America’s Four Gods:
What We Say About God—
and What That Says About Us
By Paul Froese and Christopher Bader
Oxford, 280 pages
It is not uncommon to hear politicians across the spectrum sound a conciliatory note by suggesting that “we all pray to the same God.” The idea is pleasing, too pleasing perhaps, because it suggests that the faith traditions practiced in the United States have greater commonalities than differences. Is this really true? Is one American’s God the same as his neighbor’s? Some remarkable data from the Baylor Religion Survey, a longitudinal study of about 1,700 people, suggest that, indeed, He may be.
The vast majority of Americans believe in a “loving God,” as sociologists Paul Froese and Christopher Bader explain in their new book, America’s Four Gods, which is an explication of the survey’s results. “The idea of a God without love is almost entirely foreign to the American religious mind,” Froese and Bader write. “American Christians focus heavily on the biblical passage John 3:16, which states, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’” Neckties and mugs with “John 3:16” emblazoned on them can be bought in stores across the country.
Where Americans do part ways is on the question of a direct divine role in human affairs. The authors divide American belief in God into four categories. First is the belief in a benevolent God, who is both loving and engaged in the world. Second, an authoritative God, judgmental and engaged. Third, a critical God, apart and watchful, who, when he exercises judgment (presumably in your next life), is going to be wrathful. Finally, a distant God, more of a cosmic force, removed from the world but forgiving (to the extent that he has any feelings toward mankind).
“A person’s God,” write Froese and Bader, “is a direct reflection of his level of moral absolutism, his view of science, his understanding of economic justice, his concept of evil and how he thinks we should respond to it.” Thus, they argue with some success, the conventional ways pundits and scholars alike slice up the country—primarily along the Red-Blue/Religious-Secular axes—are too simplistic. Rather, they say, knowing what a person believes about God is a better predictor of his views on a range of issues than is his race, class, income, education, or any number of other demographic factors.
This approach does help deepen our understanding of the ways Americans actually view the world around them and their place in it. In one chart, the authors present the “relative morality of hot-button issues.” No matter what God you believe in, it turns out that you rank these issues in exactly the same order. On a scale from always wrong to not wrong at all, 95 percent of Americans believe in this ranking: adultery, gay marriage, abortion, premarital sex, stem-cell research. The authors rightly call this level of agreement “amazing.”
Though we are prone to forget sometimes, these hot-button issues are not the only ones influenced by our views of God. Views of science, for instance, are affected by the extent to which we believe God is involved in the world. And so the children of a benevolent or authoritative God will be more likely to question the findings of modern science and push for teachers to include theories like intelligent design in the classroom.
And our beliefs about God can influence not only what we think God is responsible for but also what we think we are responsible for. Believers in a less engaged God are more likely to feel they are responsible for their own fate and the fate of others. One “distant God” interviewee suggests that global warming should be a big concern because God created the world and then left human beings to care for it. A “benevolent God” believer says that God controls the universe and simply would not allow global warming to happen.
Though America’s Four Gods is a largely descriptive work, the authors do take the opportunity to chastise Americans for allowing ourselves to be divided along religious lines by the country’s political and media leaders. “Elites often benefit by exploiting [our religious] differences and mutual misunderstandings,” they write. Bader and Froese suggest that this sort of name-calling and impugning of motives leads to divisions that aren’t really there. They write: “For instance, many political liberals feel that former President Bush was not only misguided but insincere in his religious devotion. Similarly, conservatives routinely question the religious authenticity of President Obama when he openly asserts his Christian faith.”
This, like the American notion of a loving God itself, is a lovely sentiment. But it misses the point. These arguments are not about what politicians believe, but rather about what kind of country America should be. When conservatives call liberals godless, they aren’t simply saying that their opponents don’t believe in God. Rather, they are saying their opponents wish to organize American life without reference to the standards imposed on believers by religious faith itself.
Thus, though the findings of the Baylor survey don’t quite erase the divide in America, the research in America’s Four Gods reveals a remarkable moral continuum here. We may or may not believe in the same God, but we do live in the same America.
