American Religious Culture Research Articles

Flaws in the Protestant Code

I want to argue that in the modern world national cultures are distinctly different from one another, and although not homogeneous, are homogenizing: that is, each national society has a culture that, while allowing for difference, nonetheless presses in the direction of a single dominant profile. This is to put in more abstract terms the argument of Habits of the Heart that America has a first language, composed of two complementary aspects, utilitarian and expressive individualism, and also second languages, namely biblical and civic Republican languages that have tended to get pushed to the margins. Already in the Introduction to the new paperback edition of Habits, my coauthors and I suggested that the individualism which is America's dominant cultural orientation was not solely derived from 18 century Utilitarianism and 19 century Romanticism, but had roots in both of our second languages as well. In my November, 1997, address to the American Academy of Religion, “Is There a Common American Culture?” I took the argument a step further, reaching almost to the point from which I want to start this paper. There I argued that beyond the homogenizing effect of television, education, and consumerism, and deeper even than utilitarian and expressive individualism, there was a still, small voice, a tiny seed, from which our current cultural orientation derives. Nestled in the very core of utilitarian and expressive individualism is something very deep, very genuine, very old, very American, something we did not quite see or say in Habits, and its core is religious. In Habits we quoted a famous passage in Toqueville's Democracy in America: “I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores.” Then we went on to name John Winthrop, following Tocqueville's own predilection, as the likeliest candidate for being that first Puritan. Now I am ready to admit, although regretfully, that we, and Tocqueville, were probably wrong. That first Puritan who contained our whole destiny might have been, as we also half intimated in Habits, Anne Hutchinson, but the stronger candidate, because we know so much more about him, is Roger Williams. Roger Williams, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop, founder of Providence and of the Rhode Island Colony, was, as everyone knows, a Baptist. The Baptists in seventeenth century New England were a distinct minority, but they went on to become, together with other dissenting Protestants, a majority in American religious culture from the early nineteenth century. As Seymour Martin Lipset has recently pointed out, we are the only North Atlantic society whose predominant religious tradition is sectarian rather than an established church. I think this is something enormously important about our culture. What was so important about the Baptists, and other sectarians such as the Quakers, was the absolute centrality of religious freedom, of the sacredness of individual conscience in matters of religious belief. We generally think of religious freedom as one of many kinds of freedom, many kinds of human rights, first voiced in the European Enlightenment, and echoing around the world ever since. But Georg Jellinek, Max Weber's friend, and, on these matters, his teacher, published a book in 1895 called Die Erklarung der Menschenund Burgerrechte, translated into English in 1901 as The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, which argued that the ultimate source of all modern notions of human rights is to be found

The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate

The study of nineteenth-century U.S. biblical exegesis on the slavery question illumines a fundamental paradox in American religious culture. The relationship between the moral imperative of anti-slavery and the evolution of biblical criticism resulted in a major paradigm shift away from literalism. This moral imperative fostered an interpretive approach that found conscience to be a more reliable guide to Christian morality than biblical authority. Yet, the political imperative of proslavery nourished a biblicism that long antedated the proslavery argumentation and remains prevalent in American moral preaching. The nineteenth-century desire to resolve this paradox led to important innovations in American interpretations of the Bible.

The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate

The study of nineteenth-century U.S. biblical exegesis on the slavery question illumines a fundamental paradox in American religious culture. The relationship between the moral imperative of anti-slavery and the evolution of biblical criticism resulted in a major paradigm shift away from literalism. This moral imperative fostered an interpretive approach that found conscience to be a more reliable guide to Christian morality than biblical authority. Yet, the political imperative of proslavery nourished a biblicism that long antedated the proslavery argumentation and remains prevalent in American moral preaching. The nineteenth-century desire to resolve this paradox led to important innovations in American interpretations of the Bible.

