Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions, 3 Volume Set (Praeger Perspectives)

Faith in America

Faith in America Changes, Challenges, New Directions

Volume 1 Organized Religion Today

EDITED

BY

CHARLES H. LIPPY

Praeger Perspectives

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faith in America : changes, challenges, new directions / edited by Charles H. Lippy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-98605-5 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-275-98606-3 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-275-98607-1 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-27598608-X (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. United States—Religion. I. Lippy, Charles H. BL2525.F33 2006 2006022880 200.9730 090511—dc22 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright ' 2006 by Charles H. Lippy All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006022880 ISBN: 0-275-98605-5 (set) 0-275-98606-3 (vol. 1) 0-275-98607-1 (vol. 2) 0-275-98608-X (vol. 3) First published in 2006 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1

Growth and Decline in the Mainline C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler

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Chapter 2

Post–Vatican II Catholicism: A New Church for a New Day? Chester Gillis

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Chapter 3

Roman Catholicism after the Sex Scandals Paul Lakeland

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Chapter 4

The Spirit of the Law: Spirituality in American Judaism Sarah Imhoff

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Chapter 5

Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism: The Changing Face of Evangelicalism in America David G. Roebuck

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Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in America: The Impact of World Religions Khyati Y. Joshi

107

Porous Borders: Mexican Immigration and American Civic Culture Roberto Lint Sagarena

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The Shifting Role of the Latter-day Saints as the Quintessential American Religion Ethan Yorgason

141

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

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Chapter 9

CONTENTS

The Continuing Influence of Region on American Religious Life Randi Jones Walker

Chapter 10 The Shape of Things to Come: Megachurches, Emerging Churches, and Other New Religious Structures Scott L. Thumma

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Chapter 11 In Search of the Promised Land: Post–Civil Rights Trends in African American Religion Stephen C. Finley and Torin D. Alexander

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Chapter 12 New and Alternative American Religions: Changes, Issues, and Trends Sean McCloud

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Index

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About the Editor and Contributors

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About the Advisory Board

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Preface

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he American religious landscape continues to baffle pundits. The land without a legally established church, analysts long suggested, would rapidly succumb to secularization and modernization. Fewer and fewer would identify with organized religion. Matters of faith and belief would have ever declining importance in public discourse. American men and women would increasingly regard religion as an anachronism. All of that speculation proved wrong. Among the nations of the earth, the United States continues to nurture vibrant religious institutions; millions claim religious faith as vital to their own sense of well-being; politicians freely use religious language when talking about policy; matters of ethical import still stir controversy, often leading to court cases whose resolution frequently pleases no one. If religious faith remains integral to America as a nation and to Americans as a people, that faith is not cut from a single cloth. The dynamics of religious life continue to change, bringing hope to some for an even greater influence of religion in common life and fear to others that should a single religious style gain too much influence, other perspectives will become seen as dangerous falsehood. In 1976, Newsweek proclaimed the ‘‘year of the evangelical,’’ marking the coming of age of one expression of Protestant Christianity in American life.1 In December 2005, in a highly publicized court case, a judge overturned the policy of a local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, that had required biology teachers to read a statement pronouncing evolution just theory and not a proven scientific fact and also to teach what proponents called ‘‘intelligent design,’’ an understanding that detractors saw as injecting a particular theological approach into the curriculum. The thirty years framed by those two incidents mark decades of ferment and sometimes heated discussion about the role of religion in American life. Three years before the ‘‘year of the evangelical,’’ the U.S. Supreme

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Court in Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal in the United States under particular sets of circumstances, sparking a debate over the meaning of life and theological controversies over when life itself began that continued into the years after the courts struck down the required teaching of intelligent design. Along the way, fresh controversy erupted over kindred issues such as euthanasia, stem cell research, and cloning. All those controversies had religious dimensions. Meanwhile, mainline Protestant denominations bemoaned their declining memberships, even as they watched megachurches and unaffiliated congregations mushroom in size. If membership statistics remained relatively constant, there was in the decades since 1970 a shifting in terms of where folks actually became members and also a growing number who eschewed formal affiliation even if they declared themselves to be very spiritual, although not religious. Other issues rocked the religious sector, from the fundamentalist and then Pentecostal resurgence that cascaded across American Protestantism to rancorous debates over whether gay, lesbian, or transgender persons should be welcomed into church membership, given religious blessing to unions on par with marriage, and offered opportunities to serve as clergy. Some continued to struggle with the influence of second-wave feminism; if more and more bodies ordained women to the professional ministry, the nation’s two largest Christian groups, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, remained adamant in their insistence that only men could serve in the ordained professional ministry. Changes in immigration law in 1965 meant that the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of Americans who identified themselves as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or some variant thereof. As Harvard University professor Diana Eck put it, a Christian nation had become the world’s most religiously diverse country.2 Add to this pluralistic mix a growing fascination with the Internet, a passion for nature and its spiritual resources, the horror of charges of pedophilia brought against Roman Catholic priests, debates over whether the wildly popular Harry Potter books and movies etched Satanic impulses into the minds of children, concern over the morality of stem cell research, an awareness that even dietary patterns have religious dimensions, and an array of other issues. It is clear that religion, however defined, and faith, however expressed, remain central features of American life, but features that bring a host of challenges. The thirty-six essays that comprise the three volumes of Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions probe many of these currents in American religious life. The twelve in the first volume focus primarily on the transformations that have rocked organized religious life in the United States. Those in the second move broadly into areas of challenges that have come to religious practice, while the twelve essays in the third volume focus more on matters of debate and controversy. Together they suggest that faith in America is not only alive and well, but pushing in fresh directions to speak to changing circumstances and conditions of life.

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General readers, scholars, and students will find in these essays summaries of the major trends in American religious life since the last half of the twentieth century. They will also find careful reflection and analysis on the changes and challenges that have come to religious institutions, on the array of new issues that have emerged on the religious scene, and on what the future seems to hold for that unfolding drama that is faith in America.

NOTES 1. Kenneth L. Woodward et al., ‘‘Born Again!’’ Newsweek 90 (October 25, 1976): 68–76. 2. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

Acknowledgments

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hen Praeger editor Suzanne Staszak-Silva first approached me about organizing these volumes, I knew at once that I could not undertake the task alone. After all, what stands out as a ‘‘must discuss’’ issue or topic to one interpreter of American religious life may seem to another to be peripheral at best. Hence one of my first moves was to invite a cluster of scholars to form an advisory board that would help identify the most pertinent topics for inclusion as well as scholars who might be poised to offer insightful appraisals of those topics. I am grateful to those fellow scholars who agreed to assist in this capacity: Philip Goff of Indiana UniversityPurdue University at Indianapolis, Marie Griffith of Princeton University, Paula Kane of the University of Pittsburgh, Anthony Pinn of Rice University, Amanda Porterfield of Florida State University, and Peter W. Williams of Miami University. Thank you. Countless colleagues offered names of potential contributors, sometimes making an initial contact with them on behalf of the project before I had the opportunity to invite them to participate. Altogether, thirty-nine individuals shared their research, insight, and writing skills to bring these three volumes together. I owe each a great debt, although I am sure that there are a few who are looking forward with great delight to their appearance in print since publication will finally mean that I am no longer hounding them about an endnote reference, deadline, or seemingly awkwardly constructed prose. Much of my work on these three books was completed during the fall semester of 2005, when I was fortunate to have been released from teaching responsibilities. For making that shift in teaching duties possible, I extend my thanks to William Harman, head of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of Tennessee, and to Herbert Burhenn, then dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences and now acting university provost. I have benefited from the wise editorial counsel of

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Suzanne Staszak-Silva and Lisa Pierce at Praeger; one cannot work on a project such as this without editorial support. For more than forty years, the religious culture of the United States has consumed my intellectual interests. It is my hope that the thirty-six essays in these three volumes will stimulate your reflection on the multitudinous dimensions of religion in this most religious of nations.

CHAPTER 1

Growth and Decline in the Mainline C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler

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he dominant religious trend since the settlement of the United States has been growth and geographic expansion. Fueled by immigration, a high birth rate, and a large proportion of ‘‘unchurched’’ persons, reaping a bountiful religious harvest came relatively easy in the American context. For the main, religious denominations grew. Some grew faster than others, of course, but if growth is taken as a measure of denominational health and evangelistic success, then the churches of America were clearly healthy and successful. Large-scale denominational decline therefore has been an aberration. When decline did occur, it did so as a result of severe conflict, schism, or, in a few instances, because of a denomination’s becoming severely outof-step with American culture. Following the American Revolution, the Anglican churches experienced precipitous decline as loyalist clergy left the country and churches were closed.1 Growth only resumed in the nineteenth century when the church was able to become an American denomination, the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Civil War also caused severe drops in membership when many religious bodies divided along with the nation. Other, somewhat more recent, schisms occurred over theological or cultural issues: The ‘‘Christian’’ church movement early in the nineteenth century led to the disruption and decline of several denominations in the upper South and Midwest; and Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Lutherans have split and lost members over theology and denominational mergers. By and large, when these declines occurred they were abrupt and the causes easily identified. And after large-scale losses, the affected denominations began to grow again from new starting points. When the initial crisis had passed, they had little reason to wonder about their long-term survival or to question their identity or viability.

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The only true exception to the norm of continual, if briefly interruptible, growth was experienced by the Shakers, Unitarians, and Universalists— religious bodies that grew quite rapidly for decades before becoming out-of-step with American culture. In the case of the Shakers, the problem was one of procreation (or rather lack thereof) and insufficient converts when this novel faith lost its attractiveness. The rise of Unitarianism and Universalism between 1815 and 1820 also came in the form of a social movement that attracted numerous converts and provoked the defection of many churches from their former denominations. However, when the national interest in novel religious forms waned by the mid-nineteenth century, Unitarianism and Universalism began to decline.2 For the vast majority of religious bodies in America, growth continued unabated; the population grew through procreation and immigration, and a once largely unchurched population was slowly gathered in through the Great Awakenings and a near pervasive evangelical zeal among American churches. For much of American history, almost all Protestant denominations were evangelical, including those that are now called the mainline. Indeed, Methodism, now the numerically dominant mainline church, was the societal norm for an evangelical church from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth. The pattern of continual growth was finally broken in the mid-1960s when one after the other Protestant denominations collectively known as mainline began to experience losses in membership.3 The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) first declined in 1964; the United Church of Christ in 1966; the United Methodist Church in 1966; the constituent bodies of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1966; the constituent bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1967; the Episcopal Church in 1968; and the Reformed Church in America in 1968. Early on, these losses were not severe and failed to attract much attention from denominational leaders or those who study American religion. Because many denominations do not publish statistics in a timely manner and aggregation in annual editions of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches delays public knowledge for another year after denominational publication, it takes more than a few years for a trend to become apparent.4 Thus, the issue of mainline decline did not arise as a serious subject of concern until early in the 1970s, seven years after the decline first began. Dean Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing began the conversation (or argument) about mainline decline, and the first academic efforts to study the losses did not appear until 1978 as chapters in Dean Hoge and David Roozen’s edited volume, Understanding Church Growth and Decline.5 In the years since Kelley and Hoge and Roozen wrote about mainline decline, these denominations continued to lose members, and debates about those losses have also continued. In this chapter we provide an overview of mainline decline, followed by an analysis of the decline within a larger context of religious and demographic trends.

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THE MAINLINE PRIOR TO THE ERA OF DECLINE The term ‘‘mainline Protestant’’ is used along with ‘‘mainstream Protestant’’ and ‘‘old-line Protestant’’ to categorize denominations that are affiliated with the National Council of Churches and have deep historic roots in and long-standing influence on American society.6 In the mideighteenth century, mainstream denominations would have included only Congregationalists, Anglicans, and perhaps Presbyterians. However, after the American Revolution, religion spread westward in the form of popular evangelicalism, primarily benefiting the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians.7 During the second half of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth century, Methodists, Christian Churches, and most Lutheran bodies lost much of their sectarian or immigrant flavor and, along with the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, formed the core of the ‘‘Protestant Establishment.’’ These increasingly ecumenical and culturally centrist bodies epitomized Protestantism, as distinguished from Catholicism and Judaism. According to Martin Marty, ‘‘mainline religion had meant simply white Protestant until well into the twentieth century.’’8 However much the ecumenical ‘‘mainline’’ operated as a de facto standard for Protestantism in America, there was no true evangelical/mainline division until after the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Richard Quebedeaux, ‘‘it was that dispute which divided Protestantism in America into two hostile camps and resulted in a factionalism within the church from which it has never fully recovered.’’9 Both the cooperative mainline and noncooperative conservative Protestants continued to grow during the 1930s and 1940s, and all available evidence indicates that conservative Protestants, despite becoming more culturally marginal following the Scopes trial, were growing at a more rapid pace than the mainline. But since most mainline denominations were growing faster than the general population and were largely unconcerned about events in the conservative sector, there was no sense of envy or competition on the part of the mainline. This was an era in which the proportion of unchurched Americans was shrinking as churches—mainline and conservative—made evangelistic inroads and increased the overall percentage of Americans who were on the membership rolls of a local church.10 ‘‘Total membership in all religious groups (except the Quakers, the Unitarians, and the Universalists) grew by leaps and bounds during the twentieth century as the general population increased threefold. . . . There were 42 million churchgoers by 1916, 55 million by 1926, and 72 million by 1942.’’11 In spite of the growth of Protestantism in America, there were signs that all was not completely well in the Protestant house. According to Sydney Ahlstrom, following the stock market crash of 1929, ‘‘unemployment and hunger proved inconducive to a revival of popular religion.’’12 Furthermore, fertility rates that had dropped steadily since the 1800s were barely above replacement level from the late 1920s through the 1930s.13 Like the mid-1970s, the 1930s saw a ‘‘birth dearth’’ that

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slowed membership growth in most mainline denominations and resulted in a few years of net loss for the Methodists and United Presbyterians.14 But the membership malaise of the 1930s did not last. The national mobilization for World War II ended the Great Depression, and birth rates increased thereafter, rising steadily during the early 1940s before jumping more dramatically in 1946 and 1947, the years usually designated as the beginning of the postwar ‘‘baby boom.’’ Denominational growth rates soared, ushering in an era of pervasive growth for mainline and conservative churches. The growth of the 1950s came as a surprise according to most observers, and ‘‘mainline churches were equally unprepared for the shaky statistics of the early 1960s and for the stunning decline in membership, which gathered momentum as the decade ended.’’15

THE BASIC TRENDS IN MAINLINE GROWTH AND DECLINE: 1945–2003 Membership trends for the era of growth during the baby boom years and the decline that followed are best viewed graphically. Figure 1.1 shows the basic membership trends for United Methodists and six other mainline denominations. Methodists are graphed separately because they are so much larger than any of the other mainline bodies and would overwhelm a trend line in which they were included. The six aggregated mainline bodies include the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ. The American Baptist churches are also normally included as part of the Protestant mainline, but are excluded from our analysis here because of serious problems in their membership reporting. As can be seen in Figure 1.1, the United Methodist Church (UMC) had around 9.1 million members in 1945, the year prior to the beginning of the baby boom. Methodist membership peaked in 1965 at 11.0 million members. In the next year membership declined by 0.15 percent, and every year thereafter the UMC lost members. The most severe year of loss was a decline of 1.7 percent in 1971. As of 2003, United Methodist membership stood at 8.2 million members, a figure that represents a decline of 0.8 percent from the previous year and a loss of 2.8 million members since 1965. The six other mainline denominations in Figure 1.1 had an aggregate 11.4 million members in 1945, and as the steeper line on the graph indicates, they grew at a more rapid pace than did United Methodists during the early years of the postwar baby boom. The aggregate mainline peak was 1966 when these denominations totaled 17.2 million members. The following year they declined in membership by 0.2 percent. Declines accelerated thereafter, with a loss of 2.0 percent in 1973. Losses continue through the present. In 2003, aggregate mainline membership stood at 12.0 million members, representing a decline of 1.5 percent in 2003 and a loss of 5.2 million members since 1966.

