American Religiosity Research Articles

Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff and Detlef Junker (eds.): Religion and the Marketplace in the United States

Religion and the Marketplace in the United States is a collection of eleven essays covering a wide array of marketplace theories within the context of American religiosity from leading experts and scholars. The book touches upon a broad range of academic fields including history, literature, sports, politics and media to demonstrate how religion and the marketplace are intertwined

Reflections on American Religiosity from an Eliasian Point of View

Reflections on American Religiosity from an Eliasian Point of View

Measuring Religion in Different Spatial Contexts: How Surveys Involving Religion Inconsistently Determine Locations

As American spatial contexts change, particularly the suburbs with increasing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity and shifting political patterns within a range of unique suburban types and communities, an analysis of 89 surveys involving religion in the Association of Religion Data Archives shows a lack of consensus in how to measure locations. The 529 questions addressing suburban locations differ in three major ways: a majority allows respondents to self-report their location, leading to more respondents selecting small towns; there are a variety of response categories, often with options that are not mutually exclusive; and one result of the first two issues is that surveys provide different percentages regarding how many individuals and congregations reside in the suburbs. These issues are also present in large-scale studies of American religiosity including the National Congregations Study and the National Study of Youth and Religion. Improving the measurement of spatial context could include reaching consensus over standard questions and categories to use, assigning respondents to specific geographic locations which allows matching to other data (such as the Census), and including both self-reported and assigned locations in survey results.

Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?

Virtually every discussion of secularization asserts that high levels of religiosity in the United States make it a decisive counterexample to the claim that modern societies are prone to secularization. Focusing on trends rather than levels, the authors maintain that, for two straightforward empirical reasons, the United States should no longer be considered a counterexample. First, it has recently become clear that American religiosity has been declining for decades. Second, this decline has been produced by the generational patterns underlying religious decline elsewhere in the West: each successive cohort is less religious than the preceding one. America is not an exception. These findings change the theoretical import of the United States for debates about secularization.

Book Review: A Political History of the Bible in America

A Political History of Bible in America. By Paul D. Hanson. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015. 694 pp. $50.00 (paper).As title suggests, Paul D. Hanson sets out to accomplish an ambitious task in offering a political history of Bible in America. At nearly seven hundred pages, this book requires more than a casual commitment from reader, but those who accept challenge will surely find it well worth investment. Hanson's credentials as a renowned Old Testament scholar stand on their own merits, but his equally impressive grasp of history and politics make for an exciting and thought-provoking literary odyssey, drawing together social sciences, philosophy, theology, and literary studies (p. 122).Divided into two parts, Hanson articulates a brief but thorough overview of Bible's use in American history, politics, and society from European settlement to present day. Here, Hanson lays out framework for book by tracing many forms of political and governmental ideologies brought to bear in American history. He then teases out biblical hermeneutics employed by politicians and religious leaders to undergird their political and ideological conclusions. He begins with Puritan belief from seventeenth century that was New Israel (p. 32). From there, he moves into eighteenth century and birth of a quintessential^ American mixture of nationalism and apocalypticism, noting that disobedience to God's call to war was depicted as a despicable fusion of blasphemy and lack of patriotism (p. 51).The nineteenth eentuiy, Hanson argues, was watershed era in history of American religiosity, for it was the century that created notion of a Christian America (p. 60). Discussing epochs including Second Great Awakening, Civil War, forced resettlement of Native Americans, and Jim Crow South, Hanson highlights extent to which Christianity influences politics and society. Continuing into twentieth century and beyond, Hanson's commentary on foreign policy, labor practices, and income inequality, among many others, shows degree to which American politics were held hostage by ?myth of America,' which portrayed a nation founded on godly principles by Christian heroes, sanctified by churches infusing nation with righteousness, and commissioned by God as an agency for Christianizing world in preparation for God's reign (p. 82).Hanson's rapid pace slows dramatically in part two, where he devotes remaining four-fifths of book to a close reading of political systems and motifs found in Bible. Here, Hanson's expertise as a biblical scholar stands out, as he offers an exhaustive though at times tedious accounting of historical and political nuances of Old Testament in particular. …

The father of the fatherless: How Cold War American religiosity sentimentalized and politicized overseas adoption from South Korea, 1953–1961

This paper seeks to investigate the influence of Cold War American religiosity on overseas adoption from South Korea from 1953 to 1961. Using primary sources from International Social Service – American Branch records in the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, and secondary sources pertaining to the construction of Cold War American religiosity in 1950s America and the forced prostitution of Korean women by the U.S. and Korean governments, I argue that the Christianizing of overseas adoption from South Korea really worked in antithetical ways as it politicized the orphan and abandoned the birth mother – especially those who were prostituted by the two governments. Thus, America exercised a self-proclaimed manifestation of divine intervention, choosing whom among the destitute would be saved and who would be abandoned.

