After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s

In The Restructuring of American Religion, Robert Wuthnow examined the changing patterns of institutional religion in contemporary America. In After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, he makes a similar analysis of personal spirituality. His basic argument is that professional and social mobility makes it hard for Americans to sustain spiritual life because they don't feel rooted in one place; therefore, they embark on spiritual searches "characterized more often by dabbling than by depth." In contrast to these "dwelling-oriented" and "seeking-oriented" spiritualities, Wuthnow observes that increasing numbers of religious people are turning to "practice-oriented" spirituality--"making a deliberate attempt to relate to the sacred" through disciplines such as reading, prayer, and service. Wuthnow is passionately interested in the question of how an individual's search for spiritual identity affects our society, so he explains that although practice-oriented spirituality may initially seem to weaken the authority of religious institutions, spiritual practices "ultimately sustain these institutions by giving individuals the moral fortitude to participate in them without expecting too much from them." Wuthnow's prose is clean and clear, and his argumentation is thoroughly humane: every idea is conveyed through stories taken from interviews with hundreds of people of varying ages, races, religions, and classes. After Heaven stands with Wuthnow's previous work, and Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart as a landmark in the sociology of religion. --Michael Joseph Gross