BiblioVault - Books about American Religion

A Church of Our Own

Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion

Warner, R. Stephen

Rutgers University Press, 2005

In this definitive collection of essays spanning fifteen years, R. Stephen Warner traces the development of the “new paradigm” interpretation of American religion. Originally formulated in the 1990s in response to prevailing theories of secularization that focused on the waning plausibility of religion in modern societies, the new paradigm reoriented the study of religion to a focus on communities, subcultures, new religious institutions, and the fluidity of modern religious identities. This perspective continues to be one of the most important driving forces in the field and one of the most significant challenges to the idea that religious pluralism inevitably leads to religious decline.

A leading sociologist of religion, Warner shows how the new paradigm stresses the role that religion plays as a vehicle for the bonding and expression of communities within the United States—a society founded on the principle of religious disestablishment and characterized by a diverse and mobile population. Chapters examine evangelicals and Pentecostals, gay and lesbian churches, immigrant religious institutions, Hispanic parishes, and churches for the deaf in terms of this framework. Newly written introductory and concluding essays set these groups within the broad context of the developing field. A thoughtfully organized and timely collection, the volume is a valuable classroom resource as well as essential reading for scholars of contemporary religion.

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Dissent in American Religion

Revised Edition

Edwin Scott Gaustad

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Dissent in American Religion, originally published in 1973, was the first book to present religious dissent in the United States as a pervasive but hidden and often-ignored stream in American life. The first volume in the Chicago History of American Religion series, it reviewed the history of our nation’s longest dissenting tradition—a tradition older and richer in the realm of religion than in any other facet of national life. Indeed, Edwin Scott Gaustad argued that religious dissent was essential to the character of the American religious experience and stood in profound disagreement with society’s orthodox values and beliefs.

This new edition, which reinaugurates the Chicago History of American Religion series under the new editorship of John Corrigan, features new commentary by Gaustad and Corrigan on the past thirty years of American religious history and the importance of understanding dissent in American religion today.

“This is an important and erudite work which shows the originality and scope which scholarship can bring to human experience.” —Los Angeles Times

“We shall understand the religious past and present better for reading Gaustad’s brief, well-written, helpful book.” —Commonweal

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Douglas Horton and the Ecumenical Impulse in American Religion

Theodore Louis Trost

Harvard University Press, 2002

In this first complete biography of Douglas Horton, we are introduced to an extremely important but surprisingly unheralded twentieth-century religious leader. Throughout his life, Horton worked tirelessly for church and world unity under the banner of ecumenism, and his efforts bore fruit in a variety of venues. Horton introduced Americans to the work of Swiss theologian Karl Barth through his translation of The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928). He was the chief architect of the denominational merger that formed the United Church of Christ (1957). He also presided over the transformation of the Harvard Divinity School from a near moribund institution to a distinguished center of religious learning (1955–1959). Toward the end of his life, Horton coordinated the Protestant presence at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

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Engaged Spirituality

Social Change and American Religion

Stanczak, Gregory C

Rutgers University Press

In Engaged Spirituality, Gregory C. Stanczak challenges this assumption, arguing that spirituality plays an important social role as well. Based on more than one hundred interviews with individuals of diverse faith traditions, the book shows how prayer, meditation, and ritual provide foundations for activism. Among the stories, a Buddhist monk in Los Angeles intimately describes the physical sensations of strength and compassion that sweep her body when she recites the Buddha’s name in times of selfless service, and a Protestant reverend explains how the calm serenity that she feels during retreats allows her to direct her multi-service agency in San Francisco to creative successes that were previously unimaginable.

In an age when Madonna studies Kabbalah and the internet is bringing Buddhism to the white middle-class, it is clear that formal religious affiliations are no longer enough. Stanczak’s critical examination of spirituality provides us with a way of discussing the factors that impel individuals into social activism and forces us to rethink the question of how “religion” and “spirituality” might be defined.

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The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace

American Religion in a Decade of Conflict

Ellwood, Robert S

Rutgers University Press, 1997

If you still hold the notion that the fifties were the "good old days," blessed with incomparable social affluence and widespread family unity, all buttressed by a strong, unconflicted spirituality, then look again. In this compelling narrative of religion in a decade still embraced by an indefatigable nostalgia, Robert Ellwood interrogates the notion of the fifties as an era of normalcy, and proves it to be full of spiritual strife.

A companion to his Sixties Spiritual Awakening, Ellwood explores the major Catholic-Protestant tensions of the decade, the conflict between theology and popular faith, and the underground forms of fifties religiosity like "Beat" Zen, UFO contactees, Thomas Merton monasticism, and the Joseph Campbell / Carl Jung revival of mythology. Ellwood frames his detailed and lively account with the provocative idea of the fifties as a "supply-side" free enterprise spiritual marketplace, with heady competition between religious groups and leaders, and with church attendance at a record high.