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Figure 1.1. Mainline membership trends, 1945–2003.

Overall, these seven denominations (Methodists included) lost 8 million members from the mid-1960s to the present, or 28 percent of their total membership. Declines have been continuous for all of the seven denominations except for modest increases for the Episcopal Church in 1999 and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1982, 1990, 1991, and 1997. Thus far into the new millennium, no mainline denomination shows any sign of a return to consistent growth. Indeed, in the last few years, declines worsened in several religious bodies after showing signs of moderation. After growth in 1999 and tiny losses in 2000 and 2001, the Episcopal Church lost 8,000 members in 2002 and over 32,000 members in both 2003 and 2004. Similarly, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America experienced rates of decline in 2002, 2003, and 2004 that were greater than any year since the early 1970s. If the overall population of the United States began declining in the mid-1960s and all American denominations started to lose members at the same time, no explanation of mainline decline would be necessary. However, the U.S. population grew throughout the 1960s and continues to grow today; and among American denominational families it was only the mainline that began to decline. Almost all conservative denominations continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace. The most simplistic explanation offered for decline is the status quo position of these groups. Mainline denominations are typically characterized as ecumenical, ‘‘liberal,’’ and ‘‘weak.’’ They lack the religious commitment, sense of moral rightness, and evangelical zeal of conservative denominations and are therefore at a strategic disadvantage in the American religious economy. This is the explanation used by Dean Kelley (1972) in Why

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Conservative Churches Are Growing. In more recent years, the so-called ‘‘strictness’’ thesis has been elaborated by Laurence Iannaccone, Roger Finke, Rodney Stark, and other proponents of rational choice economic modeling.16 There is some face validity to the Dean Kelley/rational choice explanation: Polls show that members of mainline churches are somewhat less religiously active than their evangelical counterparts, mainline denominations start proportionately fewer churches, and mainline congregations put less emphasis on prayer and devotionalism than do congregations in conservative denominations.17 However, these differences in religious actions did not suddenly appear in 1965, nor did the growth differential between mainline and conservative denominations. Conservative denominations were growing faster than mainline denominations throughout the post-World War II baby boom era. Furthermore, the growth rate of conservative denominations began to decline at the same time as that of the mainline. The difference was that conservative membership growth only slowed, whereas for mainline bodies the growth rate decreased to the point of actual membership loss by the mid-1960s. Mainline denominations grew substantially in the 1940s and 1950s. In Figure 1.2 it can be seen that the United Methodist growth rate was relatively modest from the mid-1940s to 1964, before experiencing a slight downturn in 1965. The growth rate dropped greatly in 1966, to the point of minimal decline ( 0.15 percent), before becoming a serious loss in 1967 ( 0.65 percent), and reaching its worst level in 1971 ( 1.66 percent).

Figure 1.2. Yearly percentage change in denominational membership, 1946–2003.

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Other mainline denominations grew much faster than the United Methodist Church on average. These bodies experienced growth exceeding 2 percent each year from 1946 to 1959. However, their aggregate growth rate dropped to 1.56 percent in 1960 and plunged in subsequent years, reaching +0.04 percent in 1966 and actual decline the year after ( 0.23 percent). The decline reached its most severe levels in 1972 and 1973 when mainline denominations lost 1.93 percent and 1.97 percent of their members, respectively. After the worst years of the early 1970s, mainline declines moderated, and as seen in Figure 1.2, the rate of decline essentially converged with the United Methodist trend line. Mainline declines fluctuated between 0.5 percent and 1.0 percent from the late 1970s through 2000. The pattern for conservative denominations is similar to the mainline in some ways but clearly different in others. Figure 1.2 includes Southern Baptists on one line and seventeen other conservative bodies on another. Data are not available for all seventeen conservative groups prior to 1949, so that line begins in 1950. Conservative denominations were clearly growing much faster than mainline denominations in the 1950s. In 1950 the growth rate for Southern Baptist and other conservative groups was over 4.5 percent. After several years of extremely rapid growth, the rate of increase for Southern Baptists and other conservatives started to slow down. The drop was less precipitous than for the mainline, however, and during the mid-1970s conservative growth averaged between 1 and 2 percent each year. But unlike the mainline, the decline in the growth rate did not bottom out in the 1970s. Instead, the decline in the rate of growth continued, reaching its lowest point for conservative Protestants in 1988 and for Southern Baptists in 1996. The primary similarity among all denominations in the chart is that decline in the growth rate began at nearly the same time. The main difference is that the decline for the conservatives was less severe and it continued for a longer period than for the mainline.

THE POSTWAR RELIGIOUS REVIVAL The surge in church growth in the late 1940s and the 1950s is universally attributed to the postwar baby boom, suburbanization, and the pent-up demand for new churches and new church facilities among a population who valued the church as part of traditional nuclear family life. According to Milton Coalter, John Mulder, and Louis Weeks in their assessment of the Presbyterian Church during this period, ‘‘the expansion of membership in American Presbyterianism and mainstream Protestant denominations during the 1950s is largely the story of parents seeking out religious instruction for their children and church membership for themselves.’’18 As people returned from military service they married and began to have children. The year 1946 saw the highest number of marriages to date in the United States and the highest marriage rate ever recorded (before or since).19 The second highest marriage rate was 1947. Dramatic increase in

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the birth rate reversed a century-long pattern of slow decline, and the rise was not only as a result of war returnees. The birth rate also rose among older age cohorts, greatly increasing the proportion of married-couple households with children in the home. ‘‘Births were bunched together in the 1950s,’’ Dianne Crispell notes, because women ‘‘had children soon after marriage and spaced their children close together.’’20 By 1960, almost half of all American households consisted of families with children under 18 years of age.21 Household homogeneity was compounded by the rise of the suburbs. Although suburbanization was not a new phenomenon, ‘‘the mass exodus of middle-class people from cities’’ in the 1950s created suburbs that were qualitatively different from earlier eras.22 Millions of Americans in the same stage of the family life cycle now lived in close proximity to one another. A suburban culture was a byproduct. Families with children were normative and pervasive, and part of normal family life was the church. Sydney Ahlstrom notes that ‘‘being a church member and speaking favorably of religion became a means of affirming the ÔAmerican way of life.Õ ’’23 People flocked to the churches, and the denominations started new churches in the suburbs in order to reach people where they lived. New church development rates soared during the 1950s, and churches expanded facilities to accommodate families with children.24 Ahlstrom reports that postwar church construction increased from $26 million to $409 million between 1945 and 1950, and continued to rise throughout the 1950s.25 According to Robert Wuthnow, ‘‘the 1950s were the apex of a century and a half of church construction and membership drives.’’26 Growth in the 1950s, as noted by Coalter, Mulder, and Weeks, was not just a matter of enrolling the children of church members.27 If this had been the case, mainline growth could not have exceeded that of the population. Since it did, the inescapable conclusion is that formerly unchurched persons joined churches along with their children and that the overall proportion of the unchurched declined during this time.28 Data on baptisms support this conclusion: Even though child baptisms were extremely high, one-quarter of new Episcopal baptisms in 1950 were adults. From 1947 to 1952, the Presbyterian Church (USA) ‘‘received more on profession of faith and had more net gains than in the previous 20 years combined.’’29 Other mainline denominations saw similar gains.30 Throughout the 1950s, the birth rate remained high, and youth and young adults remained active in the many church-related activities provided for them.31 As a result, it is likely that church affiliation in the United States reached its highest point ever in the mid-to-late 1950s.32 In summary, during the 1950s the U.S. population was growing rapidly because of the baby boom. Unprecedented numbers of churched and formerly unchurched nuclear families flocked to mainline and conservative Protestant churches. Denominations followed the population to the suburbs and expanded family-friendly programs and facilities. Going to the church ‘‘of your choice’’ was normative and the proportion of churched Americans increased.

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Figure 1.3. Raw U.S. birth rate and mainline membership change, 1944–2003.

Given that church growth of the 1950s is attributed largely to the baby boom, it is perhaps odd that the end of rapid growth in the 1960s is not typically attributed to the decline in the birth rate. However, if we superimpose a graph showing mainline membership change (all mainline bodies combined) onto a graph showing the raw birth rate, it can be seen that the trend line is very similar (see Figure 1.3). There is a strong association between the mainline growth rate and the birth rate. In fact, the correlation between the data in these two graph lines is .93 and increases to .94 if the white birth rate is used. Squaring these correlations indicates that 88 percent of the variation in the rate of mainline membership change can be explained by reference to the white birth rate. So either the birth rate is driving membership trends among the mainline or some other variable is driving both trends.

INTERPRETING THE 1960s and 1970s Although the churches were still growing, ‘‘during 1958 and 1959 . . . discerning observers began talking about the postwar revival in the past tense (and) by 1960 this view was generally accepted.’’33 Indeed, according to Margaret Bendroth, ‘‘by the late 1950s, even the most enthusiastic supporters of the Christian Faith and Life Program [a Presbyterian program] were forced to admit that it was foundering, largely because of indifferent and inconsistent support from parents.’’34 Something changed in American society during the late 1950s and early 1960s that disproportionately affected the growth rates of mainline denominations, causing them not only to lose population share but also members, even as the overall population was growing.

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The 1960s and 1970s were not like the 1950s. The familial conformity, conservatism, and traditionalism of the immediate postwar period gave way to the individualism, social experimentation, and anti-institutionalism of the 1960s and 1970s. This cultural sea-change, moreover, was not restricted to the United States. ‘‘It crossed international boundaries and profoundly affected (the postwar generation)’’ according to Wade Clark Roof, Jackson Carroll, and David Roozen.35 Not only did values change among the general population (and particularly among youth) regarding sex and family, birth control, ideal family size, and civil liberties but denominational priorities also shifted. To a large extent more conservative groups were insulated by their social location in the South and among less well-educated segments of the U.S. population, but the mainline denominations were greatly affected. According to Roozen, Carroll, and Roof, ‘‘During the 1960s and early 1970s the national denominational structures of mainline Protestantism gained a strong identity for universalizing notions of ecumenism and social justice, but at the cost of a weakened sense of personal spirituality, a weakened connection to the localism and voluntarism of their congregations, and significant decreases in membership.’’36 These authors essentially blame mainline church decline on the directions that the denominations took following the 1950s. Other social observers make similar statements regarding the change in denominational priorities from education (including family programs) and evangelism to ‘‘discussions of racism, war, and sexual ethics.’’37 In a twist on this thesis, Ahlstrom claims that the churches ‘‘muffed their chance’’ in the 1950s by sacrificing theological substance in favor of growth, leaving ‘‘both clergy and laity demoralized and confused’’ by the ‘‘harsh new social and spiritual realities of the 1960s.’’38 Dean Kelley’s influential book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, also places the blame on mainline denominations, suggesting that it is in their nature to ‘‘diminish in number’’ while more conservative churches ‘‘will continue to increase.’’39 In American Mainline Religion, Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney indicate that ‘‘for the most part, Kelley’s interpretation holds’’ even though they find his interpretation of why the mainline stopped growing in the 1960s ‘‘unconvincing.’’40 Essentially, Kelley makes a descriptive point that mainline churches are declining and conservative churches are growing. This point is obvious, and it does not explain why mainline churches stopped growing. But Kelley does make an analytic point as well, namely that liberal churches decline because they are weak and that conservative churches grow because they are strong. This point is less obvious, yet it too fails to be helpful because it cannot explain how the growth equation changed from the 1950s to the 1970s. The descriptive side of the Kelley thesis, namely that conservative churches were growing and mainline churches were declining, led to the mistaken assumption of a conservative membership resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney suggest that a conservative resurgence occurred after the 1960s because ‘‘rigid and demanding beliefs, traditional values, certainty, absolutist moral

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teachings—all seemed to fill the needs of the times . . . they offered a clear alternative to secular and diffusely religious points of view.’’41 Martin Marty also seems to accept a resurgence explanation: ‘‘between 1965 and 1975 the new Evangelicals and many of the Fundamentalists experienced a new resurgence while the Mainline churches suffered setbacks.’’42 Assumptions of conservative resurgence also support the more recent work of Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, and Laurence Iannaccone on strictness and denominational growth.43 Statistically, however, there was no conservative resurgence during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, as Figure 1.2 shows, conservative denominations grew much more slowly during this period. There may have been resurgence in terms of conservative visibility but there certainly was no resurgence in terms of evangelical growth rates. Even though the causes of mainline decline are not completely clear, the consequences of that decline are quite apparent. According to Roof and McKinney, ‘‘having made more accommodations to modernity than any other major religious tradition, liberal Protestantism shows many signs of tired blood: levels of orthodox belief are low, doubt and uncertainty in matters of faith common, knowledge of the Scriptures exceedingly low. A loss of morale and mission shows up in both its public demeanor and its corporate life.’’44 This loss of morale is reflected in the following statement by a mainline church leader: ‘‘Our mainstream churches are not merely in decline; we who have been assigned responsibility to be leaders are frightened. We are huddled in dismay. We have a paralysis of mind and heart. We are dedicated to our tasks, but we have found that nothing we urge our people to do is curbing the stubborn decline of our membership, our ministry, and our cultural influence.’’45 Clearly, certain changes were occurring in American society in the late 1950s and beyond that impacted the constituency of mainline churches. None of these changes helped the churches grow, and some of the reactions made by the mainline churches undoubtedly exacerbated declines.

