In Gods We Trust

New Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America

Thomas Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351513067
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Much has changed since publication of the first edition of this established text in the sociology of religion. Revised and expanded, this edition emphasizes new patterns of religious change and conflict emerging in the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century. Leading scholars describe and analyze developments in five main areas: The fundamentalist and evangelical revival; challenge and renewal in mainline churches; spiritual innovation and the so-called New Age; women's movements and issues and their impact; and politics and civil religion.

Chapters include an examination of religious movements' responses to AIDS; Christian schools; quasi-religions; healing rites and goddess worship; recruitment of women to charismatic and Hassidic groups,; televangelists and the Christian Right; racist rural populism; contemporary Mormonism and its growth; cults and brainwashing; Jonestown; dissidence in the Catholic church; and trance-channeling, among other topics.

A new introductory chapter by the editors establishes an integrating framework in terms of three themes: increasing conflict and controversy associated with American religion; increasing focus on various forms of power in American religion; and challenges to models of secularization and modernization inherent in religious revival, innovation, and politicization. A concluding chapter by the editors looks at new trends and assesses their possible impact in coming years.

Like its predecessor, this outstanding collection is a significant contribution to the literature as well as a valuable resource for the classroom.

Part I Introductory

Introduction

Conflict and Change in American Religions

Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony

American religion at the end of the 1980s seems to be simultaneously experiencing a revival and a crisis. New churches are proliferating, but the importance of overarching denominational structures may be diminishing. Some religious groups are experiencing a heady growth, while others, including some of the once-dominant mainline Protestant denominations, are declining and arguably are being “disinherited.” Resurgent fundamentalists and evangelicals are flexing their political muscles, but religious conflict and controversiality is sharpening and the religious unity or harmony of the American people is a fading vision. Church-state tension is increasing and religiopolitical ideologies or variations of civil religion are polarizing. Young Americans of the Baby Boom generation are exhibiting a marked interest in religion, but their patterns of church shopping and church switching seem to reflect a consumerist orientation to religion that destabilizes particular commitments. Occult, New Age, and neopagan beliefs and practices are spreading, but they often seem to resist firm organization so that the survival of many new groups may be in doubt.

In this volume the editors have assembled a collection of papers that highlight some emerging patterns, with particular emphasis on change and conflict. We have assembled papers that collectively depict American religion in transition and promote the sociological analysis of emerging American religious patterns and movements.

The editors have divided this collection into sections dealing with topics, such as the resurgence of religious traditionalism, patterns of spiritual innovation, and religion and politics. But the boundaries separating these sections are tenuous and somewhat arbitrary. Many of the papers in our volume are relevant to more than one section or topic. Readers therefore should not be beguiled by our convenient topical constructions and separations.

Revival of the Social Science of Religion

The present revivalist, pluralizing, and politicizing trends in American religion are rendering the sociological and social-scientific study of religion increasingly popular and relevant. But this development hardly appeared to be the case when the editors were graduate students in the 1960s. Looking back, the transformation of the cultural and intellectual milieu with regard to the perceived significance of religion over the past two or three decades appears to be rather striking!

Religion was not considered to be a high-priority area of sociological and social-science inquiry in the 1960s. One usually had to be “in” religion to appreciate its study. The late Dr. Christina Larner noted in a lecture in 1982 that while the great classical sociologists of the nineteenth century, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, were atheists, they “nevertheless attached importance to religion.” In contrast, “the contemporary sociology of religion has become split off from mainline theory and has been mainly attractive to believing Christians” (Larner 1984, 110).¹

The sociology and “scientific study” of religion appeared to be placid backwaters to the increasingly roiled currents of social science in the late 1960s and 1970s. The radical politics and student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s had little immediate effect on the study of religion, while the broader sociological and social-science communities were riven with dissidence and dispute and with theoretical and philosophical ferment and radical debunking, all of which ultimately reflected the intensity of feelings over the Vietnam War and civil-rights crusades, and the resulting crisis of legitimacy which suddenly confronted the dominant political and socioeconomic institutions studied by social scientists.

Fall and Rise of Religious Controversies

American religious history has generally been turbulent and pervaded by conflict and controversy. Yet, as various scholars have recently noted, the period from the end of World War II until the early or middle 1970s was characterized by a relative mitigation of religious conflict and controversy. Cuddihy (1978) has analyzed the developments that by 1950 had led Catholic, Jewish, and mainstream Protestant communities to water down their traditional exclusivist mystiques (for example, the One True Church, the meaning of Jewish “chosenness”) in a process of assimilation to a broader American “religion of civility.” Cuddihy speaks of the earlier situation of tense and antagonistic religious pluralism in the United States as “the era of’cold war’ and ‘coexistence’ between Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, and between all of them and [American] civil religion, [which] gave way in post-World War America (1945-75) to a thirty year period of religious ecumenism and theological detente” (Cuddihy 1978, 28, our emphasis). By the 1960s, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism were conspicuously on the wane.