Introduction: The Debate over Homosexual Ordination: Subcultural Identity Theory in American Religious Organizations

This essay plots the moral, social and ideological map within which Protestant, Catholic and Jewish religious organizations debate the issue of homosexual ordination. It argues that the bipolar cultural war thesis may describe the rhetoric of elites on each side of the debate but it fails to grasp the diverse positions held by American religious groups. Kniss's recent model of moral mapping provides a more comprehensive understanding of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish debates in the context of American religious and political culture. Subcultural identity theory investigates why the issue of homosexuality is at the center of controversy in American religious denominations, arguing that symbolic positions are taken by religious clites in order to mobilize political movements, resources and members. In comparing the strategic approaches of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish bodies four typologies are outlined : exclusive, semi-exclusive, semi-inclusive and inclusive. This broader perspective on the argument over the ordination of gays and lesbians gives a context for the following four essays that analyze the recent debate over the issue in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Embracing Doomsday: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Nuclear Age

Beliefs and narratives about the end of the world have fascinated people throughout history. In nearly every culture, sacred narratives are told about worldly cataclysm, the regeneration of the earth, and the creation of a terrestrial paradise (Talmon 1968:349-351; Thrupp 1970:11-15).1 Until recently, the end of the world has been interpreted as a meaningful and supernatural event, involving the annihilation and renewal of the earth by deities or divine forces. During the last half of the twentieth century, however, widespread beliefs about a meaningless apocalypse have emerged and now compete with traditional religious apocalyptic worldviews. The creation and proliferation of nuclear weapons, in particular, have fundamentally altered contemporary apocalyptic speculation, fueling fears of global annihilation and evoking widespread fatalism about the future of humanity. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 initiated an era of nuclear apocalypticism that has flourished in American religious culture, folklore, and popular culture; the most widespread and persistent belief that emerges from both religious and secular speculation about nuclear weapons is that they will be used to bring about the end of the world (see Wojcik 1997). Since the mid-1940s, folk beliefs and assorted religious traditions have reflected the view that the invention of nuclear weapons is a fulfillment of divine prophecies. The prospect of nuclear annihilation has been readily incorporated into various apocalyptic belief systems and mythologized as a meaningful event that is an part of a preordained plan for the redemption of the world. The extent to which visions of nuclear catastrophe are found to be compatible with prophecy beliefs about a fiery conflagration at the end of time is indicated by a Yankelovich poll taken in 1984, in which 39 percent of a sample population agreed with the statement When the Bible predicts that the earth will be destroyed by fire, it's telling us that a nuclear war is inevitable (Jones 1985:67). If this sampling of the populace is representative, then as many as eighty-five million Americans may believe that nuclear apocalypse is foreordained (Halsell 1986:10). Despite the end of the Cold War, beliefs about the inevitability of nuclear apocalypse persist today, stemming from the magnitude and seeming uncontrollability of nuclear weapons and the likelihood that they will be developed and used by hostile nations or extremist organizations in the future. Although other disastrous scenarios involving environmental destruction, the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, and deadly viruses have become increasingly emphasized in current endtimes thought, prophecy beliefs about nuclear Armageddon continue to thrive in assorted apocalyptic traditions as the year 2000 approaches. This essay initially discusses apocalyptic beliefs as a folk religious phenomenon and then examines premillennial dispensationalism, the most pervasive form of apocalyptic prophecy belief in the United States today. Focusing on the ways that dispensationalist beliefs have been adapted to reflect the concerns of the nuclear age, I explore how the concept of fatalism-commonly understood as the belief that certain events and experiences are inevitable, unalterable, and determined by external forces beyond human control-is central to the dispensationalist tradition. The term fatalism is not used here in a pejorative sense; fatalistic thought is an enduring and widespread means of understanding the world. The idea of fate embodies the sense of inevitability that is inherent not only to dispensationalism but to other contemporary apocalyptic traditions as well. From the dawn of the atomic age, the belief that nuclear annihilation is foreordained and unavoidable has been a feature of dispensationalism and remains an important part of this prophecy tradition in the post-Cold War era. APOCALYPTIC TRADITIONS AND FOLK RELIGION Although most mainstream churches in the United States today deemphasize prophecy and reject outright the practice of predicting events relating to the end of the world, numerous surveys indicate that apocalyptic speculation flourishes at a popular level, with millions of Americans of all backgrounds currently embracing beliefs which assert that worldly destruction is imminent and part of a divinely preordained plan for collective salvation (see D. …