“An Authentic Record of My Race”: Exploring the Popular Narratives of African American Religion in the Music of Duke Ellington

AbstractEdward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short filmBlack and Tanin the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movementBlack, Brown and Beigein the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.

Religion and American Politics from a Global Perspective

Past findings and theory in the sociology of religion support two opposing perspectives concerning the influence of religion on American politics. Looking from within the United States, the commanding influence of religion on political rhetoric and voting patterns seems apparent. From a global perspective, the role that religion plays in American politics is less clear; in fact, one could argue that our political institutions are decidedly secular. I present support for both of these perspectives before turning to an international analysis of images of God using the Gallup World Poll. These data indicate the uniqueness of American religiosity and suggest that the ways in which religion affect politics in the United States is unusual for a post-industrial country. Namely, many Americans understand God as a political actor; because of this, American political culture mixes religious and political language with fervor, all while keeping church and state institutions separate.

Civil Rights Religion?

This article explores the historiography of the modern civil rights movement at the point where African American religious history and American political history intersect. Several scholars who have written about African American religion and politics during the 1950s and 1960s have wrestled with the significance of the appearance, characteristics, and motives of religions as expressions of political activism. By engaging how some scholars have created narrative portraits of organized African American religious women and men, I examine their stated and implicit definitions of African American religiosity, arguing that these definitions produce a historiographic portrait of religion as activism that refracts religious beliefs and practices through the lenses of social and political activism, thereby limiting the scholarly landscape of African American religious thought and expression in this period. I suggest the inclusion of recent works to broaden our sense of this period's religious landscape without dismissing the era's important politics.

Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promises (review)

Reviewed by: Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promises Philip Gleason Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise. By Kevin M. Schultz. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. x, 256. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-195-33176-9.) In part 1 of this valuable book, Kevin Schultz documents the origin, development, and general acceptance of the “tri-faith” idea in the second quarter of the twentieth century. “Tri-Faith America” meant that the country could no longer be understood simply as a “Protestant nation”; rather, Catholicism and Judaism had attained equal status as spiritual constituents of American identity. By the 1950s, that view shaped what Schultz calls “standard operating procedure” (p. 43) in American social thought. In part 2, he analyzes significant shifts in American thinking related to this development. The National Conference of Christians and Jews, formed in 1928 in reaction to Ku Klux bigotry, was the key agency in systematically promoting the tri-faith idea. Its message of tolerance and brotherhood was reinforced in the wartime years by the prevailing sense of cultural crisis and the conviction that America’s democratic values were rooted in the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” The NCCJ’s programmatic activities in training camps, enthusiastically supported by military authorities, made the organization “one of the most extensive propagandists for what the nation was fighting for” (p. 49). The same linkage of tri-faith/Judeo-Christianity with Americanism was carried over into the cold war battle against “godless communism.” Schultz’s account of how the “three faiths of democracy” (p. 50) came to be regarded as the leading markers of diversity in American society is well [End Page 173] researched and convincing. However, his treatment of Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY, 1955), the classic contemporary analysis of the phenomenon, is surprisingly ungenerous. His summary of its argument is incomplete; he calls Herberg’s critique of American religiosity cynical and characterizes his interpretation as derivative—Herberg was merely “the most famous of the bunch” of sociologists who had been theorizing along the same lines for years (pp. 88–89). This dismissive evaluation of Herberg’s work seems quite wrongheaded. However, Schultz’s review of the overall impact of the tri-faith idea is more rewarding. Here he argues, first, that the tri-faith vision legitimated “communalism”—that is, the right of minority groups to maintain a distinctive identity—and implicitly suggested that groups as such have rights. Second, it was associated with a shift in constitutional thinking whereby church-state separation was grounded in the need to protect minorities from discrimination. Third, by being associated with the Jewish campaign to exclude religious questions from the census, the tri-faith idea helped establish the principle that religion is a strictly private matter. Finally, it “softened the ground” for the civil rights movement by supplying a language that Reverend Martin Luther King and other leaders could “tap into” in their struggle for equality and by making “American pluralism an accepted part of the nation’s identity” (p. 185). However, the leaders of tri-faith America did not formally embrace the cause of racial justice until the 1960s, and Schultz is highly critical of the “sometimes willful blindness” (p. 194) that kept them from including racial minorities in their campaign for brotherhood and tolerance from a much earlier date. The broadly interpretive claims Schulz makes in part 2 are definitely provocative, but also plausible and well worth further investigation. There are, however, some disquieting errors of detail in part 1. Schultz mistakenly calls Whittaker Chambers a “Catholic convert” (p. 90); and he errs in respect to the dating of Father Charles Coughlin’s antisemitic agitation (p. 30), Carlton Hayes’s service as ambassador to Spain (p. 31), and Servant of God Fulton J. Sheen’s elevation to episcopal dignity (p. 63). To assert that Stuart Symington—rather than the courtly Joseph N. Welch—“famously asked [Sen. Joseph R.] McCarthy if he had any decency” (p. 90) has to be called a howler. Philip Gleason University of Notre Dame (Emeritus) Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