In addition to challenging an idealistic fifties cultural milieu, the book analyzes American religious responses to key historical events like the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the civil rights movement, turning a religious lens on the cultural history of the United States.

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Finding Mecca in America

How Islam Is Becoming an American Religion

Mucahit Bilici

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on American society, but they had an even more lasting effect on Muslims living in the United States. Once practically invisible, they suddenly found themselves overexposed. By describing how Islam in America began as a strange cultural object and is gradually sinking into familiarity, Finding Mecca in America illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape.

In this book, Mucahit Bilici traces American Muslims’ progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, Bilici develops a novel sociological approach and offers insights into the civil rights activities of Muslim Americans, their increasing efforts at interfaith dialogue, and the recent phenomenon of Muslim ethnic comedy. Theoretically sophisticated, Finding Mecca in America is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.

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Redeeming Culture

American Religion in an Age of Science

James Gilbert

University of Chicago Press, 1997

In this intriguing history, James Gilbert examines the confrontation between modern science and religion as these disparate, sometimes hostile modes of thought clashed in the arena of American culture. Beginning in 1925 with the infamous Scopes trial, Gilbert traces nearly forty years of competing attitudes toward science and religion.

"Anyone seriously interested in the history of current controversies involving religion and science will find Gilbert's book invaluable."—Peter J. Causton, Boston Book Review

"Redeeming Culture provides some fascinating background for understanding the interactions of science and religion in the United States. . . . Intriguing pictures of some of the highlights in this cultural exchange."—George Marsden, Nature

"A solid and entertaining account of the obstacles to mutual understanding that science and religion are now warily overcoming."—Catholic News Service

"[An] always fascinating look at the conversation between religion and science in America."—Publishers Weekly

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The Reed Smoot Hearings

The Investigation of a Mormon Senator and the Transformation of an American Religion

Michael Harold Paulos

Utah State University Press, 2022

This book examines the hearings that followed Mormon apostle Reed Smoot’s 1903 election to the US Senate and the subsequent protests and petitioning efforts from mainstream Christian ministries disputing Smoot’s right to serve as a senator. Exploring how religious and political institutions adapted and shapeshifted in response to larger societal and ecclesiastical trends, The Reed Smoot Hearings offers a broader exploration of secularism during the Progressive Era and puts the Smoot hearings in context with the ongoing debate about the constitutional definition of marriage.

The work adds new insights into the role religion and the secular played in the shaping of US political institutions and national policies. Chapters also look at the history of anti-polygamy laws, the persistence of post-1890 plural marriage, the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiment, the intimacies and challenges of religious privatization, the dynamic of federal power on religious reform, and the more intimate role individuals played in effecting these institutional and national developments.

The Smoot hearings stand as an important case study that highlights the paradoxical history of religious liberty in America and the principles of exclusion and coercion that history is predicated on. Framed within a liberal Protestant sensibility, these principles of secular progress mapped out the relationship of religion and the nation-state for the new modern century. The Reed Smoot Hearings will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Mormon, western, American, and religious history.

Publication supported, in part, by Gonzaba Medical Group.

Contributors: Gary James Bergera, John Brumbaugh, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Byron W. Daynes, Kathryn M. Daynes, Kathryn Smoot Egan, D. Michael Quinn

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The Transformation of American Religion

How We Actually Live Our Faith

Alan Wolfe

University of Chicago Press, 2005

American religion—like talk of God—is omnipresent. Popular culture is awash in religious messages, from the singing cucumbers and tomatoes of the animated VeggieTales series to the bestselling "Left Behind" books to the multiplex sensation The Passion of the Christ. In The Transformation of American Religion, sociologist Alan Wolfe argues that the popularity of these cartoons, books, and movies is proof that religion has become increasingly mainstream. In fact, Wolfe argues, American culture has come to dominate American religion to such a point that, as Wolfe writes, "We are all mainstream now."

The Transformation of American Religion represents the first systematic effort in more than fifty years to bring together a wide body of literature about worship, fellowship, doctrine, tradition, identity, and sin to examine how Americans actually live their faith. Emphasizing personal stories, Wolfe takes readers to religious services across the nation-an Episcopal congregation in Massachusetts, a Catholic Mass in a suburb of Detroit, an Orthodox Jewish temple in Boston-to show that the stereotype of religion as a fire-and-brimstone affair is obsolete. Gone is the language of sin and damnation, and forgotten are the clear delineations between denominations; they have been replaced with a friendly God and a trend towards sampling new creeds and doctrines. Overall, Wolfe reveals American religion as less radical, less contentious, and less dangerous than it is generally perceived to be.

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