The intra-Protestant conflict between “fundamentalists” and “modernists” (now more frequently referred to as a conflict between “conservatives” and “liberals”) also appeared to be somewhat muted in the post-World War II period. As Wuthnow notes, “it was the experience of World War II that had drawn conservatives and liberals closer to a common center” (1988, 143).² The onset of the Cold War and the felt need for Christian unity in the face of the “menace of communism” also tended to encourage the downplaying of theological differences among Christians (Wuthnow 1988).

In general, in the relatively consensual period lasting from the 1940s through the early 1970s it was widely assumed that, as one Christian writer affirmed in 1943, “the attempt to identify true religion with a specific theological pattern may be regarded as having failed” (quoted in Wuthnow 1988, 141). This period has been termed the “Eisenhower period” in American religious history (Robbins 1983, 1985a), an appellation which is intended to refer “to the former president’s alleged statement that every American should have a religion and that he didn’t care which religion the individual chose,” which was frequently interpreted “as indicating that during this period, religion in general was viewed favorably and particular religions were viewed as more or less interchangeable” (Robbins 1985a, 172, emphasis in original).

Eisenhower, whose statement had probably been erroneously transcribed (Henry 1981), may not have meant to affirm theological indifference and the interchangeability of faiths. Nevertheless, the attitude that religion was vaguely good and that all religions deserve respect was widespread in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s (Herberg 1960; Turner 1983, 53-58). By the late 1960s various demographic trends as well as patterns of immigration, religious intermarriage, and denomination switching appeared to have undercut the sociocultural and religious “boundaries” separating different Protestant denominations, which throughout the 1950s and 1960s increasingly lost their distinctive demographic characteristics and cultural identities (Wuthnow 1988, 77-99).

Religions thus momentarily appeared less diversified and controversial in the 1950s and 1960s than had been previously or is presently the case. Of course there were “wild sects” in the 1950s and early 1960s (for example, West Virginia snake handlers), but they were assumed to appeal to a restricted southern, rural, and uneducated clientele. “Insofar as religion was found to be problematic, it was widely assumed to be ‘safely’ marginal” (Robertson 1985, 183). Fundamentalists were assumed to be restricted to the “Bible Belt,” and the quiet nationwide growth of conservative evangelical and pentecostal Christian groups (Kelley 1972) was little noticed. Non-Christian religions (other than Judaism) such as Vedanta or Sufism appeared until the late 1960s to be restricted to bohemian artists and intellectuals (for example, beatniks), as well as certain alienated ethnics such as the “Black Muslims.”

The relevance of religion to American politics seemed to be declining, particularly after the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 as our first Catholic president. On the world stage, theistic religion seemed to be a less conspicuous political force than it appears to be today; for example, the most salient antagonists of American policy in the Mideast marched under the banner of secular ideologies such as Marxism and “Nasserism.” Catholicism in Eastern Europe appeared quiescent and politically impotent; the Catholic Church also seemed to be “captive” in Latin America, the tame auxiliary of autocratic conservative regimes (while insurgent forces such as “Castroism” were Marxist and anticlerical).

In the United States, Christian churches tended in the decades after World War II to emphasize individual piety, an emphasis which “was consistent with broader individualistic orientations in American culture, as religious leaders themselves were quick to point out” (Wuthnow 1988, 57). A corollary of this emphasis was the view that the churches could best contribute to general social betterment by shaping the values of individual Christians rather than by direct social action. Both liberal and conservative Protestant leaders strongly affirmed the separation of church and state. When, under the impact of the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, a number of (mainline) Christian leaders began to embrace political activism in the late 1960s, conservative Christian leaders such as erstwhile segregationist Jerry Falwell initially responded by reaffirming the primary responsibility of the churches for the “cure of souls” and the enhancement of individual piety, a nonpolitical attitude which was implicitly political but still overtly nonpolitical and nonconfrontational. Liberal activist clergy became dangerously isolated from the laity, which remained more conservative theologically and politically (Hadden 1969). Large-scale conservative Christian activism—the Moral Majority—was not really evident until the mid-1970s.

Today the atmosphere is markedly changed compared to the postwar decades. Perhaps what stands out about the contemporary religious science is its controversially, as Robert Wuthnow notes:

On all sides American religion seems to be embroiled in controversy. Whether it be acrimonious arguments about abortion, lawsuits over religion in the public schools, questions over who is most guilty of mixing religion and politics, or discussions of America’s military presence in the world, religion seems to be in the thick of it. Scarcely a statement is uttered by one religious group on the issues without another faction of the religious community taking umbrage. The issues themselves shift almost continuously, but the underlying sense of polarization and acrimony continues. (1988, 6)

Religion, Social Science, and Secularization

Increasingly controversial, newsworthy, and threatening, religion is now more interesting and relevant to persons who are not themselves religious or, in Max Weber’s words, “religiously musical.” Some formerly “non-musical” persons have rediscovered the value of religion as a vital medium of social protest and mobilization which can be utilized to promote social change. Others have become alarmed at the destructive potentialities of religion in exacerbating ethnic, national, and class cleavages, or in allegedly deranging persons and promoting irrational and violent behavior (for example, Jonestown and “cults”).

