144 Wade Clark Roof
survey question in our research on the baby boom generation some years back was very
revealing in this respect. To tap this changing ethos, we asked: “Is it important to you
to attend church/synagogue as a family, or should family members make individual
choices about religion?” Fifty-five percent of our respondents said it was important to
do so as a family, but 45 percent indicated that family members should make their own
choices. A shared faith is still a family ideal, but not by much. We do not have historical
data to describe the trend, but it is unlikely we would find as much individual emphasis
in previous decades. What such findings underscore is that the family as a traditional
bastion of religious unity, long held up as an ideal for the maintenance of faith across
the generations, is less able to sustain itself in this manner under contemporary cir-
cumstances; consequently, many individuals are left without the religious support and
reinforcement that once was found within this institution, and thus now must rely
more upon themselves.
Important, too, the current concern with the spiritual is a reflection of a deeply
personal search for meaning arising out of broader cultural changes within society,
and manifest in worries about the “self” and its well-being. If, as many sociologists
argue, religion is about two major foci of concerns – personal meaning and social
belonging – then it is around the first of these that religious energies primarily revolve
today. Pressures mount in the direction of bringing Bellah’s internal religion to the fore.
“Firsthand” religion, or its more inward realities, to use William James’s (1902/1961)
expression, takes precedent over the “secondhand” manifestations of creeds, rituals,
and institutions. Surveys show that ordinary Americans are capable of drawing this
distinction. For example, in a 1994 poll, 65 percent of Americans reported believing
that religion was losing its influence in public life, yet almost equal numbers, 62 percent,
claimed that religion was increasing in importance in their personal lives. Attention
to the spiritual may indeed represent a healthy response to a felt loss of meaning
and a resulting malaise, and especially when as the psychologist Vicky Genia (1997)
observes, people find a healthy balance between a structured grounding which is also
simultaneously open to the cultivation and expansion of the interior life. Whatever
spiritual maturity might mean, it seems apparent that a seismic religiocultural shift
is underway in how people, as the ethnographer Robert Orsi (1997: 7) says, “live in,
with, through, and against the religious idioms, including (often enough) those not
explicitly their own.” That is to say, Americans concerned with their spiritual well-
being are reaching deeper into their own faith traditions, yet at the same time are not
necessarily ruling out the presence of other faith traditions as a possible resource for
themselves.
Helpful is Ann Swidler’s (1986) notion of “strategies of action.” Using a toolbox
metaphor of culture, she emphasizes how we selectively draw off religious traditions,
although in quite differing ways in settled and unsettled times. In settled times, as with
Wuthnow’s (1998) “dwellers,” people relate to the sacred through their habits; that is,
their strategies of action are firmly established within communities. As the historian
Dorothy Bass (1994: 172) says, “Living traditions are embodied in the social world in
two related ways: Throughpracticesandinstitutionswhere practices are sustained. Indi-
viduals can learn and participate in traditions only in the company of others; they do so
by entering into the practices and institutions through which particular social groups,
versed in specific activities and gathered into specific organizations, bear traditions
over time.” Practices embedded within tradition reproduce religious memory, essential