American Religiosity Research Articles

Network, Cryptography, and the Next World to Come: An Everlasting American Techno-millenarianism?

To understand the nexus between networked cryptography and American religiosity, it is essential to embed this inquiry within the broader context of religious imaginaries associated with communication networks in nineteenth-century North America and their evolution into the spiritual landscape of the twentieth century. Throughout United States history, network imaginaries have exerted a substantial influence, engaging in a continuous dialogue with the evolution of religious thought, attributing eschatological expectations to networks, and ascribing them with a profound sense of ultimate purpose and significance. This investigation finds its ultimate context within the early techno-libertarian communities of 1990s California, pivotal in shaping the design, development, and objectives of networked cryptography online, ultimately giving birth to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain protocol.

Americanization of Rumi: The Impact of Coleman Barks’s Appropriative Translations

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which the Sufi scholar-poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) is appropriated into a specific form of American religiosity through the intra-lingual “collaborative” translations of Coleman Barks. I argue that Barks’ attempt to reveal the universal message inherent in Rumi’s verses effectively de-Islamizes Rumi’s oeuvre and personality as his translation strategy entails elimination of particulars of Islamic culture and adaptation of the poems to the taste and sensitivities of the implied readers. In effect, Barks contributes to the Americanization of Rumi, which ultimately cast him as a “New Age guru” with romantic sensibilities.

From ascetic individualism to the dissolution of the self: A sociological approach to the religious symbolism of Chicago and New York skyscrapers

This article seeks to determine the link between the symbolic profile of North American skyscrapers and the features of North American culture, emphasizing the parallelism followed in the evolution of both. For this purpose, it resorts to a comprehensive or interpretative sociology combined with an incipient sociology of skyscrapers as a theoretical–methodological basis, complemented in turn with the notions of creativity and symbolism, resources through which the nuclear myths on which North American culture is sustained would become visible. The work reveals how the transformations in the style followed by American skyscrapers maintain a close relationship with the process of collapse of the original values proclaimed by American capitalism. So that the aesthetics characterized by a rationalist abstraction, perfectly fitted in the inaugural ascetic values of this first capitalism, would give way to an aesthetics of evanescent sign where an individuated consideration of the self would be given preeminence. In this sense, the work discovers how the symbology carried on the skyscrapers constitutes a first-level observatory in order to evidence the mutations that took place in the North American religiosity.

Living Theology in a Pluralistic Latin America: An Exploration of Ecclesial Base Communities through the Lens of Social Imaginaries

The geography, histories, and ethnic composition of the Latin American continent pose a great challenge when attempting to identify and describe the region’s constitutive religious traditions and experiences. This task is further complexified by the hybridity, fluidity, and porosity of the region’s cultural groups. However, there is an aspect of Latin American religiosity that shares a significant family resemblance across the continent: the small community settings in which religiosity often emerges and consolidates as a worldview, commonly known as Ecclesial base communities. Informed by liberation theology, these communities are a uniquely generative experiment in social, political, and religious life. Scholarly accounts of liberation theology fail to identify key aspects of how Ecclesial base communities generate ways of being, knowing, and making meaning. While many of these accounts depict liberation theology as a socio-political discourse of theological origin, they do not unearth the multidirectional interaction between political practice and theological thought at the heart of these communities. In this paper, I aimed to fill this gap in the literature by reframing liberation theology as a set of social imaginaries, making use of Paul Ricoeur’s theories of memory and cultural imagination to provide the philosophical ground to understand the lived theology of Ecclesial base communities. In doing so, I maintain that liberation theology is not only a theoretical discourse that emerges from these communities, but also the inarticulate background of their ways of thinking, communicating, and living, one that provides an existential orientation through which Latin Americans can provide coherence to their collective action and recognize their own capacity to change their reality of oppression.

EngenderingSlave Religion: Methodology Beyond the Invisible Institution

AbstractThis article argues for a deprioritization of religious tradition in favor of practice-centered approaches to the study of religion among enslaved people in the United States as a means of rendering the African Atlantic and gendered dimensions more legible. In the wake of W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous argument for “the preacher, the music, and the frenzy” as the constitutive elements of African American religiosity in slavery, the historiography of slave religion has largely revolved around institutional manifestations of religion and the figures who powered them. To this end, religious traditions rooted in institutional models—with centralized authority figures, defined rites, and performative parameters—often serve as indices of religion among the enslaved. Surveying the historiography of slave religion, this article explores how the methodological prioritization of religious traditions has left the religious histories of women and others who resided outside of androcentric, heteronormative institutional frameworks largely hidden in the metanarrative of US religion and slavery. Methodologies aimed at the study of practices apart from institutions, however, prove generative for the recovery of woman-gendered and African Atlantic religious histories in the US South.

