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His respondents include moral traditionalists (like Christian conservatives) and moral radicals (like sexually liberated homosexuals), and Wolfe finds, once again, that people on both sides are engaged in a classic effort to reconcile individual freedom Niche communities, including a small town in Iowa, a prosperous Ohio suburb, an African-American neighborhood in Hartford, a gay district in San Francisco, a depressed factory town in Massachusetts and a wealthy enclave In addition, he conducted in-depth interviews with people in eight

Partly on a poll sponsored by The New York Times Magazine in the year 2000 that focused on people's views about morality and self-fulfillment. In ''Moral Freedom: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now,'' Wolfe continues his intriguing exploration of our collective character, testing prevailing notions of the culture war (which he deftly summarizes). He found that reports of a culture war were greatly exaggerated: Americans for the most part value tolerance more than perfection and are united by respect for individual choice more than they are divided Wolfe's previous book, ''One Nation, After All,'' described his interviews with an ideologically diverse group of some 200 Americans nationwide, focusing on fiercely debated issues like welfare, immigration, religion, homosexualityĪnd family life. He talks to people systematically, probing their ideas about the ordinary But he has made heroic efforts to ground his generalizations in something more than ideology. To generalize (he is a sociologist, after all). Alan Wolfe, the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, is hardly immune to the impulse It's shamelessly permissive or tenaciously puritanical. Ntellectuals love to generalize about American culture: It's a culture of victims, disbelief, piety or consumerism. The Final Freedom, an essay for The New York Times Magazine adapted from "Moral Freedom," March 18, 2001.Alan Wolfe finds that in matters of morality, Americans are surprisingly nonjudgmental.