Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Nancy Ammerman:

What do you consider the essence of American Protestantism to be?

Protestantism in the United States has from its beginning been characterized by the fact that people gather into voluntary local congregations -- that a group of lay people get together and form a congregation on their own. Even if they have a bishop in the United States, one of the things that's been really important is that lay participation, that lay control, that local sense of indebtedness in a particular, local congregation.

And how has Protestantism been tied up with the history of the United States?

Among the first settlers from the European continent who came here, of course, were people that we think of as the Pilgrims, the Puritans, who came here for religious reasons and were Protestants. [They] were very much a part of that voluntary tradition [and] came here to be able to set up a community of people who could worship together and live together under the dictates of their particular understanding of how they should live together as Christians. That pattern of people gathering into local communities and a congregation is one that has really formed the model, the template, that other religious traditions have tended to follow once they come here.

Is there something in the American ideal that fits so well with Protestantism, or is it the other way around? Did the Protestant tradition help form the American ideal?

I think it's a little bit of both. It certainly is the case that throughout our history the fact that people have been gathering into these local congregations where they've been self-governing, where they have had to make decisions together -- that has been an important school of democracy. Clearly [it is] one of the things that fed into the formation of the United States Constitution and the way this country is put together, and it continues to be an important part of our civic culture. People who participate in local congregations are more likely to vote. They are more likely to have the skills to be effective participants in the larger political process. The two things are really very closely tied together.

Protestantism began in Europe, but did America really become the key breeding ground for it?

Even in Europe, most of the Protestant churches were still tied to the state, tied to a particular place. Everybody in a particular area was Lutheran or, in Geneva, Calvinist. In the United States, what began to happen very early was that the tie between place and state on the one hand and religious tradition on the other began to get broken. We mixed things up in the United States much more than they ever did in Europe. There's a very particular brand that the United States has placed on Protestantism, and Protestantism on the United States.

You talk about forming voluntary associations and about a democratic way of working things out together. But isn't there also a rugged individualism to this brand of religion?

There certainly is. One of the things that Protestantism has stood for is the individual finding a relationship with God. Different kinds of Protestants put more and less emphasis on the individual or on the church as a mediator. But in all of Protestantism, the notion of the individual having that unmediated relationship with God is important. That has been very much a part of the American way of thinking about religion -- that we each choose our religion. It's not something that's thrust upon us by birth, by where we are as children. Again, there is that back and forth between the American way of being, that rugged individualism, and the Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers.

How did Protestant diversity develop, and what does it signify?

Once you let people make their own choices, and once you emphasize local communities really having some autonomy and the ability to gather together and form their own congregations, then what you open up is the possibility that when a new group of people comes along and doesn't exactly fit with the old group that was there, they can go off and start their own congregation. They can start their own denomination. What we've seen over the course of U.S. history is an incredible proliferation of religious groups, particularly Protestant groups, and that ability to start something new if you don't like what already exists has been the impetus. Today we do have just hundreds of different kinds of Protestants in this country.

What are some of the key trends driving Protestantism?

One of the most important things happening in Protestantism at this point is the increasing diversity of the American population. We have to go back more like 30 or 40 [years], really, to get a handle on how significant this change is. If you had asked most Protestant congregations 40 years ago about their own ethnic composition, the vast majority of them would have said that they are predominantly one race and, in fact, probably would have told you that they are exclusively one race, either black or white or a minority of Hispanic and Asian and other racial groups. But what we've found in the last few years is that very few congregations claim to be exclusively one race. Everybody wants to claim at least some diversity within their congregation. And the fact that that's a badge of honor seems to me a real change in the way we think about congregational life. When we actually count them up and look to see whether they're as diverse as they think they are, in some cases they're not. But what we did find is that only about 60 percent of congregations in this country are predominantly white, to [the] point that they have 10 percent or fewer of some other racial category within them. There is actually more diversity within congregations today than there certainly would have been 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

And what are the theological implications of that?