BIRTH RATES AND MAINLINE AFFILIATION: EVIDENCE FROM SOCIAL SURVEYS Although most explanations for mainline decline since the 1960s stressed what mainline denominations did (or failed to do) or some combination of denominational action/inaction and social change, more recent research emphasizes the ‘‘demographic imperative,’’ suggesting that birth rates alone explain most of the decline in mainline constituency vis a vis the conservative Protestant sector.46 According to Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley, and Melissa Wilde, ‘‘the shift of the Protestant population away from the mainline toward conservative denominations is overwhelmingly due to conservatives’ higher fertility, which accounts for 70 percent of the change.’’47 The remainder of the shift, they say, is the result of ‘‘the declining propensity of conservatives to convert to the mainline.’’ So if these authors are correct, mainline Protestants have no need to wring their hands over their failure to keep pace with conservatives, other than

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perhaps that they became somewhat less attractive to potential converts from conservative denominations. The predominant force driving the membership trend is apparently the birth rate. Simply put, conservative Protestants have higher birth rates and mainline Protestants have lower birth rates, and even though neither denominational family has a pro- or anti-natal policy, birth rates largely determine their relative success. The analysis by Hout and his associates helps explain a great deal about mainline trends, but it is not definitive. The study deals with affiliation (survey-based denominational identification) rather than membership, and it also does not adequately explain the rapid rise in mainline membership during the 1950s, the rapid downturn in membership during the 1970s, and the numerical extent of mainline decline. The vast majority of Americans have some kind of a religious identity, but not all of those who identify are on the membership rolls of a denomination. So, for example, the 2.0 percent of Americans who identified with the Episcopal Church in 2000 should have translated into 5.6 million members. However, only 2.3 million persons were actually members of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, and other Episcopal/Anglican bodies accounted for not more than a hundred thousand or so additional Episcopalians. Thus, considerably less than half of Episcopal affiliates are actually members of Episcopal churches. The same situation exists for other denominations, and although there is some relationship between denominational affiliation and membership, the two are clearly not the same. The second problem is that this demographic model suggests that the growth differential between mainline and conservative denominations was continuous and strong from 1900 through the late-1940s. Thereafter, the effect decreased somewhat and leveled off. As such, the model accurately predicts the long-term decline in the proportion of Americans with a mainline identity, but it does not explain the 1950s’ upturn or the 1960s’ downturn. Finally, the magnitude of the decline in the birth rate among mainline Protestants is not sufficient to explain the magnitude of mainline loss, particularly in the 1970s. The correlation between the mainline birth rate and proportional mainline identity is strong, of course, but it may be a situation where ‘‘correlation does not necessarily mean causation.’’ That is, broader social forces may be influencing both the birth rate and mainline decline. If birth rates were the sole determining factor, the same basic downward trend in membership would still be apparent, but it would not be as severe as the actual pattern observed from the late 1960s to the present. Nevertheless, the analysis by Hout and his team has appropriately focused attention on two facts: Conservative Protestant religious bodies in the United States were growing faster than the mainline before, during, and after the ‘‘religious revival’’ of the 1950s, and more attention should be paid to changes in the potential mainline constituency (persons with a mainline identity) than to continuing differences in religiosity or irreligiosity of persons who affiliate with a mainline and conservative denomination. Mainline Protestants attend church less frequently than

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conservative Protestants. There has been no change, however, in the proportion of mainline Protestants who say they attend church every week, at least from the early 1970s to 2002. There also has been no rise in the rate of worship attendance among conservatives. By these measures of religious involvement, mainline Protestants are not attending church less and conservative Protestants are not attending church more. Rather, what has changed is the proportion of the population who claim a mainline Protestant identity and the proportion of those who say they were reared mainline Protestant. Both proportions declined nine percentage points from the early 1970s to 2002. It is also important to note that the proportion of conservative Protestants has not increased in absolute terms among the general population of the United States. Nevertheless, looking only at Protestants, the conservative proportion has increased relative to the mainline. Switching from a mainline to a conservative Protestant identity is and has been a minor phenomenon in American religion, despite anecdotal stories about sons or daughters of mainline parents who find Jesus in a dramatic way in conservative churches. Historically, conservative to mainline switching has been much more prevalent than mainline to conservative switching, but in recent decades conservative to mainline switching has declined. The predominant changes in mainline religious identity are decreasing rates of mainline affiliation and a more recent tendency (from the late 1980s to the present) for mainline persons to switch out of religion altogether, thus decreasing the retention rate of the mainline from 74 percent in the mid-1980s to 67 percent from the late 1990s through 2002. And the younger the age cohort, the more likely is a person reared in the mainline to switch out of religion altogether. In addition, a small part of the explanation for the reduction in mainline identification is ‘‘selective remembering’’ on the part of persons reared in the mainline. Persons in the oldest age cohort (persons born prior to 1920) in the aggregated polls used in the Hout study are more likely to say they are mainline and were reared mainline in recent surveys than they were in surveys administered during the 1970s. Conversely, the cohorts born 1934–1945 and 1946–1959 are slightly less likely to say they were reared in mainline denominations today than they were in the mid-1970s. Some reinterpretation of one’s childhood experience has occurred among the World War II generation and older baby boomers, thus decreasing the proportion of more recent age cohorts who say they were reared in the mainline. In summary, survey data show that there has been a rather large decrease in the proportion of persons who currently claim a mainline identity and in the proportion of persons who say they were reared in a mainline denomination. Part of that decrease is a result of recent declines in persons switching into the mainline. Another part has been increasing percentages switching to no religion (particularly among younger cohorts). Still another part has been selective remembering on the part of more recent age cohorts. However, the most important trend has been that fewer and fewer persons in each successive age cohort were reared in a

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mainline denomination. This can be explained by lower mainline birth rates and, perhaps, by a decreased emphasis on (or the diminished effectiveness of) mainline Protestant acculturation.

BIRTH RATES AND MAINLINE MEMBERSHIP: EVIDENCE FROM DENOMINATIONAL RECORDS Denominational identification is not the same thing as membership or participation. Even though it is clear that conservative growth generally exceeded mainline growth throughout the twentieth century, birth rate data and rates of denominational identification cannot explain the religious revival of the 1950s or the actual declines in membership that began in the 1960s and accelerated during the 1970s to the present. The demographic model noted above predicted continuous declines in mainline affiliation from the late 1940s through the 1950s based on birth rate differentials between mainline and conservative affiliates. However, the actual pattern was not continuous. The decline in mainline identification relative to conservative denominations actually stabilized during this period.48 Denominational membership (rather than affiliation) statistics during the late 1940s and the 1950s reveal an even more dramatic departure from previous trends. Dean Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald Luidens show that the Presbyterian Church (USA) was growing slower than the general population from 1924 to 1935.49 From 1935 to 1945 the Presbyterian Church (USA) grew at about the same rate as the general population, maintaining the same percentage (2.0 percent of the U.S. population was counted as members). Thereafter, until around 1960, Presbyterian growth greatly exceeded that of the national population. The reason for this rise was that the Presbyterian infant baptism rate was much higher than the national birth rate from 1949 to 1961. From 1953 to 1956 the Presbyterian infant baptism rate was over 40 percent higher than the birth rate for white Americans. The baptism rate then declined steadily for the next decade and a half before reaching the point in 1970 where the infant baptism rate for Presbyterians was lower than the birth rate for white Americans. The year 1955 marked when the infant baptism rate exceeded the birth rate by the greatest margin (45.8 percent higher), and it also was the year that the number of adult baptisms (51,840) was highest.50 The Presbyterian Church grew slower than the national population from 1924 to 1935, and slightly faster than the national population from 1945 to 1950, but greatly exceeded the growth of the national population from 1950 to 1960 (+36 percent vs. +18 percent). Yet from 1960 to 1970 the Presbyterian Church actually lost 5 percent of its membership, although the population continued to grow at 13 percent for the decade. Trends for the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations are essentially the same: slower growth than the population before the baby boom, growth faster than the population during the late 1940s and

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throughout the 1950s, and then slower growth during the early 1960s, followed by actual declines in membership in the mid-1960s, with declines accelerating in the early 1970s. Why the mainline fared better than would be expected, given population trends (including the birth rate) during the 1940s and 1950s, has been considered above. So the question is, ‘‘Why did the mainline fare so much worse than would be expected given population trends in the 1960s and beyond?’’ The key to understanding what happened to the mainline during the 1950s and beyond is found among the younger age cohorts. Survey data on church participation show that there was no generation gap during the 1950s.51 Young adults (21–30), median adults (31–55), and older adults (over 55) attended church at nearly the same rate in the mid-1950s. Thereafter, from the mid-1960s to the present, a gap appeared whereby the attendance rate for young adults was lower than for any other age group and was highest for older adults, with median adults in the middle. What this meant in the 1950s was that young parents, who were unusually fertile during this decade, were more likely to be found in church along with their large numbers of offspring. After the 1950s, attendance among young adults dropped and these same young adults began having fewer children. The baptism rate declined greatly as a result, and denominational death rates began to rise as the average age of membership increased. Survey data, even though employing affiliation rather than membership, also show substantial age-related change. Using combined national polls from the National Opinion Research Center, by the mid-1970s the proportion of active (attending church once a week or more) mainline Protestants age 18–32 was already lower than for moderate and conservative Protestants, and the percentage of active mainline Protestants age 66+ was higher than for other Protestant groups. Yet from the mid-1970s to 2002, the proportion of younger active affiliates dropped an additional 8 percentage points and the proportion of elderly active affiliates rose a further 14 percentage points.52 The only available time series data dealing with age for actual church participants are from the United Church of Christ (UCC), a liberal mainline denomination. The first study was conducted in the mid-1970s and included surveys from nearly 200,000 worshippers attending services in over 2,000 UCC churches. The second study, conducted in the spring of 2002 included 4,102 worshippers in a random national sample of 227 UCC congregations. In both cases, survey forms were distributed to all worshippers age 15+ in the participating congregation at all worship services. As was seen in the survey data, a disparity between the church population and the general population already existed by the mid-1970s. In the UCC, the proportion of attendees age 15 to 34 was only 24 percent, as compared to 45 percent of the national population. On the other end of the age spectrum, 23 percent of UCC attendees were age 65 or older, as compared to 14 percent in the general population. Commenting on this situation, William McKinney concludes, ‘‘the children of the baby boom represent a lost generation for the United Church of Christ . . . our

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membership is aging and is producing fewer children than in earlier generations.’’53 As dire as the situation was in the mid-1970s, it was much worse by 2002. Attendees age 15 to 34 declined from 24 percent in the mid-1970s to only 10 percent in 2002 and attendees age 65 or older grew from 23 percent in the mid-1970s to 43 percent of all UCC attendees in 2002. The large age disparity between UCC attendees age 15–34 and the U.S. population widened slightly from 21 percentage points to 25 percentage points between the mid-1970s and 2002, whereas the disparity between UCC attendees age 65+ and the U.S. population grew enormously, increasing from 9 percentage points to over 27 percentage points. There are, unfortunately, no similar studies of attendees in the 1950s or 1960s. However, we know that from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s the proportion of UCC members with children under 18 in the home dropped from 66 percent to only 32 percent—a precipitous decline.54 Persons born during the baby boom years, which should have composed the largest share of mainline members in the 1970s, were in fact a minority compared to older generations even at that time. Many dropped out and did not return to the church, although most probably maintained a church identity. Furthermore, whether they returned to the church or not, they had fewer children on average than did their parents. Since older generations remained in the church, the consequence was a steady increase in the proportion of elderly church participants, from the 1970s through the present. In the 2002 UCC sample, 43 percent of active attendees were retirement age or older. In national surveys dealing with active mainline affiliates, the percentage of elderly mainline affiliates is also quite high: 40 percent. Over half (57 percent) of mainline churches reported that ‘‘many or most’’ of their active members are age 60 or older, as compared to 28 percent of conservative churches.55 With fewer members in childbearing years and a high rate of disaffiliation among the children of the mainline, the membership problems have continued to worsen, generation by generation since the 1950s.

BIRTH RATES VERSUS OTHER FACTORS The large correlation between the birth rate and mainline membership change results from the fact that when the birth rate was high, membership growth was also very high. Conversely, when the birth rate dropped, membership growth turned into decline. However, the relationship could not have been completely causal, in that all of the growth was caused by the addition of x number of children being born to mainline families and decline by not enough births to offset deaths among mainline members. Rather, membership growth greatly exceeded what would be expected by the increase in the birth rate, and decline greatly exceeded what would be expected by the decrease in the birth rate. Still, the correlation was very strong because the rates co-varied. So although an explanation for mainline growth in the 1950s and decline must include the birth rate, the story

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is not just the birth rate but also social and cultural forces that influenced the birth rate and patterns of mainline church involvement. In the 1950s the birth rate rose to a very high level. Mainline membership would have grown during this period even without additions from persons who were previously uninvolved. However, the same cultural trends that drove the rise in the birth rate also ‘‘drove’’ people to church. That is, the nuclear family ideal led to large numbers of births and the meshing of the church with that ideal led to more families attending church, even among the previously unchurched. The churches responded to the growth by building new suburban churches and with familyoriented programming, actions that helped the churches grow even more. As the children of the early baby boom began to approach their teen years and as household structure began to shift from the 1950s nuclear family norm, it became more difficult for churches to hold onto the families that they had attracted and involved in the 1940s and 1950s. Not only did their 1950s constituency age and change in household structure, but no commensurately large and fertile nuclear family cohort replaced them. From 1960 to 1990, the proportion of U.S. households composed of married couples with children declined precipitously from 45.6 percent to 26.3 percent. Divorce rates rose; marriage rates declined; age at first marriage increased; and women had fewer children and went to work.56 According to Carothers, ‘‘By 1975 the typical family of the 1950s sitcom, with two parents, two children, and a nonworking mother, accounted for only 7 percent of all households.’’57 Denominations increasingly competed over (and waxed nostalgic for) a shrinking proportion of American households.58 By 1960 the birth rate was already beginning to decline, although greater drops caused by the national legalization of ‘‘the pill’’ were still several years away. Nevertheless, the climate for the family and the church was beginning to change. As suburbs aged, they stopped growing and became less homogeneous. White churches in those suburbs began having growth problems that were exacerbated in many cities by white flight. The communal joining ethic of the 1950s that supported church involvement was displaced by a more individualistic ethic that was less supportive of church involvement.59 Indeed, the church was actually attacked as being part of the ‘‘system’’ that impeded necessary social changes in society.60 The emergence of the new ethic, along with institutional suspicion, was associated with age, education, and region. Youth and young adults in mainline denominations were most greatly affected. Levels of education in the mainline were higher and these denominations are disproportionately concentrated in regions outside the South. Just as the mainline denominations in the 1950s responded to societal changes by providing new churches and family-oriented programming, the mainline denominations in the 1960s and 1970s responded to societal changes by questioning all that they had done in the 1950s. Books decried the ‘‘suburban captivity of the church,’’ and new church development virtually stopped. Justice concerns displaced Christian education and family programming. Adult Christian education was virtually eliminated in many

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mainline churches, and church school enrollment for children declined faster than overall membership. Meanwhile, conservative denominations either tried to pretend that nothing different was happening in the 1960s and 1970s or attacked the changes that were coming their way, interpreting social change through a premillennial lens that quickened evangelistic zeal and/or capitalizing on white flight through continued suburban church development. So, for instance, even though conservative denominations saw new church development rates drop greatly in the 1960s, their reaction in the 1970s and 1980s was to gear up new church development until new church plants nearly equaled the production of the 1950s.61 The 1980s and 1990s saw birth rates rise somewhat, and the social questioning of the 1960s and 1970s was replaced by acquisitiveness and an emphasis on therapeutic self-expression. The culture remains quite individualistic but not directly antagonistic toward the church. In the case of the Episcopal Church and Unitarian Universalist Association, the spiritual seeking of the 1990s did coincide with numerical growth for a number of years. For the rest of the mainline, however, the severe declines of the 1970s moderated in the 1980s and 1990s, but decline continued nonetheless. They are still plagued by problems associated with increasing age, low rates of birth (and child baptisms), and low rates of retention. In the early 1990s, Penny L. Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway conducted a national study of American Protestants who identified with a mainline or conservative denomination but who no longer belonged to a church and/ or attended regularly. This research confirmed the importance of religious socialization in maintaining church involvement. Mainline ‘‘unchurched’’ Protestants were significantly less likely than their churched counterparts to report that they said grace at home as a child or attended youth programs or church camps. Mainline unchurched respondents were also much more likely to report that their fathers never attended church when they were growing up and much less likely to report that their mothers attended regularly. Although unchurched mainline Protestants were less likely than the churched to hold traditional views of God and the Bible, both churched and unchurched mainline respondents were considerably less orthodox than conservative Protestants.62 Further, unchurched mainline respondents tended to report lower levels of church involvement among their own children than they themselves experienced.63 Indeed, what seems to account for lowered retention among mainline Protestants is childhood religious socialization rather than conservative or liberal theology per se. If this is the case, then, an observed trend for lower levels of church involvement and identification among successive generational cohorts is not surprising. Furthermore, all mainline denominations remain embroiled in controversies and conflicts over social and sexual issues that alienate older and more conservative members, consume a disproportionate amount of time and energy, and lead to the withdrawal of many entire congregations. So the membership problems that would be present anyway, given the demographics and retention trajectory of mainline denominations, are worsened by the loss of disaffected churches and disaffected members. From a

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structural standpoint, mainline denominations seem to lack the creative energy, necessary resources, and/or the simple will to engage in the kinds of new church development, evangelistic outreach, or Christian formation and education that would be required to slow or even stop the membership decline.

