Described by London’s Sunday Times as the most influential academic in the world today, Putnam is not a religious believer. Best known for Bowling Alone, the book that made ”social capital” a key indicator of a healthy society, Putnam, with his co-author David Campbell (a Mormon), has waded into the debate about religion in the public square with his latest offering, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. The book emerges out of two massive and comprehensive surveys into religion and public life in America.
Their most conspicuously controversial finding is that religious people make better citizens and neighbours. Putnam and Campbell write that ”for the most part, the evidence we review suggests that religiously observant Americans are more civic, and in some respects simply ‘nicer'”.
I read the article and some of the comments. It is fascinating that whenever there is an article asserting that the Christian faith has a positive effect on larger society, the comments on that article will be overwhelmingly dismissive of the claim and blistering in their assessment of the Christian faith and Christians. We are, it is said, stupid, ignorant, irrational, hypocritical, power-hungry, fearful, legalistic, bigoted, etc, etc.
Romans 1 says that everyone knows that there is a God, but that the natural man hates and suppresses this truth. The comments made in response to the article are evidence of the truth of God’s Word.