I think it's more a matter of theology driving diversity than the other way around. Many American Protestants in the last generation simply became convinced that a racially exclusive congregation was not theologically defensible. They have become much more intentional about trying to be open to people who are different from themselves. That's not at all to say this is an accomplished task. It's just to say that we have come a very long way in a generation in this regard. But even more important than that, we still see É many, many congregations that are predominantly of one ethnic group or other, and, of course, with immigration that ethnic array has broadened much in the last generation as well. A bigger slice of the American Protestant pie is now Korean Presbyterian[s] and Hispanic Pentecostals and people who are coming from all over the world and becoming a part of the overall Protestant mix.

The RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY/U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT national survey found a high level of religious observance but also high levels of tolerance for religions outside one's own. But while people said they were very tolerant, they also had high levels of ignorance about other religions. They didn't even know people of other faiths. How do you explain all of that?

American society has established some pretty strong norms about tolerance that, with the most recent generations, have become even stronger. Even evangelicals, for whom proselytizing and trying to convert people of other faiths is central to who they understand themselves to be, don't want to be obnoxious in their proselytizing. They want to be respectful and not push their faith on somebody else. There's a very strong sense that we should respect each other, and that respecting each other includes respecting the religious traditions that other people have. Now that's all fine in theory. And mostly what it does is let us get along where our particular religious beliefs aren't at issue. It lets us live together in neighborhoods and work together in our communities. Our kids go to school together without any huge conflicts that are precipitated simply by a kind of blanket condemnation of people who are different from us. Am I going to want to worship together with somebody who's from a different tradition? Probably not. Do I think they are right? Probably not, most Americans would say. Do I even know what they believe? Probably not, as most Americans experience it. It's a kind of tolerance that allows us to work together without necessarily having to get into the fine points of, do we really agree?

Do you see this as a potential area of tension? As diversity grows, as we experience events like September 11, as members of some minority religious groups end up running for the school board or mayor, will this level of ignorance -- and tolerance -- really be challenged?

Inevitably we will run into situations where, out of people's religious traditions, there are practices people find difficult to get along with. Already we are obviously running into all kinds of things. Is it O.K. for a Sikh young man to wear his turban? Is it O.K. for a Muslim young woman to wear the hijab? Is it O.K. for an airline employee to wear distinctively religious garb? There are all kinds of ways in which various religious practices impinge on that public space that we all share together and all kinds of ways that those things are being negotiated now. My sense is that there is going to be a really mixed picture. There will be times when tempers will flare, and we will have conflict. And there will be times when once we see why something is important to somebody, people will say, "Well, sure, that's not a problem; we can work that out." We're just in for a generation or so of figuring out that balance between particularity and difference, on the one hand, and getting along and all looking alike and sounding alike and being alike.

What trends do you see in people's ties to their denominations?

One of the things that's probably new in the last generation is that the average Protestant church finds within its pews that at least half of the people there did not grow up within the denomination of that church. The average Protestant church is a mix of about half, or maybe a little more, of people who are cradle Episcopalians, or Lutherans, or Presbyterians, and people whom sociologists tend to refer to as "switchers." It's not only liberals who switch across denominations. This is really characteristic of Protestantism across the board. Every congregation is now faced with the question, "Are we simply going to be a generic congregation, or are we going to emphasize the particular denominational tradition of which we are a part?" If we choose the latter road, congregations have to get intentional about teaching their tradition in a way they would not have in the past. When everybody in the pew has grown up in the tradition, you can assume a lot about whether they know when to sit down and stand up, when to kneel, when to do this and that, how to find something in the hymnal, how to use the prayer book -- they just absorb it as they're growing up. If you grow up Methodist and join a Lutheran church, you're going to have to learn some things if you are really going to be a Lutheran. One ironic consequence is that people who choose to teach people about their tradition end up with people who actually know more and, in many cases, value the particular denominational heritage in a way that the people who grew up in it don't always do.