MOVING INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s mainline denominations grew much faster than the general population. By the mid-1960s mainline denominations were in decline, even as the population continued to grow. Conservative evangelical denominations did not experience resurgent membership growth during this latter period, but still managed to grow. Given slower rates of mainline growth prior to the postwar revival, the 1950s represent an aberration in a longer-term trend, and to a certain extent, the declines of the 1960s and 1970s represent a return to normalcy as members who joined the church in the familial 1950s drifted away once that era had passed. This does not, however, account for the accelerated pace of that decline. As we have shown, mainline decline after the 1950s can be explained by two primary factors: one, a differentially low birth rate; and two, a differentially poor record of retention (particularly among younger age cohorts). Both are linked to social and cultural changes which directly affect the birth rate and religious socialization and especially impact mainline constituencies. Many of these changes reflected new opportunities for women through the reproductive and equal opportunity revolutions of the 1960s, and all denominations were negatively affected.64 Conservative Protestants witnessed slower growth in the decades that followed while mainline Protestants realized actual membership loss. Nevertheless, equal rights for women and endangered ‘‘family values’’ did become effective wedge issues in the conservative political revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, conservative Protestants gained a measure of social and political clout as well as organizational strength through the political coalitions and parachurch networks of the ‘‘religious right.’’ The response of mainline Protestants was more ambivalent: Although some denominational leaders and younger, well-educated laity openly embraced these changes, the majority took a more tempered approach for fear of alienating older, more traditionalistic constituencies. What became a catalyst for growth among some conservatives was an occasion for indecision and inaction among mainline Protestants. In his recent work, The Transformation of American Religion, Alan Wolfe concludes that the ‘‘culture of no offense’’ that continues to operate in mainline churches reflects a desire to ‘‘hold on to those declining numbers of members they have’’ rather than to attract new members.65 Interpretations of mainline growth and decline that emphasize values or theology confuse correlation and causation. Both mainline and conservative Protestant denominations grew in the 1950s, not because the

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mainline became more conservative, but because both groups capitalized on the baby boom and because the mainline attracted new adult members. It is important to note that conservative Protestant groups were, in fact, growing much faster than the mainline prior to the 1950s, but during that decade mainline denominations nearly equaled them. Afterwards, mainline Protestant denominations returned to their pre-1950s levels before dropping into uncharted territory: unabated decline. Birth rates fell for mainline Protestants and conservatives, but remained higher for conservatives. Because they failed to retain so many of the children born during the baby boom, the mainline effectively lost the children of the boomers. The net result was ever-increasing average age and ever-decreasing numbers of children to pass on the tradition. The issue of retention is more likely related to a decline in religious socialization or a weakening of mainline acculturation than to the particular theological content of their tradition. Declining birth rates are affected by a number of factors including reproductive freedom and choice, the increased availability of and access to higher education, new opportunities for professional careers among women as well as men, improved daycare and more flexible maternity and paternity workplace policies, and heightened lifestyle expectations accompanied by realistic concerns about economic futures. As in other developed nations, the fortunes of organized religion are largely tied to the birth rate, and the birth rate, in turn, is related to similar socioeconomic advances.66 Denominational retention, on the other hand, is primarily related to the strength and effectiveness of socialization processes in the family and in the parent organization. If doctrine and practice are valued and shared, a religious denomination is more likely to grow through new adult recruits, the conversion or confirmation of children, or both. Indeed, during the 1950s mainline denominations did both and they grew disproportionately. From the 1960s onward, they experienced increasing difficulty with both and they declined precipitously. Their values and the extent to which they were supported by the larger culture helped at some points (in the 1950s) and were problematic at others (in the 1960s). Moreover, what mainline denominations did made a positive difference at one time (in the 1950s) and became a decided problem at another point (in the 1960s and 1970s). In the end, the best thesis for explaining church growth and decline is actually an ancient one: Strong churches ‘‘train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray’’ (Proverbs 22:6, NRSV). And growth is accelerated if birth rates and/or adult converts exceed replacement levels.

NOTES 1. See Winthrop S. Hudson, American Protestantism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 2. Ibid. 3. Even though mainline denominations were growing prior to the mid1960s, they were still losing ‘‘market share’’ to more conservative religious bodies,

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owing to a more rapid growth rate among the latter. See Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 4. See Constant H. Jacquet, Jr., ed., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991), as well as other yearly editions of the Yearbook. 5. Dean Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1972); Dean Hoge and David Roozen, eds., Understanding Church Growth and Decline (New York: Pilgrim, 1978). 6. J. Edward Carothers, The Paralysis of Mainline Protestant Leadership (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990), 11, 14; Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks, Vital Signs: The Promise of Mainstream Protestantism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), xii. 7. Hudson, 97. 8. Martin Marty, A Nation of Behavers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 53. 9. Richard Quebedeaux, The Young Evangelicals (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 5. 10. See Finke and Stark and also Phillip E. Hammond, The Dynamics of Religious Organizations: The Extravision of the Sacred and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Harmony Books, 1993), 46. 12. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, Vol. 2. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Image, 1975), 445. 13. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 49; Diane Crispell, ‘‘Myths of the 1950s,’’ American Demographics 14, 8 (1992): 43. 14. General Assembly Missions Council, Membership Trends in the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (New York: General Assembly Missions Council, United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., 1976), 11. 15. Carl Dudley, Where Have All Our People Gone?: New Choices for Old Churches (New York: Pilgrim,1979), 4. 16. See Kelley; Laurence Iannaccone, ‘‘A Formal Model of Church and Sect,’’ American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S241–S268; Finke and Stark; Steven Warner, ‘‘Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Scientific Study of Religion in the United States,’’ American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 1044–93; and Laurence Iannaccone, Daniel V.A. Olson and Rodney Stark, ‘‘Religious Resources and Church Growth,’’ Social Forces 74 (1995): 705–31. 17. Penny L. Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, ‘‘New Church Development and Denominational Growth (1950–1988): Symptom or Cause?’’ in Church and Denominational Growth, ed. David A. Roozen and C. Kirk Hadaway (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 47–86; Data on religious activity are from the NORC General Social Survey: James A. Davis, Tom W. Smith, and Peter V. Marsden. General Social Survey, 1972–2002: [Computer file]. 2nd ICPSR version. (Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center [producer], 2003; Storrs, CT: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut/Ann Arbor, MI: Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributors], 2003). Data on prayer emphasis and devotionalism are from the 2000 Faith Communities Today Survey; see C. Kirk Hadaway, A Report on Episcopal Churches in the United States (New York: Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, 2002), 43.

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18. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks, The Re-Forming Tradition: Presbyterians and Mainline Protestantism (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 1992), 73. 19. See Annie Gottleib, Do You Believe in Magic?: The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (New York: Times Books, 1993), 23, and U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975, 64. 20. Crispell, 41. 21. Penny Long Marler, ‘‘Lost in the Fifties: The Changing Family and the Nostalgic Church,’’ in Work, Family and Faith: New Patterns Among Old Institutions, ed. Nancy Ammerman and Wade Clark Roof (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 23–60. 22. Ibid., 42. 23. Ahlstrom, 447. 24. Marler and Hadaway, 50. 25. Ahlstrom, 448. 26. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 31. 27. See Coalter, Mulder, and Weeks. 28. Margaret L. Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 99. 29. Milton J. Coalter, ‘‘Presbyterian Evangelism: A Case of Parallel Allegiances Diverging,’’ in The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth Century Christian Witness, ed. Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 43. 30. Ruth T. Doyle and Sheila Kelley, ‘‘Comparison of Trends in Ten Denominations, 1950–1975,’’ in Hoge and Roozen, eds., 151. 31. Jackson W. Carroll, ‘‘Understanding Church Growth and Decline,’’ Theology Today 35 (April 1978): 74. 32. Wuthnow, 30; Bendroth, 99. 33. Ahlstrom, 461. 34. Bendroth, 115. 35. Wade Clark Roof, Jackson W. Carroll, and David Roozen, ‘‘Conclusion: The Post-War Generation—Carriers of a New Spirituality,’’ in The Post-War Generation and Establishment Religion: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Wade Clark Roof, Jackson W. Carroll, and David Roozen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 244. 36. David A. Roozen, Jackson W. Carroll, and Wade Clark Roof, ‘‘Fifty Years of Religious Change in the United States,’’ in Roof, Carroll, and Roozen, eds., 70. 37. Bendroth, 115–16. 38. Ahlstrom, 460. 39. See Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. 40. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 20. 41. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, ‘‘Denominational America and the New Religious Pluralism,’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 480 (1985): 23, 30. 42. Marty, 92. 43. See Finke and Stark; Laurence Iannaccone, ‘‘Why Strict Churches are Strong,’’ American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1180–1211; and Iannaccone, Olson, and Stark. 44. Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion, 86.

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45. Carothers, 11. 46. Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley, and Melissa J. Wilde, ‘‘The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change in the United States,’’ American Journal of Sociology 107, 2 (2001): 468–500; Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley, and Melissa J. Wilde, ‘‘Birth Dearth,’’ Christian Century 122, 20 (2005): 24–27. 47. Hout, Greeley, and Wilde, ‘‘Birth Dearth,’’ 25. 48. Ibid, 27. 49. Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 1994), 5. 50. General Assembly Missions Council, 99, 103. 51. David A. Roozen, Church Membership and Participation: Trends, Determinants, and Implications for Policy and Planning (Hartford, CT: Hartford Seminary Foundation, 1978), 26; Warren E. Miller and the National Election Studies, American National Election Studies Cumulative Data File, 1952–1992 [Computer file], 6th release (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies [producer], 1994; Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1991). 52. See Davis, Smith, and Marsden. 53. William McKinney, Population Changes and the Growth and Decline of the United Church of Christ (New York: United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, 1982), 30. 54. Ibid. 55. Hadaway, 16. 56. Marler, 28–31. 57. Carothers, 121. 58. Marler, 34–40. 59. Robert Putnam catalogues rather dramatic postwar membership decline in many ‘‘secondary associations,’’ that is, in social organizations that generate ‘‘dense networks of civic engagement’’ and that ‘‘broaden the participants’ sense of self, developing the ÔIÕ into the Ôwe.Õ ’’ Such groups include labor unions, PTAs, the League of Women Voters, the Red Cross, the Jaycees, the Boy Scouts, and bowling leagues. Although most polls do show a modest decline in rates of church membership over the same period, the self-reports of all mainline denominations in the United States for the last thirty years reveal more serious losses. Robert Putnam, ‘‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,’’ Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65–78. 60. Jeffrey Hadden, The Gathering Storm in the Churches (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). 61. Marler and Hadaway, 50. 62. Penny Long Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, ‘‘Methodists on the Margins: ÔSelf-AuthoringÕ Religious Identity,’’ in Connectionalism: Ecclesiology, Mission and Identity, ed. Russell E. Richey, Dennis M. Campbell, and William B. Lawrence (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1997), 289–316. 63. Penny Long Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, ‘‘Toward a Typology of Protestant Marginal Members,’’ Review of Religious Research 35 (1993): 53–73. 64. Penny Long Marler, ‘‘Religious Change in the West: Watch the Women,’’ Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularization, ed. Kristen Auene (London: Ashgate, forthcoming). 65. Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (New York: Free Press, 2003), 87. 66. Marler, ‘‘Religious Change.’’

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SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Hoge, Dean, Benton Johnson, and Donald Luidens. Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers. Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 1990. Hout, Michael, Andrew Greeley, and Melissa Wilde. ‘‘The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change in the United States.’’ American Journal of Sociology 107, 2 (2001): 468–500. Roozen, David, and C. Kirk Hadaway. Church and Denominational Growth. Nashville, TN: Abindgon, 1993.

CHAPTER 2

Post–Vatican II Catholicism: A New Church for a New Day? Chester Gillis

T

he Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) sent shockwaves of change to every corner of the Roman Catholic Church. Announced unexpectedly by Pope John XXIII after being in office for only a few months, the idea of a universal council met with approval and anticipation by some bishops and cardinals and with hesitation and resistance by others in the hierarchy. John XXIII made it clear that he wanted a council that would address pastoral rather than doctrinal issues in the church. He believed that the time had come to update the church and to open it to the modern world. Many bishops and cardinals believed that it was more than time for the church to consider new ways to make its message and presence relevant, and they rejoiced at the prospects of a council that would consider practices and dispositions ranging from liturgy to the church’s relations with other Christians and other religions. However, there were also those who thought that the church need not and should not change since change might signal discontinuity, resulting in an erosion of tradition. Encouraged by John XXIII’s leadership and vision, the universal church met in council to set a course for the church in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. During the course of four sessions in which bishops, archbishops, and cardinals met in Rome, along with their theological advisors, under the direction of the pope, the council produced sixteen documents that addressed the church’s relationship with the contemporary world. The effects of this council are still being felt today and will likely continue to shape the church for much of the twenty-first century. The very title of this chapter, ‘‘Post–Vatican II Catholicism,’’ suggests that ‘‘pre–Vatican II Catholicism’’ differed from what the church has experienced since 1965. And differ it did. The church had not convened a

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council since Vatican I (1869–1870) and that council dealt with dogma more than pastoral practice. Vatican II made changes in church practices that immediately and directly affected ordinary Catholics, the most obvious of which involved the celebration of the mass. For centuries the church celebrated the mass in Latin with the priest’s back to the congregation. Vatican II’s document on the liturgy changed the language of the mass to the vernacular, instructed that the altar be turned around so that the priest-celebrant could face the people, permitted contemporary forms of music, and invited the laity to participate in the liturgy by responding in English (in the United States) to prayers and to be lectors as well as, eventually, Eucharistic ministers. Lay participation in the liturgy proved to be only one manifestation of increased lay involvement in the church. Parishes created councils that advised pastors on various policies including finances, governance, and worship. Responding to their own vocation given in baptism, the laity emerged from the shadows to take on leadership roles and to participate at almost all levels of church life. In the Roman Catholic Church in America, the period immediately following Vatican II brimmed with hope and promise but proved to have some serious difficulties as well. Chronologically, it coincided with the tumult that characterized the 1960s in America. The sexual revolution, the Vietnam conflict, rock music, recreational drugs, more permissive media, distrust of government and authority, widespread access to higher education, the rise of a consumer culture, the cold war, increased personal freedom, and more, all contributed to a unique era in American history. The church’s opening up to the world meant that a tide of change would sweep through the church as it did society and culture. The effects of Vatican II have not completely subsided as it continues either to inspire or to worry various church observers. Some think that it was simply too much too fast. Others believe that it did not go far enough to change the culture of the church. Some argue that the church needs a new council to revise and extend the reforms of Vatican II. Others hold that the church continues to absorb the changes instituted by that council and that further revisions would not be prudent until all of the changes inaugurated by Vatican II have had a chance to settle. Others would like to repeal some, if not all, of the changes instituted by the council, preferring to return to what they believe to have been the stability and security of the pre–Vatican II church. Within days of his election as pope, Benedict XVI reassured Vatican officials and the faithful that he would continue to carry out the reforms initiated by Vatican II. In Benedict’s first homily after being elected (April 20, 2005), addressed to the cardinals who elected him pope, he stated: Thus, as I prepare myself for the service that is proper to the Successor of Peter, I also wish to confirm my determination to continue to put the Second Vatican Council into practice, following in the footsteps of my predecessors and in faithful continuity with the 2,000-year tradition of the Church. This very year marks the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of the Council (8 December 1965). As the years have passed, the Conciliar Documents

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have lost none of their timeliness; indeed, their teachings are proving particularly relevant to the new situation of the Church and the current globalized society.1

Some interpreted Benedict’s words as a genuine commitment to the vision of Vatican II. Others interpreted them as a way to preempt those who might call for a Vatican III. In either case, the shadow of Vatican II continues to loom large over the current horizon of the church. The council touched so many areas of church life and practice with documents concerning the church, revelation, religious freedom, ecumenism, nonChristian religions, the Eastern Rite, relations with Jews, missions, education, religious liberty, bishops, laity, liturgy, religious life, priestly training, and communications that little was left untouched.

