. He worries that many Americans do not feel comfortable with people outside their religion—and out of ignorance they often fear people unlike themselves.
Putnam says:
People who are really secular and don’t really know much about religious people at all . . . project their worst fears. They imagine that all evangelicals are would-be theocrats, that they’re sort of Taliban-like and would like to get rid of all the non-Christians. Conversely, evangelicals (and) other deeply religious people know about secular people from what they see on TV and think, "These people are really godless . . . They’re Satan personified.”
In his research for the book, the author found that neither seculars nor religious people are as hostile as popular media has described them.
Putnam doesn’t debate theology. Married to a Jew, he converted to Judaism and sees himself as “puzzled” on theological matters, though he doesn’t consider himself as agnostic. He points out that on high holy days, he attends services not as an observer but as one “there to worship God.”
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