Exceptional Behavior or Exceptional Identity?: Overreporting of Church Attendance in the U.S.

It is well established that religious service attendance is overreported on conventional surveys. However, research has focused almost exclusively on overreporting in American survey data. This study extends the current body of research by pursuing the following question: Are Americans the only overreporters, or is this a ubiquitous survey artifact inherent to conventional survey measures of religious service attendance? Overreporting is estimated as the difference between directive measures from conventional surveys and those from time diaries. The survey artifact is examined across 14 countries and over four decades, highlighting the consistency and extremeness of (over)reported American religious participation, in light of concordance between modes in other countries. Findings suggest that American religiosity may be exceptional not in terms of actual behavior, but rather in terms of identity. As a result, this study adds to our understanding of American exceptionalism by drawing a distinction between religious identities and religious behavior.

Lost in Space: Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s

Lost in Space:Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s Andrew J. Huebner Before a commencement audience at Lehigh University in 1949, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) anticipated the central question guiding a forthcoming wave of futuristic Hollywood science fiction. In his remarks that day, titled "Science and the Spirit of Man," David Lilienthal asked the graduates and their guests, "Is our advancing technology good? Is the ever more important machine good? Or [is it] evil?"1 Just four years removed from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few in the audience would have missed the Cold War implications. Indeed, the cluster of 1950s films on futuristic space travel and alien invasion introduced audiences to all manner of weird machines, robots, weapons, and other phenomena, of human and alien origin, meant, in part, to represent nuclear arms, and the scholarship on those films has emphasized the Cold War elements accordingly.2 Yet for the AEC chairman—and for futuristic cinema in the 1950s—the problem of technology did not stop with atomic weaponry or the standoff with the Soviet Union. "It reaches into the lives of every one of us, old and young, rich and poor, you who graduate today and you who are freshmen," he said. "It concerns the housewife, the librarian, the [End Page 6] chemist; it must be faced by the clergyman, the professor and the physician no less than by the businessman and public official. For this is the kind of world we live in—the world of the machine—and this is the struggle of our time." Science and technology could "exhaust," "poison," "foul," or "devastate" the natural world, although they just as likely might "eliminate filth and congestion and disease...strengthen the soil...conserve the forests...humanize man's environment." In the hands of democracies, he said, returning to Cold War geopolitics, scientific and technological innovations promised to deliver humanity to the heights of individual freedom. In that scenario, "Men can direct technology so that it can carry mankind toward the fulfillment of the greatest promise for human life and the human spirit in all history."3 Lilienthal gave hopeful answers to his own questions that day, yet he recognized their thorniness in the "turbulent times in which we live."4 Futuristic films of the 1950s, for all their cheap thrills and crude storylines, took a similar tack. They shared Lilienthal's expansive view of technology, looking beyond the Cold War and voicing broad concerns over the triangular interplay of nature, religion, and scientific advancement. This article seeks to re-imagine space and alien potboilers, from Destination Moon (1950) to The Time Machine (1960), as signs of such disruption in postwar values, concerns, and relationships—indicators that the Cold War and other socio-political developments were changing the tenor of everyday life in America.5 To accomplish that, the article puts the movies into the context of contemporary debates airing in scientific, religious, political, and journalistic circles during the 1950s. Such positioning reveals that popular cinema offered American audiences a safe and entertaining space for confronting and comprehending the profound anxieties of the era. How might the technological revolution reach into "the lives of every one of us?" Americans found answers to that question—sometimes [End Page 7] disturbing ones—in the great cinematic clashes of men, machinery, and aliens of the 1950s. Naturally, the atomic bomb animated much of the insecurity and fear of the decade. Its development raised the public profile and institutional support of scientists, while simultaneously eroding confidence in their moral authority. The public association of scientists with the birth and implementation of atomic weaponry increasingly rendered them both authors of great human suffering and pawns of government, military, and industry. Filmmakers duly infused their pictures with such Cold War themes. Yet they also articulated a postwar shift in popular attitudes toward nature, the growth of a nascent environmental movement, perceptions of antagonism between technology and nature, and concerns about global population increases. The Cold War helped spur a concurrent spike in American religiosity in the 1950s, reviving public discussion—and cinematic coverage—of piety's place in a world of galloping technological change. Celluloid science fiction pitted...