STATISTICALLY SPEAKING So what does the post–Vatican II church in America look like? Statistics tell part of the story but, as sociologists know, statistics require interpretation. In 1965, at the end of Vatican II, American Catholics numbered 45 million. In 2005, they numbered 65 million. Much of the recent growth in the Catholic population comes from the immigrant Hispanic community.2 In 1965, approximately two-thirds of American Catholics attended church weekly. In 2005, that percentage has declined to onethird, with older (pre–Vatican II) Catholics attending more regularly than younger (post–Vatican II) Catholics. In 1965, there were no permanent deacons (since the rite had not yet been reinstituted after centuries of inactivity). In 2005, there are more than 14,000 permanent deacons. In 1965, there were about 550 American parishes without a resident priest. By 2005, that number has risen to more than 3,000, and in many cases multiple parishes are served by one priest. In 1965, America had 58,000 priests. In 2005, America has 42,000. In 1965, 180,000 sisters served the church, while in 2005 there are fewer than 78,000. In 1965, America had 12,000 brothers; it now has 5,000. Today’s average age of 70 for sisters and 62 for priests tells even more of the story. Fewer professed sisters and ordained priests, and an average age above or near retirement, signal difficulties for the church at large as well as for religious orders and dioceses. Seminaries operate below capacity and many orders of religious women have only a handful of postulants in formation. Some orders of nuns will survive because they have novices on other continents, such as Africa and India. However, some orders will simply die because they have no replacements for their aging sisters. The church, of course, should not be exclusively identified with clergy, nuns, and brothers. Nevertheless, these key positions of leadership play an important role in the daily running of the institution. Many of the functions previously carried out exclusively by priests, sisters, and brothers—for example, teaching, ministering to the sick and the poor, supervising youth groups, overseeing parish organizations, and the like—have been assumed by laity, which both engages the laity in responsible work and frees priests

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for sacramental ministry and sisters and brothers for specialized roles. However, a church that relies too heavily on lay leadership and participation can overly tax volunteers (and professionals) and can risk marginalizing priests, sisters, and brothers. The laity, often with clerical assistance, has created a number of post– Vatican II organizations. Some of these supported a more democratic or liberal approach to church life, for example, Dignity (for gay and lesbian Catholics), Corpus (for resigned priests), Women’s Ordination Conference, Call to Action (a lay group advocating further change), and Voice of the Faithful (founded in response to the sexual abuse crisis). Traditional or conservative groups include the following: Catholics United for Faith, Opus Dei, Women for Family and Faith, and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

JOHN PAUL II’S LENGTHY PAPACY The papacy of John Paul II closely rivals Vatican II in importance because his reign was so active and so long—almost twenty-seven years— the third longest in history. Elected in October 1978 at the age of fiftyeight, the first non-Italian pope since the sixteenth century, John Paul followed the brief (thirty-three days) papacy of John Paul I and the immediate post–Vatican II papacy of Paul VI, a pope who saw the Second Vatican Council to its conclusion and guided the church through many changes, some of which he disliked but permitted. Paul VI, a career diplomat, made a commitment to implement the changes inaugurated by Vatican II, but personally lacked the charismatic personality of the pope from Poland. John Paul II took to his role immediately and charmed the crowds with his first public words as pope when, from the balcony of the Vatican where he was first introduced with his chosen papal name, the Polish pope spoke in fluent Italian catching and correcting himself when he said he would ‘‘speak in your, I mean, our language.’’ An actor in his youth, he possessed a stage presence unparalleled in recent papal history. John Paul II brought the papacy to the world. He made more than one hundred foreign trips, each time greeted by world leaders, politicians, cardinals, bishops, priests, brothers and sisters, and, most important, enthusiastic crowds of laity who often waited hours just to get a glimpse of the pontiff. He presided over Eucharistic liturgies in celebrated American venues usually reserved for sporting events and rock concerts: Yankee Stadium in New York; Grant Park in Chicago; Camden Yards in Baltimore. And he filled them. His charisma was so palpable that one easily got the sense that he enjoyed being pope. He also had very definite ideas about what direction the church should take. Clearly, he thought that the reforms instituted by Vatican II had in some cases gone too far, too fast. During the course of his long papacy, John Paul II reigned in experimentation and momentum for change that had swept the church in the decade immediately following the council. He preferred traditional forms of spirituality. Thus, for example, he empowered the conservative movement Opus Dei by favoring it with the unusual status of a personal

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prelature to the pope, allowing it to circumvent the usual authority structures under bishops and report directly to him. Thus, it could operate its own seminaries and ordain priests. In Latin America, he opposed those who advocated liberation theology and appointed bishops who aligned themselves exclusively with his thinking. He confronted American society, claiming that it (along with other Western societies) promoted a culture of death because of its legalization of abortion and capital punishment, efforts to enact laws permitting physician-assisted suicide, and stem-cell research. He opposed same-sex marriage, as well as partner benefits and rights, arguing that they were both unnatural and undermined the family. At the same time, he championed human rights around the world, spoke on behalf of the poor, and, in most cases, opposed war and capital punishment. John Paul II also displayed a deep spirituality that provided an example of holiness for ordinary Catholics to follow. Even those who disagreed with some of his policies admired his piety. Equally comfortable with small groups and with huge throngs, he invited bishops, clergy, and laity to pray with him as he celebrated daily Eucharist in his private chapel at the Vatican. Thus, the world knew him as a man of action and contemplation. John Paul II’s style for governing the church could not be characterized by a single phrase. He did not micromanage the Vatican, preferring that Vatican congregations attend to the daily business of the church. At the same time, he set the tone and agenda for the direction of the church and saw to it that his vision was implemented at all levels of church life. In the early years of his papacy, he listened to bishops’ concerns and tried to understand geographical and cultural differences in the church. In his later years, unity mattered more than particularism, and he steadfastly upheld a universalism that originated in Rome. The conservative direction of John Paul II’s papacy was echoed in a neoconservative movement in American politics and within certain quarters of the church. The growth in numbers and strength of evangelical Protestants in America and their political and social influence during the administration of George W. Bush engendered hope in conservative Catholics that together with evangelicals they could wrest back the social mores of the nation. With a Christian conservative in the White House, they began targeting the judicial and legislative branches in the hope that they could reverse what they perceived to be decades of permissive moral and social laws and judicial rulings. The political reach of the church extends far beyond the Vatican. Even a cursory examination of political activity in the United States reveals that the church, particularly through its bishops, weighs in on numerous social and political issues. It often assumes the role of moral guardian in American society. Making rules and pronouncements designed to bind Catholics, the church also attempts to influence the larger culture by providing moral norms and guidelines, for example, in its marshaling of a well-organized and funded pro-life effort. In practice, some Catholics ignore some of the norms proposed, and some non-Catholics resent the church for ‘‘meddling’’ in political policy and personal life as it attempts to set the moral compass for American society. But moral concerns represent a central element of the church’s mission and teaching.

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Illustrative of John Paul’s concern that religion have a place in public discourse is the pope’s charge to the Honorable Lindy Boggs as Ambassador to the Holy See on December 16, 1997: It would truly be a sad thing if the religious and moral convictions upon which the American experiment was founded could now somehow be considered a danger to free society, such that those who would bring these convictions to bear upon your nation’s public life would be denied a voice in debating and resolving issues of public policy. The original separation of church and state in the United States was certainly not an effort to ban all religious conviction from the public sphere, a kind of banishment of God from civil society.3

No moral issue has divided the Roman Catholic Church in America as much as the controversy about abortion. Even characterizing it as a moral issue is a signal that it should be considered an ethical-moral-religious concern rather than a ‘‘social’’ or ‘‘personal’’ issue, as many political analysts describe it. On this issue the bishops line up staunchly behind the Vatican. Abortion is, at the same time, an intensely private matter and a widely debated public issue. Over this ethical conundrum, private morality and public morality collide in a battle that has divided the nation as well as affected the church. The institutional church, via the hierarchy and the offices of the United States Catholic Conference, attempts to influence public policy; the church joins its protest with the protests of evangelical Christians in an alliance that some call unholy, and individual bishops and priests have made it the focal point of their ministry. The stances on abortion are as divisive as they are decisive. Reacting to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade that legalized abortion, the American bishops issued a ‘‘Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities’’ in 1975 in order to coordinate Catholic efforts to counter the court decision. In 1995, in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II stated that the church’s teaching on abortion is unchanged and unchangeable. . . . This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.4

At the pope’s summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, Italy, John Paul addressed George W. Bush on July 23, 2001, about the right to life, including a warning about stem-cell research: Another area in which political and moral choices have the gravest consequences for the future of civilization concerns the most fundamental of human rights, the right to life itself. Experience is already showing how a tragic coarsening of consciences accompanies the assault on innocent human life in the womb, leading to accommodation and acquiescence in the face of other related evils such as euthanasia, infanticide and, most recently,

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proposals for the creation for research purposes of human embryos, destined to destruction in the process. . . . America can show the world the path to a truly humane future in which man remains the master, not the product, of his technology.5

During the presidential election of 2004 some members of the church hierarchy injected themselves into the political process. John Kerry, the Catholic Democratic candidate for president, came under severe criticism for his support for pro-choice legislation. Like some other politicians before him (for example, New York Governor Mario Cuomo and vicepresidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro), Kerry personally opposed abortion as a Catholic but believed as an elected official that he had an obligation to uphold the law of the land. Hoping to dissuade Catholics from voting for him, some bishops openly condemned Kerry. One example of such action drew both praise and condemnation. On May 1, 2004, in anticipation of the November national elections, Bishop Michael Sheridan of the Diocese of Colorado Springs wrote a pastoral letter to his diocese, ‘‘On the Duties of Catholic Politicians and Voters.’’ The letter stated: When Catholics are elected to public office or when Catholics go to the polls to vote, they take their consciences with them. . . . Anyone who professes the Catholic faith with his lips while at the same time publicly supporting legislation or candidates that defy God’s law makes a mockery of that faith and belies his identity as a Catholic. There must be no confusion in these matters. Any Catholic politicians who advocate for abortion, for illicit stem cell research or for any form of euthanasia ipso facto place themselves outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize their salvation. Any Catholics who vote for candidates who stand for abortion, illicit stem cell research or euthanasia suffer the same fateful consequences. It is for this reason that these Catholics, whether candidates for office or those who would vote for them, may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled with God and the Church in the Sacrament of Penance.6

Some bishops agreed with him, but the majority resisted about instructing Catholics how to vote and about denying communion to politicians. In response to such initiatives by individual bishops, the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops appointed a task force chaired by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., to study the matter. The committee, after consultation with the Vatican, produced an interim report in June 2004. The document encouraged all Catholics to examine their conscience before receiving the Eucharist. With regard to politicians and bishops it states: Given the wide range of circumstances involved in arriving at a prudential judgment on a matter of this seriousness, we recognize that such decisions rest with the individual bishop in accord with the established canonical and pastoral principles. Bishops can legitimately make different judgments on the

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Thus, the document did not interfere with the right of individual bishops to govern their dioceses. At the same time, not wanting the Eucharist to be an instrument of politics, the document recognized that ‘‘[t]he polarizing tendencies of election-year politics can lead to circumstances in which Catholic teaching and sacramental practice can be misused for political ends.’’ The bishops walked a tightrope that balanced the church’s moral position against the separation of church and state.

AMERICAN BISHOPS Bishops, appointed by the pope, know what the Vatican expects of them, namely, leadership and loyalty. Sometimes they find it difficult to exhibit both qualities simultaneously. If they listen to their constituency of American Catholics, they recognize both faithfulness to the core beliefs and dissent from some teachings, particularly those dealing with procreation and sexual ethics. If they enforce Vatican rules, they risk alienating their own Catholics; if they ignore Vatican rules, they risk their appointments. In recent years, the Vatican has been vigilant about appointing bishops who are steadfast loyalists whom Rome can count on to ‘‘keep the faith.’’ In the 1980s, the American bishops addressed a number of sensitive public policy issues. In doing so, they appealed both to the ecclesial community and to the civil community, using arguments constructed from the scriptures and from natural law. By grounding their documents in the Bible, they appealed to revelation that underpins all Christian theology. By employing a natural-law argument, they were being consistent with Catholic theology that has relied on natural-law reasoning since at least the time of Thomas Aquinas. Using natural law, they attempted to influence public opinion and government policy by explicitly using a philosophical argument that did not require that the public (and public officials) share the faith disposition of the bishops. The pastoral letters (‘‘The Challenge of Peace,’’ 1983, and ‘‘Economic Justice for All,’’ 1986) addressed all Americans, not simply Catholics, and were not only bold in content but were also the product of an extraordinarily consultative process. The impetus for the pastorals came from Vatican II and particularly from the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which encouraged the bishops to read the ‘‘signs of the times’’ and to respond to them in ways consistent with the gospel. In the area of war and peace, the bishops’ reading of the times indicated the need for a quest for peace, emphasized the unique destructive powers of nuclear weapons, and underlined the need to curb the escalating arms race. The peace pastoral attempted to analyze the moral issues involved in nuclear warfare and to suggest ways to peace. The church has traditionally defended a just-war theory which allows for warfare under certain conditions. Nuclear war, the

