Quoth a friend of mine, "There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide people into two groups, and those who don't." He adds impishly, "I'm not either one."

Wary of the pollster's penchant for segregating sheep and goats into ever-distinct species, sociologist Alan Wolfe set out to explore whether Americans could be so consistently categorized. He finds that, to the contrary, we may be more unified, if complexly so, than we realize.

Wolfe, an admitted Northeastern intellectual who teaches at Boston University, organized the grandiloquently-named "Middle Class Morality Project" to survey and then interview in depth 200 Americans from suburbs of four cities around the country. He reported his findings in the long but descriptively-titled One Nation After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About: God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, and Each Other (Viking Press, 1998).

Only 2.5 percent of his interviewees registered as Episcopalians - five of 200, a wee bit more than the national average. But because the Episcopal Church is a middle-class phenomenon - OK, more toward the "upper" side if stereotypes have any weight - his findings may warrant Episcopal attention. Its news, while provocative, is not altogether bad.

Wolfe's project involved 25 people in eight suburban communities, two each outside Boston, Atlanta, Tulsa and San Diego. Together, they gave an in-depth image of what at least one substantial group of Americans is thinking.

Those 200 don't entirely agree: No surprise there. Yet Wolfe unearthed a deeper, more intricate unity than the either-or approaches of pollsters or politicians perceive. "There are surely differences between more conservative and more liberal Americans," he writes, "but those differences mark where a discussion of America's values starts, not where it ends." The terms "traditional" and "modern" conveniently posit two poles of debate, but overlook how each pole has incorporated the values of the other. "It is a basic truth of American society that no one is a traditionalist or a modernist, but that everyone lives with varying degrees of both."

He may overgeneralize, but the point is helpful that Americans avoid extremes, having assimilated new realities of life into their values. Though many regret the effects of mothers working outside the home, for instance, they typically recognize either the economic necessity or its personal importance to women - or both. Thereby, they have developed a high degree of tolerance, even to a fault - certainly when it comes to religion.

In the practice of faith, times have changed from the first suburban heydays. To be sure, mainstream religion in the 1950s never got much respect from academics who figured that "people's willingness to go to church was not due to their inner convictions but to what their neighbors might think if they did not," Wolfe recalls. Though church membership reached its peak in 1958, the nature of religion in the suburbs was a limited one, "a private matter to be discussed only reluctantly with others."

"By the 1990s, however," Wolfe writes, "... this solution of relegating religion to the realm of private life seemed to be breaking down." Its most public evidence of a "return to religion" was "the huge growth in conservative Protestant sects." As a result, religion now occupies a more vocal corner of the public square.

But Wolfe found few who wanted religion to take over the marketplace altogether. "Clearly, most middle-class Americans take their religion seriously. But very few of them take it so seriously that they believe that religion should be the sole, or even the most important, guide for establishing rules about how other people should live." Judgmentalism is their bugaboo. The '60s credo of "Do your own thing" has become '90s middle-class orthodoxy so thoroughgoing that the two black ministers he interviewed in Atlanta defended the right of the Ku Klux Klan to stage a march. Wolfe discerned an "eleventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not judge." For the Episcopal Church, with its heritage of comprehensiveness, that word is hopeful. But not altogether.

First, there is the One Big Exception. In matters of faith and morals, these live-and-let-live Americans are surprisingly tolerant. But not on homosexuality. While most issues showed a consistent bell-curve distribution - equal minorities on both sides, the bulk of opinion in the middle - this one elicited a singularly negative reaction: "Nearly three times as many respondents condemned homosexuality as accepted it." Here, again, tolerance becomes a moderating force; a "relatively large number of people ... take a nonjudgmental position." Nonetheless, "[t]he best that can be said is that support for public acceptance of homosexuality is negative rather than positive, rooted more in a libertarian appreciation of privacy than in active acceptance of homosexuality."

Second is trust and involvement in the institutions of society. Wolfe's findings agree with an oft-cited phenomenon: "Americans have lost faith in many of their institutions," government in particular.

Anxious about society at large, still they are optimistic about their own future, the project finds. Moreover, theses such as Robert Putnam's that Americans are "bowling alone" more than joining community groups are too pessimistic. Three-quarters of Wolfe's group belonged to at least one organization. Notable among them were churches.

Again we might infer both good news and bad. As religion still plays a vital role in middle-class America, so does the church. Meanwhile, the persistent unease over national institutions and leadership, like politics and government, unions and megacorporations, could possibly transfer to other larger institutions ... like a nationally-structured church.

Finally, middle-class morality, in Wolfe's view, looks at narrowed horizons. Jeffersonian in mistrust of big government, big corporations, big unions and big issues that might violate an innate individualism, Americans have nonetheless accommodated themselves to a complex political economy. Still, "they want very much to be Jeffersonian moralists ... The best moral relations, they believe, are between those closest to each other. We can call it morality writ small: not only should our circles of moral obligation never become so large that they lose their coherence, but morality should also be modest in its ambitions and quiet in its proclamations, not seeking to transform the entire world but to make a difference where it can."

For parish life, that bodes well. It supports such notions as Loren Mead's that emphasis has shifted firmly to grassroots levels. Americans remain a generous and energetic people, committed to local action, seeking the right thing to do and welcoming advice, not commandment, on how to do it. If they shun the role of neighbor's keeper, they see themselves, as one woman told him, as neighbor's helper.

Wolfe himself admires the ways this morality unifies disparate people while also allowing them to integrate the multifarious dimensions of modern life. Yet he holds some reservations, even exasperations. "Reluctant to impose their values on others, they are committed to tolerance to such an extent that they have either given up finding timeless morality or would be unwilling to bring its principles down to earth if, by chance, they came across it." At worst, it can become what he finally calls "wishy-washy." Anglicans might phrase the question, Are there limits to comprehensiveness?

There is as well a profound theological issue, for in the midst of such rampant individualism, truly - as Bishop Stephen Bayne warned a half century ago - God is optional.

Still, in the end, those whom he interviewed "do understand that what makes us one nation morally is an insistence on a set of values capacious enough to be inclusive but demanding enough to uphold standards of personal responsibility." Against those who spot a rigid and growing dichotomy within the body politic (or the body of Christ - the "two church" theory as a bishop recently enunciated it [TLC, May 7, 14 1995]) - Wolfe finds a chronic hankering for the middle, a distaste for extremes, and a dislike of polls which measure by polarizing.

If Wolfe is correct, most middle-class Americans are, in fact, in the middle, on issues as well as the economy. As he alludes, there can be more than a vowel's distance between "middle" and "muddle," especially on moral thinking. For a church whose purpose in part is to help shape that thinking at least of its own, there's another challenge.

So the middle-class morality that Wolfe unveils anew surely warrants Episcopal scrutiny. I suspect it is, somewhere between Bishop Spong and Episcopalians United, waiting for some long-denied recognition and even a modicum of respect. And leaders of church and state might start addressing this inchoate middle as well as the wings, for it is there that leadership may most be needed. For, to speculate from Alan Wolfe's project, if Episcopalians manifest the same centrist tendencies as the nation at large, for better and for worse, then it too is one church after all. o

The Rev. David Cox is rector of R.E. Lee Memorial Church, Lexington, Va.