Cemetery Analysis of Whitewater, WI

Procedures and customs surrounding funerals, burial, and grave marking vary widely by time period, location, culture, and religion, among many other factors. This project investigated the gravestone customs of cemeteries in Southern Wisconsin, USA. Utilizing a dataset of 500 gravestone samples collected from cemeteries in Whitewater, WI, the aim of this project was to objectively measure how people choose to remember their dead and how these practices have evolved over the years. Because of the decline in American religiosity in recent decades, the expectation of this project was to see the usage of religious symbols decline. Based upon this analysis, this does not appear to be the case. Practices such as the recording of one’s name and year of birth/death have remained constant; however, other customs of remembrance, such as the use of religious symbols and the recording of one’s date of marriage, have shifted dramatically over the years, reflecting the evolution of society and culture. KEYWORDS: Cemetery; Symbols; Funeral; Thanatology; Death; Demography; Monuments; History

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity

Remembering Italian America: Memory, Migration, Identity

Review: Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America, edited by James L. Heft, S.M., and Jan E. Stets

Review: <i>Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America</i>, edited by James L. Heft, S.M., and Jan E. Stets

Neoliberalism and Religion in Latin America

The term “neoliberalism” has variable and broad meanings. It has even been suggested that we should dispense with the term altogether. However, in this text, I defend that we can find a very powerful concept of neoliberalism in the works of Dardot-Laval, and Brown. These thinkers show us that neoliberalism needs to be conceived as a rationality that produces a specific kind of human subjectivity, namely, the neoliberal Homo Oeconomicus or the Homo Neoliberalis. Such a concept is, in addition, crucial to understand the most recent and visible changes in Latin American religiosity, that is, the so-called “Latin American Protestant Turn”. This turn, as has been noted, should be more precisely called the “Latin American Pentecostal Turn”. Based on empirical studies that describe the main elements of this turn, I describe what seems to be the principal traits of the religiosity of the Latin American Homo Neoliberalis.

Associations between religion, religiosity, and parental vaccine hesitancy

IntroductionReligious vaccine exemptions are widely available and increasing despite decreases in American religiosity. We tested associations between religion, religiosity, and caregiver vaccine hesitancy in a sample of caregivers of 2-year-olds. MethodsWe analyzed data from a 2020 survey in three pediatric clinics, estimating distinct multivariable logistic regression models to examine associations. ResultsOur sample included 255 predominantly poor, Latino, Christian, and English-speaking caregivers (response rate: 90%); 13% were vaccine hesitant. Caregivers identifying with major faith traditions were not more likely to be hesitant than those without a tradition (adjusted odds ratio 1.46; 95% CI 0.29, 7.26). There were no significant associations between caregiver vaccine hesitancy and three religiosity domains. ConclusionsWe found no associations between parental vaccine hesitancy, religiosity, or adherence to a major faith tradition in a sample of mostly poor, Latino, Christian mothers. Additional work is needed to inform exemption policies and public health and faith leaders.

Review: Speaking with the Dead in Early America, by Erik R. Seeman

Review: <i>Speaking with the Dead in Early America</i>, by Erik R. Seeman

Ethnic Identity in American History and America’s Exceptional Religiosity: Theory and Some Evidence

Why is religiosity in contemporary America exceptionally high relative to those in other rich countries? I develop a simple theory that hinges on the sense of security of immigrant-identity, which is informed by both religion and ethnicity. Commitments to religion and to ethnicity are complementary in the determination of identity, and immigrants consciously invest in the endogenous component of their sense of identity through the actions they choose (like socialising with an ethnic group or performing religious activities). I demonstrate that the level of religiosity increases with the extent of ethnic fractionalisation in the society. I offer some empirical evidence for the theory using contemporary cross-sectional data from the 50 states of the US. I test this theory against two alternative theories that have been offered to explain the high American religiosity. I find a robust positive and statistically significant correlation between religiosity and state-level ethnic fractionalisation. When tested with world data, the model is rejected — lending further support for the claim that America’s religiosity derives from its unique history of exceptionally high and ethnically diverse immigration.