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pastoral argued, no longer fit under this rubric since nuclear weaponry cannot compare with conventional weapons. Nuclear weapons are capable of destroying entire countries in a matter of minutes, and they readily violate all principles of proportionality. It is virtually impossible to contain their destructive effect to exclusively military targets. Thus, ‘‘a limited nuclear war’’ seems an oxymoron. War, in any form, is no longer morally viable in the modern world, according to the bishops. Citing one of Pope John Paul II’s homilies, the document asserts the following: ‘‘Today, the scale and the horror of modern warfare—whether nuclear or not—makes it totally unacceptable as a means of settling differences between nations. War should belong to the tragic past, to history; it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future.’’8 To some lay people, this sounded like a utopian dream. To others, it was the only stance possible in an unstable world in which the weaker nations were likely to suffer at the hands of the powerful. The document is careful to distinguish those who are Christian (and Catholic) from those who ‘‘do not share the same vision of faith,’’ although the document is ultimately intended for everyone regardless of religious commitment. For Catholics, it is an internal authoritative voice; for other Christians, it is a plea for peace based on Christian scripture; for non-Christian America, it is an appeal to rationality and sanity in a time when all sense of reason could evaporate in the heat of nuclear conflict. The committee charged with writing the draft of ‘‘The Challenge of Peace’’ included five bishops headed by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. One of the committee members, Cardinal John O’Connor, held the rank of admiral in the Navy and had served as the bishop for U.S. armed forces. Prior to this document, most church statements were the exclusive product of bishops and perhaps theologians. The committee overseeing this pastoral invited comment from a wide range of constituents who reacted to the drafts, including scientists, government officials, the military, politicians, and ordinary Catholics and non-Catholics. The discussions were open and frank. People within and without the church debated the content. Such collaboration was unprecedented. The entire process took thirty months and required the scrutiny of hundreds of potential amendments. The road to passage was not always a smooth one, however. Some Catholics who were more hawkish disagreed vehemently with the document’s position that first-strike nuclear war cannot be justified under any conditions. In general, conservatives inside and outside the church disagreed with the bishops. Those with a more liberal bent agreed with the document, and those within the church were heartened by the support for the document in circles outside the church. Both sides were surprised and encouraged by the consultative process by which the document was conceived. Despite the widespread consultation in the creation of the pastoral, and the accompanying publicity it received, many Catholics either ignored it or were unwilling to invest themselves in a quest for peace partly because in the 1980s, as American church historian David O’Brien pointed out: ‘‘Episcopal and papal authority is weaker, the church has become more

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voluntary, and few Catholics are familiar with church teaching on social justice and world peace, even fewer with the natural-law tradition on which so many of these teachings are based.’’9 The second major pastoral letter by the American bishops in the 1980s, drafted under the leadership of Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, dealt with the moral questions underlying the American economy. This was an area which appeared to some as beyond not only the competency but the authority of the bishops. After all, bishops are meant to be shepherds and administrators, not economists. The Los Angeles Times reported ‘‘that the letter will make the anti-nuclear statement seem like a ÔSunday-school picnicÕ by comparison.’’10 But the bishops thought that it was time to address economic structures that favor the wealthy, spend more on weapons than welfare, foster a permanent underclass, and distribute economic advantage unevenly. The pastoral ‘‘calls for the establishment of a floor of material well-being on which all can stand’’ and ‘‘calls into question extreme inequalities of income and consumption when so many lack basic necessities.’’ The pastoral ‘‘Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teachings and the U.S. Economy’’ dealt with a wide range of economic issues, principal among them being employment, poverty, food and agriculture, and the U.S. role in a global economy.11 It was published at a time of high unemployment and accompanying hardships. The bishops argued that individuals have a right to work, and that every effort should be made to provide jobs in both government and the private sector. While the pastoral acknowledges that some of the reasons for unemployment—such as population growth and women increasingly entering the work force—are beyond the control of the government or private industry, it is critical of policies such as overseas manufacturing because of lower labor costs, increased defense spending on high-tech weaponry, and lack of job training programs for the unskilled or underskilled worker. The bishops deplored the fact that one in seven Americans now lives below the poverty line in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. This is particularly reprehensible since many of these are children. They also called for an overhaul of the welfare system, not to diminish the assistance given but to improve it. Theologically, the pastoral favored a preferential option for the poor, a tenet that is biblically grounded, found in Vatican II documents, and stressed in many contemporary liberation theologies. The American bishops built on an established tradition. They spoke on similar topics in the past (on unemployment in 1930, on the social order in 1940, and the economy as recently as 1970). However, this was the first time that the bishops, as a body, addressed American society as a whole on this topic and received a spirited public reaction. This prophetic action (in the sense of biblical prophets who brought God’s message to the attention of a sometimes reluctant people) reflected the fact that American Catholics and their episcopal leaders no longer thought it incumbent on them to support American public policy at all costs. The Catholic community in America was no longer an exclusively immigrant one seeking confirmation of its patriotism. It had toed the mark long enough to gain respectability

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and had risen above the suspicion that it was beholden to a foreign power in Rome. These pastorals symbolically represent an American Catholic community come of age. The pastoral on the economy was directed at the American people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. But it addressed issues of economic justice that affect people all over the world. The economy must serve all people, including the poor. The objectives are noble, as noted in the pastoral: ‘‘[S]ociety has a moral obligation to take the necessary steps to ensure that no one among us is hungry, homeless, unemployed, or otherwise denied what is necessary to live with dignity.’’ Some critics of the economic pastoral challenged the church to live by its own words. Joseph A. Pichler, president and chief operating officer of Dillon Companies, wrote the following: The Church must witness its commitment to self-determination and voluntarism through its own actions as employer, educator, and minister. Churchrelated institutions must be a sign to all of managerial behavior that respects the dignity of work and of workers. This entails multiple obligations to: avoid all forms of discrimination based upon race, sex, and other arbitrary dimensions; provide employees with full information regarding their performance and status; recognize the right to collective bargaining; limit restraint placed upon employees to those which are necessary for the effective performance of duties; hear and accommodate the personal needs of employees insofar as they are consistent with the task at hand; and avoid actions that would foreclose the freedom of others to seek self-improvement.12

Economists took exception not to the objectives of the pastoral but to the methods it proposed to achieve those objectives. Some argued that the bishops were naive or misdirected in their proposals to achieve admirable objectives. For example, the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman argued that the means proposed in the pastoral would result in effects diametrically opposed to those the bishops desired.13 Adhering to the tenets of the pastoral would create more unemployment and weaken the economy. The bishops wanted to invest the government with greater authority over economic matters; Friedman saw little hope that the government could correct what it was largely responsible for creating. He wanted to empower the free-market private sector, not the government. Walter Block, senior economist at the Fraser Institute and director of its Centre for the Study of Economics and Religion, was troubled by the bishops’ ‘‘lack of comprehension of the free marketplace.’’14 Carl Christ, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, commented: ‘‘Admirable though the aims of the pastoral letter are, they are sometimes [perhaps deliberately] stated in imprecise terms and hence give little quantitative guidance.’’15 Clearly, some among the professional ranks of economists thought that the bishops ventured beyond their area of expertise in writing such a document. While it may have been true that the bishops were beyond their competency as far as economic theory was concerned, they had not exceeded

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their moral authority. The gospel is clear in its call for justice and its mandate to care for the poor. In lobbying the American people in such a direct and public manner, the bishops were fulfilling their role as prophetic voices. The details of the letter may be subject to legitimate debate and criticism, but the rationale for such a document is unquestionable in Catholic theology.

THE SADDEST CHAPTER IN THE CHURCH’S HISTORY Although another chapter in this volume will address in detail the sexual abuse crisis in the church, it is important to note it here since, clearly, it comprises a significant chapter in the church’s post–Vatican II history. No one knows for certain exactly when sexual abuse by priests began, but everyone knows that it came to light in the 1990s. The abuse had been going on for decades, and the cover-up by bishops, equally as long. As a result of this scandal the Roman Catholic Church in America suffered the most painful, disturbing, and publicly embarrassing chapter in its history. Among the most notorious of cases were those of John Geoghan and Joseph Shanley, in Boston; Rudy Kos, in Dallas; James Porter, in Fall River; and Gilbert Gauthier, in Lafayette. But the abuse touched virtually every diocese in America to some degree. Many of the cases exhibited similar characteristics: an abuser who was himself abused by a priest, multiple victims over many years, negligent supervision, unsuccessful therapy, legal wrangling, the press’s role in exposing the case, prison sentences, dismissal from active ministry or from the priesthood itself, and lawsuits against dioceses with sometimes devastating financial consequences. While no two cases are identical, most exemplify the complexity, the idiocy, and the tragedy of clerical sexual abuse and the institutional church’s mishandling of cases. Unchecked power of the clergy also contributed to the sexual abuse crisis. Because parishioners revere the role of priest, too many victims were intimidated, as well as abused, preventing them from coming forward. To make matters worse, instead of acting in a pastorally sensitive manner, some bishops relied mostly upon lawyers for advice when dealing with victims, further exacerbating their pain and disenfranchisement. So both clergy and bishops abused their power by acting in authoritarian ways. In an attempt to protect themselves and the institution, Rome and the bishops tried to neutralize the sexual abuse crisis through a series of mechanisms that deflected admission of and responsibility for their malfeasance. Many observers believed that John Paul II, by this time visibly affected by the effects of Parkinson’s disease, did not react quickly enough to the crisis in the American church. The slow reaction from Rome may have been a result of the pope’s illness, but it also may have been caused by Rome’s underestimation of the widespread nature of the abuse, its belief that the scandal was created by a hostile press or that self-absorbed Americans had exaggerated conditions in their church. Whatever the reasons

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for not acting swiftly, the growing cry from Boston Catholics (and others) for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, a close confidant of the pope, brought the crisis to papal attention. Cardinal Law met with the pope and offered his resignation, but the pope declined to accept it, preferring that the cardinal remain in office so that he could address and correct the problems in his archdiocese. However, Boston Catholics and a number of the priests from the Archdiocese of Boston completely lost confidence in Cardinal Law to the degree that it became difficult for him to appear in public without protests. Finally, he and the pope recognized that his leadership was no longer viable, prompting the pope to accept Cardinal Law’s resignation on December 13, 2002. In July 2003, his successor, Bishop Sean O’Malley, a Franciscan with a record for cleaning up abuse scandals in the Dioceses of Fall River, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida, became archbishop of Boston. He met with abuse victims, sold diocesan property, and settled outstanding lawsuits. But the damage had been done, and the Archdiocese of Boston suffered financially and morally as the abuse crisis took its toll, eroding the morale of priests and the trust of the laity. Boston may have been the eye of media attention, but it was hardly the only place to be devastated by the abuse. Three dioceses (Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; and Spokane, Washington) filed for bankruptcy. Almost every diocese in the nation faced charges of sexual abuse by priests and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in claims. Bishop Tod Brown of the Diocese of Orange, California, made the largest payout ($120 million), believing that victims deserved an apology from the church that had wronged them and just compensation without a protracted legal battle that served neither the victims nor the church well. Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles, facing more than 500 allegations, employed numerous legal maneuvers to protect the church’s privileged internal communications. The American bishops, under the leadership of the U.S. Conference of Bishops’ Wilton Gregory, were forced to do a great deal of soul-searching, damage control, and apologizing. They devoted their annual meetings in Washington in November 2002 and in Dallas in June 2003 to the crisis, creating detailed policies for dioceses to follow. The bishops established a distinguished panel to oversee the church’s compliance with sexual abuse policies. Bishop Gregory appointed former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating to head the oversight commission. Keating angered many bishops when he openly criticized them for covering up their negligence. The backlash among bishops to Keating’s style of leadership led to his stepping down. The consequences of the abuse scandal defy summarization. It will take years, if not decades, for the church to recover. Horrified, the laity lost trust in the church as an institution, in individual priests and the priesthood, and in the bishops whom they blamed for lack of oversight and action. Priests lost the respect of their people, had to endure harsh (and in some cases unfair) criticism, and suffered a sharp decline in morale. Bishops became the targets of anger from laity and priests, the wider public, and the press. Tragically, the situation resembled Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in which ‘‘all are punished.’’

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RESPECTING BUT NOT ALWAYS FOLLOWING THE CHURCH In the post–Vatican II era, American Catholics continued to profess that they love their church, but they heed its teachings selectively. For numerous reasons they think and act independently. Much has to do with American society and culture, to which Catholics contribute and by which they are affected. Americans are democratic; Catholicism is not. Americans often follow—or even set—trends. Seldom has the church been accused of being trendy. Americans live in a pluralistic society that values tolerance for many views and practices, whereas the church holds moral and dogmatic positions that do not abide tolerance in its beliefs or practices. Americans live in an affluent, developed, and materialistic country. The church promulgates the gospel mandate to identify with the poor. Americans prize their independence. The church ‘‘takes care of’’ its children. Often, Americans are asked to compete and win at work. The church asks them to form a community of forgiveness and compassion. Americans demand reasonable answers to difficult questions from their political leaders. The church asks them to accept some things on faith alone or on the sole basis of the authority vested in the church. Several observers of the church have opined that this distancing from Vatican control had its origins in the reaction to Paul VI’s 1969 encyclical Humanae Vitae, prohibiting, under pain of sin, Catholics from practicing artificial birth control. Catholics might like or dislike liturgical changes, the reintroduction of the permanent diaconate, and contemporary musical instruments instead of the classical organ, and they might or might not be aware of the nuances of theological disputes, but none of these struck at the core of family and economic life the way that banning artificial birth control did. It did not help when American Catholics (and others, worldwide) learned that Paul VI had issued his encyclical against the advice of a committee he had established to study the issue. Not permitting Catholics to limit the size of their families by the use of readily available and safe artificial birth control in an economy that required ever increasing resources to feed, clothe, and educate a child, loosed the ties that bind for the vast majority of the faithful. They refused to be faithful on this issue. Instead, they ignored the teaching against artificial birth control yet continued to practice the faith. Many went through heartwrenching pangs of conscience, not wanting to disobey their church but at the same time not willing to have more children whom they could not afford to raise with sufficient opportunities to succeed in the world. Some tried the church-approved natural family planning method but found it cumbersome and sometimes unreliable. Some still favor this method, but they represent a small minority of American Catholics. Whether or not the birth control teaching was the watershed event that signaled profound disagreement with their church, since that time many American Catholics (on a number of issues, a majority) have elected to think and act contrary to numerous church teachings. Thus, they procure abortions at about the same rate as other Americans; they believe that

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divorced and remarried Catholics should be permitted to receive the Eucharist without going through the legal complexities of what many perceive to be an intrusive process; they favor ordaining women as priests; they are tolerant of same-sex relationships; and they favor capital punishment for the worst criminals. In other words, they remain Catholic but they do not practice their Catholicism on Rome’s terms.

