Over at The Immanent Frame, the always insightful and provocative Jon Butler offers “a historian’s reaction to American Grace,” a sweeping treatment of  “how religion divides and unites us” in contemporary America that has rightly gained a fair amount of publicity and praise since its release last October. Butler’s thoughtful critique wonders whether authors Robert Putnam and David Campbell allow the “many and complex “beliefs'” they survey to “float too free from their historical moorings.” According to Butler, the historical point in which the authors begin their narrative—the 1950s—may end up distorting their analysis: “Even if the 1950s weren?t entirely peaceful, they may still have been the most unusual, and indeed relatively irenic, years in American religious history.” American religion, Butler reminds readers, is one marked by intolerance almost from the beginning of its arrival in the 17th century:

Campbell and Putnam acknowledge this historical religious polarization on the penultimate page ofAmerican Grace. Yet they not only trumpet its rarity but assert that ?from its founding, America has had religious toleration encoded in its national DNA.? Our DNA?  Here, the episodic, conditional past is annihilated in a paroxysm of essentialist rhetoric. … We might hope it?s present now. But religiously based homophobia, anti-Muslim tension, and even the quietly continuing evangelizing of Mormons by Wisconsin Synod Lutherans suggest that America?s genetically assured triumph of religious toleration hasn?t yet arrived.

In order to highlight the importance of that history and of the importance of historical context more generally, Butler turns to a narrative familiar to JI’s readers: Mormon history. “Because American Grace makes much of Campbell?s own Mormonism and contains ample discussions of contemporary Mormon belief and behavior,” he explains, “its approach to Mormon history is itself intriguing.” In addition to omitting any mention of “the upheaval of the movement’s radical, polygamous, and harassed past” and instead “jumping to the triumphant present,” Butler highlights the importance of historical context in making sense of the fact that “Mormons are far ahead of any other religious group in believing that even non-Christians can enter heaven; 98% of Mormons?but only 83% of Catholics, 79% of mainline Protestants, 62% of black Protestants, and 54% of evangelical Protestants?hold such views.”

[T]he Mormon heavens and means of getting to them are remarkably different than those of other Christian groups. Only Mormons have held, since the 1840s, that heaven is complex, with ?three degrees or kingdoms of glory,? and that Mormons may baptize the dead by proxy to provide the foundation for their entrance into heaven. These views and this history shape modern Mormon behavior. Mormons have collected birth and death records worldwide for a century, now in microfilm and digital form, and are the originators of the fabulous Ancestry.com, which provides access to more than five billion birth records?a gold mine for historians (it?s by far the best route to fully digitized U.S. census returns up to 1930), genealogists of all kinds, and Mormons verifying records for proxy baptism.

This history and this theology upend one of the seemingly innocuous questions Campbell and Putnam pose in American Grace?can even non-Christians enter heaven??because the respondents simply don?t share the same understanding of ?heaven.?  Mormons pointedly understand heaven differently than do other Christians, and they have a mechanism for getting even the dead there, of which others disapprove, most notably Jewish leaders, who have sometimes bitterly protested Mormon proxy baptism, especially of Holocaust survivors. (Campbell and Putnam do refer to Mormon ?posthumous baptism? in an endnote, but one limited to Mormon convictions that theirs is the only true faith.)

The entire review is well worth the read, and Butler has much to say in praise of the book. But I thought that his comments on Mormonism might generate some good conversation here. What do you think?