Ethnic Identity in American History and America’s Exceptional Religiosity: Theory and Some Evidence

Why is religiosity in contemporary America exceptionally high relative to those in other rich countries? I develop a simple theory that hinges on the sense of security of immigrant-identity, which is informed by both religion and ethnicity. Commitments to religion and to ethnicity are complementary in the determination of identity, and immigrants consciously invest in the endogenous component of their sense of identity through the actions they choose (like socializing with an ethnic group or performing religious activities). I demonstrate that the level of religiosity increases with the extent of ethnic fractionalization in the society. I offer some empirical evidence for the theory using contemporary cross-sectional data from the 50 states of the U.S. I test this theory against two alternative theories that have been offered to explain the high American religiosity. I find a robust positive and statistical significant correlation between religiosity and state-level ethnic fractionalization. When tested with world data, the model is rejected—lending further support for the claim that America’s religiosity derives from its unique history of exceptionally high and ethnically diverse immigration.

Occupy Wall Street’s Civil Religion of the Nones: A Theology of Consensus

ABSTRACTOver the last thirty years religious and political polarization has not only created the Religious Right, but a Secular Left. These changes have had a profound and underappreciated influence upon civil religious life in the United States. This article lays out the case for distinguishing between two forms of civil religion: the traditional, pro-status quo (drawing on Puritan thought) and a critical, anti-establishment variant (which draws upon the Quaker tradition). After detailing historical and theoretical reasons behind such a distinction, I posit that the contemporary expression of the anti-establishment civil religion exists in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Far from purely secular, OWS epitomizes the Quaker civil religion: its ideals of radical democracy and individuality, as well as practices like the Quaker’s own consensus-based decision made through the People’s Mic. Ultimately, I argue that as American religiosity changes, so too does its expression through the nation’s civil religious traditions.

Is Religiosity a Black Thing?

This article examines the depiction of an African American “none” in Octavia Butler’s “The Book of Martha” and argues that the story critiques the assumption that being African American means being Christian or religious. The problem with that assumption, as highlighted in Butler’s story, is that it excludes black nones from the African American experience, contends that biology explains African American religiosity, and imagines God as an omniscient and omnipotent human who is on the side of the oppressed.

Why Study Religion from a Latin American Sociological Perspective? An Introduction to Religions Issue, “Religion in Latin America, and among Latinos Abroad”

This article introduces the Religions issue on Latin American religiosity exploring sociological perspectives on the Latin American religious situation, from a Latin American perspective. The Secularization Theory proposes “the more modernity, the less religion”, but in Latin America we see both, modernity and religiosity. The Religious Economy model, on the other hand, affirms “the more pluralization, the more religion”, but in Latin America there is not so much pluralization, and it is not easy to switch from one religion to other. Finally, the article presents a Latin American model, the “popular religiosity” one. The problem with it, is that it is mostly ‘Catholic,’ and so does not account for the growing religious diversity in the region. It also emphasizes the “popular” aspect, excluding middle socioeconomic status individuals and elites, assuming they practice “real” religion. This introduction presents a critical approach as a way to recover, describe, and understand Latin American religious practices. This methodology might be a path to creating sociological categories to understand religion beyond the north Atlantic world.

Pluralism With Syncretism: A Perspective From Latin American Religious Diversity

Abstract The aim of this paper is to defend a type of pluralistic philosophical theory that addresses the specific characteristics of Latin American religious diversity. In order to do this, I will first try to show how, from a Latin American perspective, the discussion of religious diversity necessarily imposes the concept of syncretism and how this concept can be understood within the debate about diversity. After that, I will defend an understanding of religiosity that takes syncretism as something natural, given the functioning of our systems of practices and beliefs in general. Finally I will defend the advantages of a pluralistic philosophical perspective of religion that considers the phenomenon of syncretism and how it is necessary for an understanding of Latin American religiosity.

Unpacking the Bunker: Sex, Abuse, and Apocalypticism in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”