CURRENT ISSUES AND CHALLENGES At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Roman Catholic Church in America faces a number of challenges. The greatest of these is the quest for an adequate number of clergy. Not confined to the United States, this problem became part of the focus of the October 2005 international synod on the Eucharist convened by Benedict XVI in Rome, in which 256 bishops from 118 countries participated. During the course of the synod, bishops discussed the shortage of priests in various parts of the world. While the shortage has caused concern in the United States, it is not nearly as acute as in some other countries. For example, Bishop Lorenzo Voltolini Esti of Honduras reported that his diocese has only one priest for every 16,000 Catholics.16 The shortage leads to spiritual and sacramental concerns. The gift of the Eucharist remains central to Catholic spiritual life. In order to have the Eucharist, the church needs priests who celebrate mass and consecrate the Eucharistic bread and wine for Catholics to receive—no priests, no Eucharist. The synod discussed the critical shortage of priests with some bishops, suggesting that the church reexamine whether the policy requiring priests to remain celibate discourages vocations and contributes to the shortage. However, in the end, the synod, under the direction of Benedict XVI, reaffirmed the celibacy requirement and recommended that the church redouble its recruitment efforts to fill the clerical ranks. Such a tactic would suggest that the vocations shortage may only be a temporary condition and that, guided by prayer and focused recruitment efforts, the ranks of the priesthood will swell again. Of course, only time will tell whether this strategy succeeds. However, if it does not bring men in far greater numbers into the priesthood, the church faces an increased hardship for priests who already show signs of overwork, and the Eucharist in the context of the liturgy will be less available to Catholics. A second issue is the changing face of the American church, with Latino/Latina and Asian American Catholic populations increasing in number who require services in their native languages. Increasingly, in many regions in America, priests must be bilingual to serve their parishioners. In Southern California, for example, the church requires virtually all priests to speak Spanish as well as English. Estimates of the percentage of Hispanic Catholics in the United States vary, but no one disputes that this population is growing faster than the traditional Anglo population.17 According to U.S. census figures, from 1990 to 2003 the Hispanic population grew at a rate of 78 percent (from 22.3 million to 39.9 million),

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while the non-Hispanic population grew at a rate of 11 percent (from 226.4 million to 250.9 million). While Hispanic Americans traditionally have been Catholic, that affiliation can no longer be guaranteed, as a sizable portion elect to join either mainline Protestant churches, or, more commonly, evangelical churches. To what degree Hispanic Catholics desire and are able to assimilate into American Catholic patterns remains to be seen. Some Hispanic Catholics want the church to appropriate the Latino language and habits; others prefer to learn the language and customs of the established community. The role of women in the church presents a third challenge for Catholicism in America. This issue perhaps stirs more passion in America than in some other countries where the roles and rights of women are not as prominent. However, in the United States, where women have been voting for nearly a century, where they serve prominently in national political office, the military, the academy, and the corporate world, to name a few of the roles they have regularly assumed, precluding service in the diaconate and priesthood continues to concern a significant portion of Catholics, both men and women. John Paul II spoke forcefully and quite definitively on theological grounds about the ineligibility of women to serve in these capacities, but the issue remains a concern, increasingly so as the priest shortage worsens. However, despite these and other challenges, American Catholics remain faithful to the central beliefs of the church. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America: ‘‘The [people] of our days are naturally little disposed to believe; but as soon as they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent instinct that urges them unconsciously towards Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church astonish them, but they feel a secret admiration for its discipline, and its great unity attracts them.’’18 Not only has its unity attracted them, it has maintained their interest. American Catholics seem to like the universal character of the church while at the same time objecting to certain practices and beliefs that underlie this unity. Most do not envy their Protestant brothers and sisters, and they do not wish to emulate the divisions that Protestant Christianity displays. Besides, declaring independence from Rome would not resolve all of the issues that differentiate American Catholics from each other. There would still be those who favor and those who oppose women priests and noncelibate clergy, and those who prefer local autonomy as opposed to universal compliance and more rules as opposed to fewer rules. The combination of Vatican II and the cultural revolution in the 1960s in America left Catholics reeling. Perhaps the American canonist James Provost is correct when he reflects that it will take a long time for the church to absorb Vatican II in its entirety. But his prediction that ‘‘[w]e must anticipate a period—perhaps a century or two—of unsettled times’’19 is not very comforting to Americans who are accustomed to change but fear anarchy. Nevertheless, it may take much longer than forty years for the church to implement Vatican II wisely. Or, since the world evolves so

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quickly, it may require a Vatican council every fifty years simply for the church to keep up with cultural and social change. But while one can confidently predict what the hierarchy of the church will look like in the national and international arena in the near future, the local leadership, particularly at the level of the parish, is changing rapidly. Pastoral ministry no longer equals clerical ministry. The male and female lay professional presence has changed the face of institutional Catholicism. To some degree, lay women replace the sisters who toiled before them in various ministries—sisters whose numbers have shrunk so that even a consolidation of orders (an unlikely event) or a narrower focus of ministry will not result in a presence and influence that even approach that of forty years ago. Of course, the laity who take up the mantle of professionally caring for the church, are themselves of all different stripes—some more doctrinally rigid, some wishing to revive the subculture of a previous era, some maneuvering for the day when they can operate without clerical ‘‘interference,’’ some eschewing all politics in the church, all wondering what the future will bring and praying that the Holy Spirit will lead them in the right direction. Increasingly, the laity is taking responsibility within the church. In 1950, 17,000 lay people worked full-time for the church; by 2005, that number grew to 180,000. Lay influence grows daily, and it is bound to have a long-term impact. American Catholics are diverse in their beliefs, practices, and levels of affiliation, loyalty, and identification with the church. As journalist Paul Wilkes accurately observed: ‘‘Indeed, there is more room in Catholicism than a person might imagine. From Bible-quoting fundamentalist Catholics to Catholics who have found a spirituality rooted in Buddhist meditation, from Catholics who celebrate the mass in an uproarious charismatic celebration to those who prefer the quiet dignity of a Tridentine mass, the church is broad enough for all.’’20 In many ways diversity serves the church well. And there is no sign that a homogenous community is on the horizon. The followers of Jesus in the Roman Catholic Church reflect the ways in which he himself served. The director of a soup kitchen is doing Jesus’s work of feeding the hungry. The hospice volunteer or nurse is comforting the dying as Jesus would have them do. The university theologian follows Jesus’s example as a teacher. The protester against capital punishment or abortion emulates Jesus’s cries against injustice and immorality. The inspiring preacher brings Jesus’s parables and narratives to life for a new generation. The religious education teacher suffers the little children to come unto her as Jesus instructed his disciples to allow him to do. The retreat director uncovers a path to God as Jesus did for those willing to listen to him. The liturgical scripture reader proclaims the Word of the Lord. The finance committee chairperson ensures that the resources to do Jesus’s work are sufficient to the task. The parish social life committee members help to create a community that knows each other by name instead of a group of anonymous churchgoers. The youth minister nurtures tomorrow’s leaders with respect for their presence in the church today. The pastor spends himself so that

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others may know the gospel and encounter the living God. The rich talents of many in this diverse community enable the church to serve a wide variety of needs and will enable it to continue to flourish in the twentyfirst century.

NOTES 1. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/pont-messages/ 2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20050420_missa-pro-ecclesia_en.html, accessed October 15, 2005. 2. An accurate account of the Catholic Hispanic population is notoriously difficult to acquire. See Paul Perl, Jennifer Z. Greeley, and Mark M. Gray, ‘‘How Many Hispanics Are Catholic? A Review of Survey Data and Methodology’’ (2004), The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, http://cara.georgetown. edu/Hispanic%Catholics.pdf, accessed September 2, 2005. First-generation Hispanics tend to be Catholic in greater number (nearly 90 percent) than subsequent generations, with third-generation Hispanics’ identification with Catholicism being as low as 62 percent in some surveys. 3. http://www.vatican.va/holy_fatter/john_paul_ii/speeches/1997/december/ docments/hf_jp-ii_spe_19971216_ambassadoe-usa_en.html, accessed August 8, 2005. 4. http://www.vatican.va/edpcs/ENG0141/INDEX.HTM, accessed June 4, 2005. 5. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2001/documents/ hf_jp-ii_spe_20010723_president-bush_en.html, accessed November 16, 2005. 6. http://www.diocs.org/CPC/Corner/pastoralletters_view.cfm?year= 2004&month=May, accessed June 6, 2005. 7. http://www.usccb.org/bishops/catholicsinpoliticallife.shtml, accessed July 2, 2005. 8. The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1983), par. 219. 9. David J. O’Brien, ‘‘American Catholics and American Society,’’ in Philip J. Murnion, ed., Catholics and Nuclear War: A Commentary on the Challenge of Peace, the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on War and Peace (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 26. 10. Quoted in John W. Houck and Oliver T. Williams, eds., Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy: Working Papers for a Bishops’ Pastoral (Washington, DC: University Press of America. 1984), 4. 11. See Douglas Rasmussen and James Sterba, The Catholic Bishops and the Economy: A Debate (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987); Walter Block, The U.S. Bishops and Their Critics: An Economic and Ethical Perspective (Vancouver, BC: Fraser Institute, 1986); and Houck and Williams. 12. Joseph A. Pichler, ‘‘Capitalism and Employment: A Policy Perspective,’’ in Houck and Williams, eds., 67. For a study of the church’s relationship to unions within its own organizations, including schools, hospitals, and other church agencies, see Patrick J. Sullivan, U.S. Catholic Institutions and Labor Unions, 1960– 1980 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985). 13. Milton Friedman, ‘‘Good Ends, Bad Means,’’ in The Catholic Challenge to the American Economy, ed. Thomas M. Gannon (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 99–106. 14. Block, 11.

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15. Carl Christ, ‘‘Unemployment and Macroeconomics,’’ in Gannon, ed., 117. 16. See Ina Fisher, ‘‘Uninvited Guest Turns Up at a Catholic Synod: Issue of Married Priests,’’ New York Times, October 7, 2005. 17. See Perl, Greeley, and Gray. 18. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, book 1, chap. 6 (New York: Vintage, 1945), 30. 19. James Provost, ‘‘The Church in a Post-Council Era of Transition,’’ Origins 26, 42 (April 10, 1997): 691–95. 20. Paul Wilkes, The Good Enough Catholic: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Ballentine, 1996), xx.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Froehle, Bryan T., and Mary L. Gautier. Catholicism USA: A Portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000. Gillis, Chester, ed. The Political Papacy: John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Their Influence. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2006. Gillis, Chester. Roman Catholicism in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Steinfels, Peter. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

CHAPTER 3

Roman Catholicism after the Sex Scandals Paul Lakeland

T

he scandal of clerical sex abuse of minors that broke upon the Catholic church at the beginning of 2002 was the result of events that had been taking place for at least three previous decades, perhaps much longer. In their different ways, the press, the legal profession, Catholic lay persons, and the American public were informed about and became involved in unprecedented fashion in the inner working of the clerical establishment. For Catholics themselves, the scandal of sex abuse led to a new awareness of deeply dysfunctional elements in the church. The result has been a crisis in the church, perhaps the most significant crisis ever to hit the American Catholic church, and arguably the biggest crisis for Catholics around the world since the days of the Protestant Reformation. This crisis continues today, as church leaders, theologians, and ordinary Catholics try to come to terms with its implications for ecclesial structures, for patterns of ministry, and even for the continued long-term viability of the church itself as a major Christian denomination in American life. In order to explain a phenomenon of this magnitude, it will be necessary to go back a little into the recent past to uncover the proximate origins of the scandal, to recount the major events of the year in which the scandal first came to public awareness, to examine what the church has done and tried to do to address the scandal, and to probe some of the major implications for American Catholics.

BACKGROUND TO THE SCANDAL It is impossible to determine when clerical sex abuse of minors became a problem in the Catholic church. There are two principal factors that make such a determination difficult, both stemming from the inevitably

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secretive nature of abusive behavior. The first is that there are no records, obviously, beyond criminal records or diocesan files and these do not stretch back very far. The information that has come to light from so many victims and their families over the past few years of its nature only goes back at most to the 1950s and usually only to the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the accused clergy are dead or old, as are many of the oldest of the abused. Memory cannot carry us much further back than fifty years ago. We can, in consequence, only speculate about the incidence of sexual abuse before the middle of the twentieth century. The second complicating factor is the changing character both of the perception of what constitutes sexual abuse and of the attitudes of Catholic lay people to their rights and responsibilities when incidences of abusive behavior come to their knowledge. Although rape is always rape, what were objectively less serious offences in past decades were often dismissed as inappropriate but harmless. And although abuse is always abuse, in days gone by, the typical Catholic awe of the clergy meant that ordinary lay persons were unwilling, even fearful, to bring abuse to the attention of the ecclesiastical establishment, still less before the legal system. So, moving the clergy on, buying silence, or using victims’ shame to encourage silence were more commonly the ways in which the more egregious forms of abuse were handled, and supposedly minor offences of touching, fondling, and so on were not taken seriously, perhaps not even reported at all. Shame, in particular, may have meant that many instances of more serious forms of abuse also went unreported, and that failure to report contributes to the difficulty of estimating the length and the scope of the problem. It is therefore entirely possible to argue reasonably plausibly that human nature doesn’t change and that we can extrapolate from what we know about the second half of the twentieth century to conclude that this kind of abusive behavior is something we have had as long as the Catholic clergy and Catholic youth have been thrown together—in other words, always. But it is equally possible to construct a view that links the incidences of sexual abuse that have recently come to light to specific cultural forces or trends in the world of the very recent past and so to argue that before these trends came to light, abuse was probably much less of a problem. The first argument could obviously be used by those wishing to pin abuse to clerical celibacy, the second by those who want to explain it as a product of twentieth-century sexual permissiveness. Neither has much hope of ever making the case because the facts of the matter are largely hidden. One of the most important factors in explaining so much about the sex abuse scandal is the privileged and unusual position of Catholic priests in the lives of working-class Catholics in the mid-twentieth century. As is well-known, the mid-century was the high point of Catholic expansion in America. All across the country, but most especially in the Northeast and in the major cities of the industrial Midwest, Catholic parishes and schools flourished, staffed by a plentiful supply of priests and religious sisters. Each parish provided for its members an entire framework for both religious and social life. A typical urban Catholic in 1950 identified the part of the

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city she or he lived in by naming the parish, not the neighborhood or even suburb. Dances, sports leagues, youth clubs, men’s and women’s charitable organizations, educational opportunities, devotional groups of all kinds—all proliferated at the parochial level. In consequence, a Catholic need never and frequently never did step outside the structures of the church for much other than secular employment. The church provided everything else, and the good Catholic participated. In some ways this culture reflected patterns from the old Catholic world in Europe, although in others it was a brilliant re-creation of that world for the express purpose of maintaining Catholic life in what was, or seemed to be, so obviously a Protestant society. In the culture that dominated Catholicism really until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the priest was king, or, more accurately, the pastor was king.1 Every urban parish was run by a pastor who had been appointed by the bishop but who, once appointed, ruled (and that is the correct word) with little or no reference to higher authority. He would have a staff of one or two or more assistant priests and a convent of nuns who took principal responsibility for the education of children in the parochial school, for the maintenance of a clean church, and undoubtedly for many valuable pastoral services to the women of the parish, though in an entirely informal capacity. But the pastor was in charge of everything. Nothing happened in the parish that he was not at least nominally leading. From preaching at the High Mass late on a Sunday morning to counting the money taken in the collection baskets, from decisions about the conduct of the school to decisions about where to get a deal on repaving the playground or the parking lot, he was at the center of everything. Whether personally generous or mean-spirited, intelligent or ignorant, devout or cynical, he was a true prince-bishop in miniature. One of the little team of assistant priests would typically be a newly minted clergyman, fresh from the seminary. Ordained at twenty-three, he might have been in minor and major seminary since the age of fourteen. As low priest on the totem pole in the parish, he was very much an apprentice, though often thrown in at the deep end to sink or swim. He in all probability knew very little about the challenges that pastoral responsibilities might bring to him, but doubtless he was ready to learn. Unlike today, he might expect quite a long term as an assistant with no final assurance that he would become pastor one day of his own parish and its people. In those days of plentiful clergy, the less talented among them— however talent was measured—might expect to serve thirty or more years in the role of assistant at a series of parishes around the diocese and might never attain the coveted role of pastor. He could also reliably expect that his special responsibilities in the parish would be those the others did not especially covet. He was young, so he could be in charge of the youth group or the Boy Scouts. He was full of energy, so he could get up in the middle of the night to attend a sick bed. He was young, so he could teach catechism in the parochial school. He was junior, so he could have the least well-attended mass at the least desirable time on Sunday. Since in those days Catholics were required to fast from midnight on the day

