I n one sense, none of Roof's observations is remarkable. The late historian Barbara Tuchman once accused sociologists of crawling on their bellies for miles, noses pressed to the ground, following every faint scent, tracking every crust of spoor, only to discover what everyone else already knew way back. Roof's research does give some interesting, even surprising, statistical backing to most anyone's anecdotal survey of the town they live in. It offers a wider frame of reference for the conversation you may have had yesterday with your hair stylist, your kid's hockey coach, or your insurance broker. It's not news, though.
Roof thinks so.
In an irony that Roof misses, the most dogmatic-sounding person his team interviewed is a woman who claims her church has finally come alive now that it's shucked all its hidebound traditionalism, its dogmatism . You get the idea. Nowhere are Roof's sympathies so clear as when he takes issue with a much-cited passage from the influential book, Habits of the Heart . In that prescient work, first published in 1985, Robert Bellah introduced a woman named Sheila Larson whose religion, she said, was Sheilaism. Bellah found this alarming, a bad moon rising.