Unpacking the Bunker: Sex, Abuse, and Apocalypticism in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” Megan Goodwin Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt opens in a dark, sparsely furnished underground bunker. Four women (three white and one Latina) are decorating a Christmas tree. Their language is stilted, archaic; their dress and demeanor are extremely conservative. They are celebrating Christmas by singing about ending the world to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”: “Apocalypse, apocalypse! We caused it with our dumbness.” These are the members of the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne's Spooky Church of the Scary‐pocalypse. From the very first scene, viewers of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt know they're looking at a cult. These women are isolated. They live in apparent poverty. None of them look related, but they call each other “sister,” suggesting a complex family structure. They're all dressed alike and are very conservative in their appearances—long‐sleeved prairie dresses in muted pastels, no makeup, plain shoes. They all live together in a single space. Their singing reveals that they're concerned about the apocalypse, and the reference to Christmas suggests that it's most likely an apocalypse informed by Christian traditions. Popular culture has conditioned viewers to expect cult members to look like these women, training audiences through countless television shows, movies, news reports, documentaries, and talk shows. And the recognition that these women are in a cult inspires several viewer assumptions, because we all “know” what happens in a cult. Among the things, viewers “know” to expect are a charismatic leader and passive, primarily female followers, who are probably preparing for the end of days and most likely subject to sexual exploitation. Kimmy Schmidt echoes and amplifies a broader cultural narrative that links end‐times religiosity with sexual abuse and women's vulnerability, inadvertently reinforcing a dangerous American conviction that women like Kimmy—and her real‐life counterparts, women members of “cults”—need saving by outside forces. American state and federal agencies often read an overt apocalyptic worldview as evidence of irrationality on the part of minority religious community members, and participation in sexual difference as evidence of coercion and abuse. Popular culture depictions of new religious movements as irrational and abusive are frequently gendered: The movements’ leaders, usually men, are portrayed as deliberately deceptive and disingenuous; the movements’ members, usually women, are either too mentally or physically weak to leave of their own volition. Popular culture depictions of New Religious Movements (NRMs)—like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—contribute to Americans’ conviction that cult members need “our” help, whether they know it or not. While Rev. Wayne kidnaped Kimmy and two other “Mole Women,” Gretchen (the fourth woman in the bunker) joined his church willingly. The kidnaped women were grateful to be released, but many women members of apocalyptic new religious movements join or stay willingly. The stakes in these comedic episodes are fairly low, of course—whereas real‐life attempts to save women from apocalyptic cults often end disastrously for both the women in question and their would‐be saviors. “White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes”: cults in context Why should—how could—anyone join a cult? The answer, of course, is that they don't. No one joins a cult. People join groups that offer compelling answers to their moral quandaries, membership in a community that shares their commitments, belonging and meaning‐making and purpose. America has been, since its inception, a space that both fosters and punishes radical religious innovation—we have enshrined certain religious protections in our founding documents, but disincentivize any religious difference deemed too far from the (predominantly white Christian) mainstream. Groups too far beyond the pale of acceptable American religiosity are “cults.” Once a banal descriptor for a system of veneration or worship, cult in American parlance has come to signify religious practices deemed irrational, excessive, and—above all—dangerous. Sensationalist usage has largely robbed the word of any analytical utility. Cult is now shorthand for “religion we don't like,” or perhaps more accurately, “religion we don't trust.” Scholars of radical religious innovation prefer the term “new religious movement” though it lacks both the impact and the cultural resonance of cult. Certainly, new religious movements share a number of characteristics...

Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics by Josef Sorett

Reviewed by: Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics by Josef Sorett Joseph Winters Josef Sorett. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 285 pp. $34.95. There is an enduring assumption in the Western academy that modernity introduced a stable division between the religious and the secular—or, between the sacred and the profane. According to this view, secularism renders religious commitments private and subjective, enabling science and reason to govern interactions in the public sphere. This widespread assumption about the transparency of the secular regime occasionally permits an exception regarding black people and African American religiosity. In other words, black religion, and black Protestantism particularly, is described as a space where the sacred and secular are indistinguishable or at least where the boundary is fluid. Josef Sorett's provocative, beautifully written text, Spirit in the Dark, examines the relationship between black religion and literature to test, expand, and revise the assumptions about the sacred/secular fusion in black life and experience. Motivated by Aretha Franklin's refusal to separate her political and spiritual music (she recorded the eponymous "Spirit in the Dark" in 1970) and Benjamin Mays's premature concerns about Harlem Renaissance writers' abandoning theological concerns, Sorett's book aims to show how Afro-Protestant motifs strongly inform black literary and aesthetic practices. Consequently, Spirit in the Dark provides both a "literary history of African American religion and a religious history of black literature" (7). In opposition to those who would describe the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement as secular, Sorett claims, "African American literature has since its advent and across its history been cut from religious cloth. … In fact, the very organizing logics, aesthetic practices, and political aspirations of the African American literary tradition have been decidedly religious. In short, black literature is religious. Better yet, it is an extension of the practice of Afro-Protestant Christianity" (2). For Sorett, the intersection between black literature and religion is most clearly seen in ongoing discussions about a unique black aesthetic and in related appeals to the "spirit" of black people. As the author points out, religion has been a "consistent and vital—yet always contested—ingredient in efforts to define (as well as debunk) the idea of a distinctive black literature and culture" (4). Black artists and writers within both the Harlem Renaissance and the later BAM discussed and debated the significance of religion as they each developed and contested versions of a racial aesthetic. Even though many of these writers did not attend a religious institution—and many rejected official doctrines associated especially with Afro-Protestantism—Sorett shows how black religion was often the discursive terrain that enabled and constrained discussions about the uniqueness of black culture. Connected to the matter of a distinctive black aesthetic is the grammar of spirit, a grammar that provides a strong link between black religion and art. For Sorett, paying attention to the different uses and connotations of the term "spiritual" within black art and literature—as it relates to black harmony and conflict, black [End Page 155] authenticity, and the transcendence of racial categories—enables us to track competing visions of black life, struggle, and liberation. Each chapter in Spirit of the Dark contributes to the aim of "retelling the history of African American literature from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s with religion … at the center of the story" (16). And, as Sorett demonstrates, this story is layered, discordant, and full of characters that contest how this story should be told. In chapter one, the author shows how the New Negro movement, or the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance, emerged through debates that often included the grammar of "spirit and church." Whereas some figures in the nascent movement (Alain Locke) urged black people to abandon, or at least distance themselves, from black Protestantism and embrace African-derived forms of spirituality, other writers like George Haynes and James Weldon Johnson contended that "churches ought to function as agents of social service and racial uplift" (51). (It is important to keep in mind that Locke's suspicion toward Protestantism was motivated by his embrace...

Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism by Bryce Traister

Reviewed by: Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism by Bryce Traister Zach Hutchins (bio) Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism bryce traister Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016 232 pp. As Bryce Traister rightly notes, an increasingly secular academy now relates to American Puritanism primarily from the perspective of disavowal, rejecting the efforts of John Winthrop and his contemporaries to regulate civic and social life according to the dictates of the Bible as bigoted and narrow-minded. In an exceptionally ambitious book, Traister works to renegotiate our relation to Puritanism, arguing that the seeds of American secularism were sown by the same preachers and magistrates now caricatured as ecclesiastical oppressors and that we might recognize the discourse of dissent and liberty characteristic of modern society in both their language and the language of the women who argued with them. To that end, he presents the New England Way "as both a story of profound and controlling American religiosity and an equally American story of religious tolerance and secularism" (20). [End Page 602] But the New England Way of Traister is very much not the brand of American Puritanism served up by prior generations, which looked to the sermons of John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, and other ministers as the best sources on Puritan thought and culture. Instead, Traister reads the records of five events as indicative of the ways in which radical female piety shaped American Puritanism: Anne Hutchinson's trial, the Quaker invasion of the 1650s and 1660s, the Halfway Covenant of 1662, Mary Rowlandson's captivity, and the Salem witch trials. Christian theology has long placed believers in a feminine position, characterizing the church and its members as the bride of Christ, but Traister suggests that New England Puritans adopted a more radically feminized piety than many other Protestant sects and makes the development of this deeply gendered theology, through key moments when women challenged or questioned their ecclesiastical leaders, central to his secularist thesis. In the five episodes he treats, Traister contends that the feminized piety of seventeenth-century New England Puritans "articulated and helped to imagine categories of personhood, cultural politics (including feminism), psychological realism, and even natural rights discourse we characteristically associate with 'modernity,' 'secularism,' and 'Enlightenment.' By reading the feminine back into Puritanism, we will also be reading religion forward into secularism" (11). Three projects—reading these five key events, tracing the evolution of a feminized piety, and searching for the influence of American Puritanism on modern secularism and postsecularism—are interwoven into a single thesis. Brilliant insights are scattered throughout Traister's work, and it should be required reading for those investigating the texts or historical moments he treats as well as those with an interest in the role of gender in early American literature and theology. Among these many fine moments is a close reading of Rowlandson's Narrative centered on a passage in which Rowlandson compares her desire to look back toward her own town of Lancaster with the desire of Lot's wife to look back toward Sodom. This comparison, Traister notes, positions Lancaster (and New England more generally) as a latter-day Sodom, separating Rowlandson's experience of providential punishment from that of the larger society to which she belongs and establishing her spiritual autonomy. Traister concludes, "Her implied criticism of New England establishes the sovereignty of Mary Rowlandson not just as an author-recorder of her own experiences, but [End Page 603] as a person claiming a personal religious experience independent of New England's spiritual discipline" (154). In a text for which Increase Mather supplied the preface and in which "a more intrusive Matherian presence" has long been suspected, Traister's reading is delightfully subversive, empowering readers to hear Rowlandson speaking to and against the ministerial culture with which her Narrative has long been identified (133). This insight and similarly innovative readings throughout his book should meaningfully shape the ways in which we discuss and teach the texts that Traister examines. However, the larger claims that Traister links together in his introduction and conclusion are more provocative than persuasive. Enough evidence is presented that his claims with respect to American Puritanism, female...