American Peace Pipe
The Seven Faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter
by George Barna
Barna Books/Tyndale House, 2009
(235 pages, $24.99, hardcover)
reviewed by Thomas A. Baima
The Seven Faith Tribes presents George Barna’s “big idea” for confronting the culture wars in the United States. His concern is that “America is being torn apart by our failure to talk and work together toward a shared set of desired outcomes, based on a common set of values that we possess.” To address this crisis, Barna writes a prescription: “To achieve positive outcomes . . . requires that Christians work in harmony with non-Christians—and do so without a covert evangelistic agenda.”
Barna claims that the failure to address the cultural issues is born of most Americans’ unwillingness to dialogue with those who hold other worldviews. His book is based on statistical sociology, specifically, on findings from more than 30,000 interviews. Such a large statistical sample requires our attention, especially when reported by a respected Christian statistician.
Barna’s assertion that “it is the widespread drive to elevate self over community that has triggered our decline” could stand as his thesis statement for what follows. The problem with American culture, he believes, is directly related to the loss of an American experience of community—not to our individual experience of community, whatever that may mean to each of us, but to the failure to achieve a sense of national community. Barna argues that this can be attributed to four institutional failures: in the family, the church, public schools, and government agencies.
Two Christian Tribes
Barna’s survey findings lead him to divide Americans into seven groups or “tribes,” of which Christians comprise two. The two Christian tribes do not line up with existing identities of the major Christian groupings. Rather, they represent a clustering of attitudes and behaviors that reflect Christians’ self-reporting on the 576 distinctive variables enumerated in his surveys. This is different from the way most Christians assign themselves to a segment of the box marked “Christian” in our society.
The larger of the two Christian tribes Barna calls Casual Christians. This group represents two-thirds of all Americans (150 million of the 225 million adults in America) and 80 percent of all self-described Christians. Barna argues that this tribe is the result of the breakdown in national values which his research is describing. Tolerance, liberty, and happiness are the defining touchstones for them.
Casuals seem comfortable picking and choosing the principles from the Bible that they believe are literally accurate. . . . Even so, what Casuals resonate with most in [the biblical narrative] is not so much the implications for their own lives and relationships with God as their pride at being associated with such a deity and the encouragement they draw from those narratives.
Christianity, he later notes, is a place of comfort in their lives.
This group is contrasted with the second, and smaller, Christian tribe, the Captives. Barna chose this term from Romans 1:1 and Titus 1:1, wherein St. Paul describes himself as a “voluntary slave to Jesus Christ.” Captive Christians may best be described as those who see their faith as making a demand on them, a demand they accept. The spiritual dimension of life is, for them, what is most real. It touches every aspect of their lives, every moment of their living. Cyprian or Tertullian would be quite at home with this group. Whereas for Casuals, religious beliefs are a resource, for Captives, they form the guiding and governing principle for all of life. Ala carte is not an option. The menu is prix fixe.
Thomas A. Baima is a Roman Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and provost of the University of Saint Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois. He holds a doctorate from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome/Angelicum.
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