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Forum: Sources of Personal Identity: Religion, Ethnicity, and the AmericanCultural Situation
Robert Wuthnow; Martin E. Marty; Philip Gleason; Deborah Dash Moore
 Religion and American Culture
, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Winter, 1992), pp. 1-22.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1052-1151%28199224%292%3A1%3C1%3AFSOPIR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H
 Religion and American Culture
is currently published by University of California Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ucal.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgMon Jan 21 15:38:31 2008
 
Forum
As a regular feature of Religion and American Culture, the edi-tors will invite scholars to comment from different perspectives uponan issue or a problem central to the study of religion in its Americancontext. This FORUM format is designed to foster the crossdisciplin-ary study of religion and American culture and to bring to the readersof the journal the latest thoughts of scholars on timely, substantial top-ics. Contributors to the FORUM are asked to present brief essays or"thought pieces" instead of carefully documented articles.
Sources of Personal Identity: Religion, Ethnicity, and theAmerican Cultural Situation
Whatever its true magnitude, depth, and intensity, changeappears to have become the normal condition in both religion and
cul-
ture in America in the second half of the twentieth century. While thereare many ways to explore connections and correlations between
cul-
tural change and the reconfiguration that seems to have been reshapingreligion in America in recent years, one particularly fruitful approach isaddressing the interpenetration of religious and cultural identity. UntilWorld War
11
Catholics and Jews in America lived in "hyphenatedcommunities"; they were Catholic-Americans and Jewish-Americans.What has been the impact on individual and group identities of themore or less full social as well as political acceptance in America of themembers of these communities that had formerly existed along the reli-gious and cultural margins? And what, in turn, has happened to thepersonal religious and cultural identities of the insiders who comprisedthe regnant culture for so long?
If
changes of the sort that haveoccurred in recent years have weakened traditional American religiousand cultural identities, what does this bode for the future of religion inthis nation? The editors have invited four distinguished scholars toparticipate in this FORUM. In the following pages, Robert Wuthnowaddresses the general and theoretical issues involved, Martin Martyspeaks to the topic as it relates to American Protestantism, Philip Glea-son comments on the theme in relation to American Catholicism, andDeborah Dash Moore deals with the issues as they pertain to AmericanJudaism.
 
Religion and American Culture
ROBERT
WUTHNOW
On
my first day of teaching at Princeton, I passed around asheet asking the undergraduates in my class to write down theirnames. Eventually, the sheet came back with the names as requested,but after each name there was a curious two-digit number preceded byan apostrophe. These numbers,
I
soon realized, corresponded to thestudents' expected year of graduation: Class of '76, Class of '77, and soon.
!30
much were these numbers a part of the students' sense of whothey were that they attached them voluntarily to their names.As
I
learned more about their subculture,
I
came to under-stand more clearly what these numbers symbolized. When a student isadmitted to Princeton, he or she is immediately accepted as a memberof one of these classes, and whether that student ever graduates or not,the label becomes part of his or her identity. For almost 250 years, stu-dents at Princeton have been following this custom. Thus, a sense ofone's place in history is an important aspect of these numbers. Espe-cially at the annual parade, when thousands of alumni return andmarch under the banners of their respective class years, the students'link in the long chain of graduating classes
is
memorialized. The sameis true as the student looks toward the future. In the twenty-first cen-
tury
there will presumably be classes of '01, '02, and so forth to carryon the tradition.What can we learn from this practice about the nature of iden-tity in our society? The Princeton case has nothing to do with religion,and yet, seeing students ascribe these numbers to themselves andwatching their annual parade, one senses a religious or sacred quality.Certainly, it is powerful enough to bring in the millions of dollars theuniversity receives annually from its alumni.
The
Character
of
Identity
The first lesson this example suggests
is
that having a personalidentity remains terribly important in our society. Some years ago,
I
tried to gauge how salient the question of identity
is
by asking a sam-ple of residents in several California communities how much theythought about the question, "How you came to be the way you are?"In response,
64
percent said they currently thought about the questionon a day-today basis, an additional
24
percent considered it important,and only
12
percent did not think about it or consider it important.(These figures come from my book
The
Consciousness Refomation.)
In
arepresentative survey of the nation at large,
I
also found that
94
percentof the American public consider their efforts to "fulfill their potential asa person" important, and 60 percent consider it very important. (These
of 00

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