I thought it would be a good idea to hear what people out there said, and I also thought it would be a good idea to kind of get away from studying people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Berkeley, California. So I interviewed people in suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma, rich people call the buckle on the bible belt, in Cobb County, Georgia, which is the home of Newt Gingrich and the most conservative county in America according to many people. I interviewed primarily Hispanic suburbanites near the Mexican border in San Diego County, black suburbanites in Georgia, people around Boston and upper middle class Brookline, working class Catholics in Medford, people from all over, all different walks of life, middle class people by and large but from many different walks of life. It's not this idea we have that people are very, very judgmental about how others live, that they kind of point their finger at other people. Well, I found it's actually the exact opposite.
People tend to be very self-critical and judgmental about themselves.
They believe in right and wrong. They know what right and wrong is for themselves, but they simply are enormously reluctant to ever say what's right and wrong for anybody else. You've thought a very important part of this story was what's happened to religious belief in this country and how people are getting along from different religions. I think it's one of those great stories that essentially goes unreported because we don't tend to notice it. Most people believed that you needed one religion to have one morality and that if you lost the one religion, you would lose morality.