After Restructuring: Understanding Religion, Nonreligion, and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Abstract The Restructuring of American Religion (1988) provided a still-influential framework for the study of American religion that centered the emergence, after World War II, of a left–right religio-political divide driving mobilization around conflicts understood as moral. But in the last 30 years, the landscape of American religion has been transformed by decline in commitment to mainstream religious institutions, especially white Christian ones, and by the emergence of large groups of Americans who are religiously indifferent or who embrace spirituality or nonreligion. A new framework is needed to account for this transformed landscape. This framework must avoid problems characteristic of earlier approaches by conceiving of morals and interests as mutually constitutive, centering whiteness, racialization, and the defense of heteropatriarchy in explaining religio-political conflict, integrating the study of nonreligion and spirituality and religion, and analyzing not only decline in religious commitment but the changing meaning of religious identity in a transformed landscape.