Modernization and Secularization Theory

But these thoughts are not entirely compatible with the thrust of much of the influential sociological writing about religion in the 1960s and 1970s, in which religion was “relegated to the margins of sociological activity,” as noted by James Beckford in his contribution to this volume. In recent decades scholars have envisioned the fundamental process of modernization to be increasingly pushing religion, or at least theistic and supernaturalistic religion, into an increasingly isolated and marginal position in the advanced culture and society of North America and Western Europe. We refer here to what is often termed the secularization thesis, which “contends that modernity is intrinsically and irreversibly antagonistic to religion” and affirms that “As a society becomes increasingly modernized it inevitably becomes less religious” (Berger 1982, 14). As a society becomes more “modern,” the authority and significance of religion is said to diminish through the continuous process of rationalization, or “the way in which society becomes increasingly subject to rules, regulations and a scientific outlook” (Lyon 1985, 24), and the ongoing “disenchantment of the world,” or the waning of supernaturalist beliefs.

Particularly vital to this model is the posited privatization of religion in modern societies. Modern religion has been said to be relinquishing its influence on and concern with the dominant institutional structures of the society (for example, politics, welfare, education) and relegating itself to the private realm of intimate familial and small group processes (for example, “the family that prays together stays together”) and to the nuances of personal identity and morale. Bryan Wilson writes:

Religion becomes privatized. In a consumer society it becomes just another consumer good, a leisure-time commodity no longer affecting the centers of power or the operation of the system—even at the level of social control, socialization, and the organization of the emotions and motivations. Religion becomes a matter of choice, but whatever religion is chosen is of no consequence to the operation of the social system. (1976, 277)

Religion in modern society has thus often been said to be marginalized. “The forces of modernity are said to push the realm of feeling, symbol and the spiritual to the edge of society” (Lyon 1985, 58). Religion is driven from “the naked public square” (Neuhaus, 1984) and ceases to exert a major influence on institutional systems such as education (for example, no more prayers in public schools). Religiously based norms such as those prohibiting abortion or sodomy cease to be enforced by public authority. Religion “withdraws from public life,” but even in the private realm religion’s influence has been thought to be somewhat diminished; for example, sexual feelings become detached from the doctrine of original sin.

Reconsidering Religion: Religion and Power

The secularization thesis has certainly not gone unchallenged. It is challenged by various contributors to the present volume (for example, Hadden, Stark, Beckford). The theory has been vigorously, even ubiquitously debated (Wilson 1985). But James Beckford (1985a) argues that “the primacy accorded to debates about secularization processes” has not been beneficial to the sociology of religion; “the fact that sociological studies of religion have been dominated by considerations of its allegedly growing insignificance has created the impression that religion is not a topic worthy of serious study” (Beckford 1985a, 350). According to Beckford, “the dominant concern with secularization tends to separate the sociological study of religion from the study of other social processes, forces and conditions” (Beckford 1985a, 350).

Beckford does not really claim that the influence of the secularization model has entailed an outright denial of the idea that religion can exert influence on other social institutions and on the total society. Rather, Beckford complains that religion has too frequently been seen influencing the total society only on a very general level and primarily through processes such as socialization and individual character formation. In his essay reprinted in the present volume, Beckford notes that sociologists have too often tended to see religion as “the wallpaper of the social system”; that is, religion is always there in the background, but it has not been viewed, at least in the short term, as a contender for power, a contester of social poli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Part I Introductory
• Introduction
• 1 Religion and Power
• Part II Militant Traditionalist Resurgence
• 2 The Limits of Modernity
• 3 Fundamentalism Revisited
• 4 Gender, Education, and the New Christian Right
• 5 Rural Ideology and the Future of Rural America
• 6 Virus as Metaphor
• Part III Challenge and Renewal in Mainline Groups
• 7 The Great Protestant Puzzle
• 8 Liberal Protestantismos Struggle to Recapture the Heartland
• 9 Why Catholics Stay in the Church
• 10 The Jews
• Part IV Spiritual Innovation and the New Age
• 11 Modernization, Secularization, and Mormon Success
• 12 On the Margins of the Sacred
• 13 Rebottling the Elixir
• 14 Channels to Elsewhere
• 15 The Apocalypse at Jonestown (with Afterword)
• 16 Religious Movements and Brainwashing Litigation: Evaluating Key Testimony
• Part V Religious Ferment and the Aspirations of Women
• 17 Women-Church
• 18 In Goddess We Trust
• 19 Women-Centered Healing Rites
• 20 Women’s Search for Family and Moots
• Part VI Religion, Politics, and Civil Religion
• 21 Religion and Legitimation in the American Republic
• 22 Religion and Power in the American Experience
• 23 Citizens and Believers
• 24 Conservative Christians, Televangelism, and Politics
• Part VII Conclusion
• 25 Civil Religion and Recent American Religious Ferment
• Bibliography
• Index