Pinned on Karma Rock: Whitewater Kayaking as Religious Experience

This paper argues that whitewater paddling constitutes religious experience, that non-western terms often best describe this experience and that these two facts are related and have much to tell us about the nature of religious experience. That many paddlers articulate their experiences using Asian and/or indigenous religious terms suggests that this language is a form of opposition to existing norms of what constitutes religious experience. So, investigating the sport as an aquatic nature religion provides the opportunity to revisit existing categories. As a "lived religion," whitewater kayaking is a ritual practice of an embodied encounter with the sacred, and the sacred encounter is mediated through the body's performance in the water. This sacred encounter-with its risk and danger-illustrates Rudolph Otto's equation of the sacred with terrifying and unfathomable mystery and provides a counterpoint to norms of North American religiosity and related scholarship.

God's Casino: The Texas of George W. Bush

It is no longer possible to dismiss American religiosity as an odd residuum of hillbilly culture. It is now a vivid and organizing force in a mobile America defined by McMansions and office parks. Indeed, the alliance of advanced capitalism and religious fundamentalism is the most remarkable feature of the landscape of American power today. The superchurch and the televangelist are at least as integral to the current culture of American capitalism as Silicon Valley and Las Vegas. More clearly than ever, America has rejected the European understanding of Protestantism as the carrier of rationalization and secularization—as in Max Weber's austere Calvinist capitalist. How are we to understand the transubstantiation of the flinty Yankee, once the incarnation of American capitalism, into the casino capitalist or the indebted but born-again shopper? The rise of the Sunbelt is of course a key component, but, within that larger transformation, the specific weight of Texas power is crucial.

New Deal Secularists and Images of Religion

Colleen McDannell. Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 336 pp. 128 black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, and index. $45.00. One of the great edifices built by the New Deal was the photographic documentation of American farm life created by the Farm Security Administration. The project left us some 272,000 photographs, now in the Library of Congress, an historical monument to the rural depression and a visual encyclopedia of American rural life. Its value is surely comparable to that of the bridges, dams, canals, airports, schools, and playgrounds built in that period. Its value seems greater than ever now that the devaluation of the common good has so impoverished our public sector. Scholars and photography lovers have celebrated and analyzed the FSA photographic collection in hundreds of books and articles in the sixty-odd years since it ended, but now Colleen McDannell offers proof of how much can still be learned from this national treasure. I have been working intensively with these photos for several years and yet I could not have predicted how much she could reveal that was new: both in what she garnered about religious faith from the collection, and in what her focus on religion reveals about the perspective of the FSA photographers. At a time when the United States is experiencing another "great awakening," her book—profusely illustrated and beautifully produced by Yale University Press—reminds us of the multivalent pull of religion for so many Americans, but also how unlikely that it would have been predicted in the 1930s. A review of this book might answer, it seems to me, two questions: What do we learn about the FSA project in particular and New Deal political culture in general by examining these pictures from a religious perspective? And what do we learn about American religiosity from these photographs? Lacking expertise on U.S. religious history, I will be able to answer the first better than the second. Moreover, to address either question, I will have to violate one of the imperatives often directed to reviewers, by discussing what is missing as well as what is present in the book. I justify that violation in part because McDannell does it so well herself, and in part because some of her [End Page 574] omissions produce misrepresentations, or at best a "spin" that is open to skepticism. McDannell construes her topic broadly. She offers chapters on vernacular church architecture, New Mexican Catholics, Connecticut Jewish farmers, African American churches both southern/rural and northern/urban, and white churches both evangelical and mainstream. Because she is studying photographs, she pictures faith as a social construction whether she looks at buildings, worship services, or community suppers. And she is a meticulous scholar of visual evidence, using the best scholarship and providing close, magnifying-glass readings of detail in photographs, extracting much information from them. About one Russell Lee photograph of prayers at All Nations Pentecostal Church in Chicago, for example, McDannell points out: these African Americans put coat hangers on the wall behind the pulpit and left a hat in front of one of the wooden churches. A moneybox, a collection basket, and a clock sit on the table. . . . Both the table and piano top are covered with decorative cloths. Just as their services are filled with debate, music, and dance, the congregation's visual space is packed with evocative images. There is no clear-cut division between sacred and profane, cross and coat hanger. Protestant African Americans used images in ways similar to Catholics in Texas and New Mexico . . . [and] engaged the religious imagination by creating a complicated visual environment that blended the supernatural and the natural. (p. 240) She is particularly attentive to gender and to absences as well as presences. She notices that religious prints in homes tend to feminize space, and notes that she found only one photograph showing a man alone, without women and children, with such religious objects...

The Competition for Worldviews: Values, Information, and Public Support for Stem Cell Research

The Competition for Worldviews: Values, Information, and Public Support for Stem Cell Research

Upstart theories and early American religiosity: a reassessment

Attempts to assess the theory of religious economies developed by Rodney Stark and his associates have generated an enormous secondary literature. For Stark himself, one beneficial effect has been a new paradigm in the study of religion that gives more emphasis to the social than to the psychological. A case is made here that key assertions in the theory have been falsified, that disconfirming evidence has been ‘explained away’ rather than explained and that the theory actually diverts attention from areas that might benefit from sociological scrutiny. But if all this is so, then why does that theory continue to command so much attention? Part of the answer is that the theory is perceived to work so well in particular contexts, and the context mentioned most often is early American religion. For that reason, the bulk of this article is concerned with taking a careful second look at Finke and Stark's The Churching of America. The evidence presented in that work turns out to be far less supportive of their general theory than is generally acknowledged. The final section of this article identifies some implicit ideological themes in the theorising by Stark et al. that likely account for its continuing popularity.

Upstart theories and early American religiosity: A reassessment

Attempts to assess the theory of religious economies developed by Rodney Stark and his associates have generated an enormous secondary literature. For Stark himself, one beneficial effect has been a new paradigm in the study of religion that gives more emphasis to the social than to the psychological. A case is made here that key assertions in the theory have been falsified, that disconfirming evidence has been ‘explained away’ rather than explained and that the theory actually diverts attention from areas that might benefit from sociological scrutiny. But if all this is so, then why does that theory continue to command so much attention? Part of the answer is that the theory is perceived to work so well in particular contexts, and the context mentioned most often is early American religion. For that reason, the bulk of this article is concerned with taking a careful second look at Finke and Stark's The Churching of America. The evidence presented in that work turns out to be far less supportive of their general theory than is generally acknowledged. The final section of this article identifies some implicit ideological themes in the theorising by Stark et al. that likely account for its continuing popularity.

The “Crusade” Against Evil: Bush's Fundamentalism

This paper deals with some of the religious elements in the responses to the terrorist attacks. It criticises some initial Christian responses (in America) as well as George Bush (Jnr)'s self‐asserted Christian credentials. The conjunction between business‐friendly forms of religion and the religious cloak over a right‐wing political stance is presented as an aspect of Bush's “crusade”. The paper surveys the history of the constitutional separation of church and state and the emergence of a republican tradition which had pretensions to displace the “moral haughtiness” and insolence of American religiosity. But the “faith‐based” legislation favoured by Bush has prevailed in the general judgementalism of the administration and in the “security measures” and pro‐corporate legislation enacted in 2001 and 2002.

The US Civil War as a Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South

IntroductionFormed in Alabama in 1994, the League of the South is a nationalist organization that advocates secession from the United States of America and the establishment of a fifteen-state Confederate States of America (CSA) – four states more than seceded during the US Civil War (1861–1865), the additional states being Okla­homa, Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland (Southern Patriot). With over ten thou­sand members, the League professes a commitment to constructing this new CSA based on a reading of Christianity and the Bible that can be identified as “Chris­tian nationalist.” This position is centred upon what we identify as the theological war thesis, an assessment that interprets the nineteenth-century CSA to be an orthodox Christian nation and understands the 1861–1865 US Civil War to have been a theological war over the future of American religiosity fought between devout Confederate and heretical Union states. In turn, this reasoning leads to claims that the “stars and bars” battle flag and other Confederate icons are Chris­tian symbols and the assertion that opposition to them equates to a rejection of Christianity.