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before receiving Holy Communion, he might expect more than his fair share of the late masses, while the pastor tucked into eggs and bacon in the rectory, served by the housekeeper.2 However easy it might be to caricature this clerical world, now largely a thing of the past, there is no doubt that it made for a very stable world in which the clergy were highly respected, perhaps the most highly respected, members of the Catholic community. While this respect was largely, no doubt, well-deserved and led to all kinds of desirable outcomes for the Catholic laity, the absolute trust that the laity placed in their priests had its potential shadow side. Trust was essential if you were going to confess your darkest secrets or your most shameful little peccadilloes to someone who sat on the other side of the screen in the confessional but who undoubtedly knew who you were. But such a level of trust could and would sometimes turn out to be devastating when the priest was untrustworthy. The very possibility of sex abuse on the scale and of the kind that has been uncovered in the church between 1950 and 1990 depended on exactly the level of trust that was necessary for the efficient functioning of the clergy/laity relationship in the Catholic church. Subsequent investigations have shown that in this world as I have described it, 3 or 4 percent of the clergy were occasionally, if not frequently, engaged in the sexual abuse of children under their charge.3 Some of this happened in boarding schools or orphanages, but most commonly it occurred somehow in rectories and in the children’s homes, on parish property or in motel rooms on trips with Father. Some of it began as little more than a hug or a kiss, but mostly it did not stop there. Fondling led sometimes to mutual masturbation, oral sex, viewing of pornographic images, and even rape. Almost all of it was accompanied by injunctions to silence. Here the power of the priest was at its greatest, not only abusing the child but also doing it in the context of a relationship of trust that enabled the offender to manipulate the victim into terrified or shamed silence. Many of the victims were pre-pubescent children. Some of the victims were female. But the clear majority of the victims were adolescent boys. Some were abused once, some multiple times. Some abusers did so only once; others were serial predators of the worst kind. All of this behavior was entirely reprehensible, but no doubt some of it was objectively more serious, some less so. And the power of the priesthood was employed to ends that made a mockery of the church itself and irreversibly damaged the lives of so many children. How did all this happen? Didn’t people know what was going on? Didn’t abused children at least sometimes inform their parents of what had happened? The evidence uncovered in the last few years suggests that the answers here are ‘‘yes, people did sometimes know’’ and ‘‘yes, children sometimes did speak out.’’ But also, no one did enough, no one spoke out enough, no one took any of this with the seriousness that the situation justified. Shame not only kept children quiet much of the time, but also made parents reluctant to approach the pastor or, still worse, the bishop. Expediency and ‘‘fear of scandal’’ often made pastors and particularly bishops act to hide the problem by reassigning offending priests to

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other parishes where, all too frequently, they became repeat offenders and were reassigned once again. Some were shipped off for treatment, quickly rehabilitated or ‘‘cured’’ and returned to work. Doubtless, people generally were not as aware thirty or forty years ago of the lasting effects of even mild sexual abuse on minors, but it is hard to see that as much of an excuse for the practice of enabling abusers that is the only way one can describe the worst examples of episcopal mismanagement.

THE YEAR THE SCANDAL BROKE: 20024 One evening in January 2002, twenty-five people met at St. John the Evangelist Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to consider the breaking stories of sex abuse whose epicenter seemed to be the Archdiocese of Boston. The organization they formed that day, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF),5 drew more than 4,000 people to its first convention in July that same year, and about one year later could claim some 25,000 members across the Catholic world. The rapid growth of the young movement, certainly unparalleled in the Catholic church and notable in any context, testified to the deep well of anger and hurt that lay people had come to feel about the often shameful treatment of the victims of abuse and the usually tepid response, at best, of bishops called on to address the whole range of problems which the sex abuse scandal was bringing out into the open. The scale of the sex abuse problem among Catholic clergy began to filter into the consciousness of the lay faithful, at least in the Northeast, as early as 1992 when the notorious ex-priest and serial predator James Porter was sentenced to 18–20 years on the 41 counts to which he pleaded guilty in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Over a six-year period he had raped, sodomized, or otherwise abused countless children, male and female. While the offences took place in the neighboring diocese of Fall River, in response to heightened concerns the Archdiocese of Boston developed a dramatically revised pastoral plan the following year to deal with accusations of abuse. It included adding two lay people to the review board, and the victims were to be offered psychological and spiritual counseling. A priest and a nun were named as individuals to whom victims could turn to initiate the process of bringing a complaint before the diocesan tribunal, a step that occasioned some criticism of Cardinal Bernard Law for keeping at least the early stages of any process entirely within ecclesiastical circles. But nevertheless there was some agreement that the procedure was a great improvement on what had preceded it. Even before the 1990s, the American bishops had been aware of the problem of sex abuse among clergy and church workers. From 1982 onwards, especially after the well-publicized case of Fr. Gilbert Gauthe in Louisiana, the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) had begun to consider legal and pastoral issues connected to sex abuse accusations. In 1985 two priests, Michael Peterson, president of the St. Luke Institute, and Thomas Doyle, canon lawyer on the staff of the Apostolic Nunciature, submitted a lengthy report written on their own initiative, titled The

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Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic Clergy: Meeting the Problem in a Comprehensive and Responsible Manner.6 This document essentially laid out what would happen to the reputation of the church if serious steps were not taken to address the problem. Although it is probably accurate to say that the report was not given the attention it deserved, some steps were taken and the so-called ‘‘Five Principles’’ became the cornerstone of the Conference’s policies. These principles addressed victims’ rights (and those of the accused) and spoke to a new concern for the scope and seriousness of the problem. They were the basis for the 1993 restructuring in the Archdiocese of Boston. But neither they nor the many other discussions and debates that the Catholic bishops had over the remainder of the decade seem to have communicated much of a sense of urgency. The sex abuse problems remained the ticking timebomb to which the Peterson-Doyle report had tried to alert the bishops in 1985. In January 2002 the people of Boston were sufficiently alarmed by the growing awareness of the problem of sex abuse that VOTF took off. The genesis of the organization and its continued identity to this day are closely tied to the problem of sex abuse. Its well-publicized ‘‘pillars’’ include support for victims, support for priests of integrity, and ‘‘structural change’’ in the church, by which it means attention to structures of communication and an end to the culture of clericalism which it identifies as a primary enabler of abusing clergy. Although there are many sympathizers among the clergy, the organization is almost entirely lay, led mostly by the ‘‘ordinary faithful’’ of Catholic parishes, with a sprinkling of management professors and other academics from Boston area schools. It includes no bishops among its members and has very few if any academic theologians in its leadership ranks. Despite occasional charges of being a front organization for disaffected liberals with more radical agendas to do with an end to clerical celibacy or even priestly ordination for women, VOTF has kept its head and its dignity as a truly grass-roots cleansing operation. Its ranks include a wide variety of Catholics from every perspective in the church except the far right. What united them in the first place and keeps them together today is their concern for a church where sex abuse will be much less likely than it was in the past, and where ecclesial patterns of control do not place the needs of victims in the lowest place on the list of priorities. On January 10, 2002, the Boston Globe reported Cardinal Law’s apology for the 1984 reassignment of Fr. John Geoghan to a diocesan parish. Geoghan’s was one of the most well-publicized cases of a serial predator. He, it turned out, had been moved frequently, often after relatively brief periods. Accusations of abuse followed him from parish to parish, from his earliest days as a young priest even into his days of retirement. But in January 2002, for all the horror at Geoghan’s behavior and the harm he caused, the spotlight was turned more on the role the church had played in ignoring and even facilitating Geoghan’s career of abuse. The attorney for all 118 victims bringing suit against Geoghan remarked that he had been dealing with the case since 1994, and Cardinal Law

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should surely have known before January 2002 that something was wrong. Law issued a handsome apology, saying that ‘‘in retrospect’’ he regretted decisions made earlier, though at the time he had thought they were the right decisions. He announced a further tightening of rules in the archdiocese, and he added that to his knowledge at this time, there was no priest active in the archdiocese who was ‘‘guilty of sexually abusing a minor.’’ This last remark was going to come back to haunt him, as throughout the months to come the Globe revealed story after story of priest after priest. Either Law was lying, people came to think, or he was asleep on the job. In either case, the Catholics of the archdiocese thought in increasingly large numbers that he had to go. By the end of that turbulent year, in December, Pope John Paul II accepted his resignation. He retired to the obscurity of a convent in Maryland, only to be appointed in 2004 to a prestigious but largely honorary position in Rome. The story of the sex abuse scandal went on beyond 2002 and continues today. It is well-documented, most especially in the incomparable Web archive of the Boston Globe, ‘‘Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church.’’ But in that single year most of the issues emerged, most of the implications began to filter through to various sectors of the church. Lay people were outraged. The American bishops met in a crisis session in Dallas in July, producing their Charter for the Protection of Young People and establishing a National Lay Commission. The Vatican responded by summoning the American cardinals to Rome for a meeting with the pope and other senior leaders. Various Vatican representatives, official and unofficial, spoke of how overblown was the American response to the scandal. Books began to appear, analyzing the events and their implications. Awareness of the problems became much more widespread as victims came forward across the country and diocese after diocese entered into negotiations with victims and their attorneys, often resulting in huge financial settlements. These brought their own set of problems, as bishops wondered how to pay them and ordinary Catholics began to rein in their generosity to dioceses, feeling that their financial support should not be used to pay for a scandal that was of the clergy’s own making. But was it, in fact, as simple as that? Could the scandal be explained simply in terms of abusing priests and bishops who were blind to the scope and the nature of their crimes?

THE UNDERLYING ISSUES The short and even slick response to the questions at the end of the previous paragraph is to say that while the scandal was mostly of clerical making and episcopal enabling, the crisis that emerged went much further and continues to reverberate deep within the foundations of Catholic polity. There is much truth in this assessment. Certainly, the scandal of sex abuse, horrible and tragic as it has been, is but the ‘‘presenting problem’’ for a whole set of deeper issues that speaks to central features of the life of the Catholic church. Sex abuse did not just ‘‘happen.’’ Of course, it happens, and the incidence of sex abuse on the part of Catholic clergy is

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below that in the male population of America as a whole. Four percent is not a large figure, but it is a significant number of people when we remember that these are the ones in whom the church placed the most trust. Attention almost inevitably shifts, then, from the actual abuse and the abusers to an effort to determine which structures failed. After all, the second most important task, after concern for the victims themselves, is to prevent further instances of abuse. One of the striking features of the response to the scandals was the way in which the outrage cut across the usual ideological differences among Catholics. Representatives of both right and left were outraged, not only at the abuse (who wouldn’t be?) but more particularly at the terrible mishandling of the problems evidenced by the American bishops as a whole. Authors as various as Garry Wills on the left and George Weigel on the right took the episcopacy to task for lack of spiritual leadership and the absence of effective management.7 True, they did not always agree about where exactly the bishops had failed, still less about the remedies, but they were of one mind that much of the responsibility for the crisis lay with American church leaders. So the first underlying issue to address is that of the American episcopacy. The majority of cases of abuse uncovered thus far are clustered in the 1960s and 1970s, with a serious falling-off in numbers after about 1985. The bishops who presided over the church while the sex abuse was apparently most rampant were not those who today are accused of inadequate responses to the problems. The earlier generation of bishops was doubtless one of men who were variously holy and variously competent. But they lived in an age when the general public was not attuned to the extent of sex abuse in the population at large and not inclined to understand it to be as serious for either the victims or the perpetrators as we know it to be today. Like the people as a whole, the bishops were not sufficiently aware of the crime of sex abuse and did not take it all that seriously when it was uncovered. Covering up the problem by moving the priest was common. Ignoring the plight of the victim was almost universal. Blaming the victim was not a rare event. Moreover, the bishops of thirty or forty years ago were even more unanswerable for their practices than they are today. Oversight committees within dioceses were largely unknown and the press was far, far more deferential than it is today. Perhaps most significantly, the role of lay people has changed considerably, if not quite as much as some would like to see, and certainly rather more than many bishops are comfortable with. If deference and lack of self-confidence marked the average Catholic of the midtwentieth century, the more educated lay people of today are far more likely to be ready to ask awkward questions and expect accountability, even from their leaders in the faith. A more professional laity is so accustomed to professional standards of conduct in public and working life, and not unreasonably expects at least the same high standards among church personnel. If today’s bishops can be accused of anything, it is surely of having buried their heads in the sand and hoped that the problem would go away.

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The Web site of the American Conference of Catholic Bishops details the many initiatives that the episcopacy took in the twenty or so years before the scandal hit.8 No bishop could claim that he was unaware of the potential dangers to the church from adverse publicity, nor could he say that there was no advice available over what steps to take to reduce the incidence of sex abuse and guard against charges of inattention or incompetence. Incredibly, none of them seems to have been proactive in removing offending clergy. Only when such decisions became unavoidable were steps taken. Often, concern for the good name of the accused was judged more important than attending to the needs of victims. Above all, the bishops seem largely to have employed one criterion for dealing with sex abuse: What can we do to avoid scandal? The almost universal answer seems to have been to try to hide the problem. A prudent leader ought to be expected to see that doing this is only postponing the problem, not addressing it, and that the end result of such conduct is that the scandal, when it eventually breaks, is all the worse. By that standard there were no prudent members of the American Catholic episcopacy. Why did the bishops fail to deal forcefully and intelligently with a problem of such magnitude with potentially disastrous consequences for the public credibility of the church and for the continued allegiance of many of the lay faithful? The bishops are not bad men, nor for the most part are they lazy or cynical or ignorant. Yet character is surely where we have to turn for our answers. It seems as if leadership was and is in short supply in the ranks of the American episcopate. There are certainly a number of bishops who manage their own dioceses forcefully and with integrity, but the demands of national leadership seem to escape most of them. In 2002, the ‘‘year of the scandal,’’ the only real heroes among the episcopate nationally seem to have been Bishop Wilton Gregory, at that time bishop of the diocese of Belleville, Illinois, and president of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, and Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, D.C. The rest were either quiet or in virtual hiding. Cardinal Law was in full retreat from the press and the public eye, and other major figures like Cardinal Edward Egan in New York and Cardinal Roger Mahony in Los Angeles had enough problems of their own to contend with. Two factors help explain the poor performance of the bishops. The first, which goes to the issue of character and lack of leadership, has to do with the process by which bishops are selected. While in principle the complicated system is set up as a meritocracy in which talented priests are placed on a list of potential bishops from which junior appointments are made and more senior appointments come through considered reflection on the part of the American cardinals and at least some of the archbishops, in effect the choices are made by very few people. One or two American cardinals who have particular political influence can all but dictate which names go forward (Cardinal Bernard Law was a particularly notorious example) to the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican representative to the United States. The Nuncio may himself be influential, too, but the short list of names is then transferred to Rome where the Congregation for Bishops scrutinizes it and it eventually makes it to the desk of the pope,

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who can accept the advice offered by any or all of the above, or who can, indeed, appoint anyone he wishes. The conclusion then has to be that the particular composition of the American episcopate is a direct reflection of Vatican intentions, especially during a very long papacy. If they are not good leaders, then that is because they were chosen as part of a deliberate policy to appoint people who, whatever their other virtues, were unlikely to act forcefully unless they were responding to direct Vatican intervention. So, strong statements on abortion or challenges to ‘‘secularism and relativism’’ might be forthcoming, while anticipatory judgment and proactive engagement with matters that might bring public scrutiny upon church personnel would be quite another. The second explanation for the weakness of the bishops is connected to the first, namely, the structure of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the character of their corporate self-understanding. Just as the Vatican during the pontificate of John Paul II has created an American episcopate of weak leaders, whether by accident or design, so it has also undermined the authority of the national bishops’ conference. The logic of this perhaps puzzling strategy is not difficult to see. The papacy of John Paul II was a time of re-centralization of authority and leadership. No one could doubt that the pope himself was a strong leader, and unlike his predecessor Paul VI (1963–1978), he sought to re-impose a strong papacy. One of the steps that had to be taken if he was to be successful was to undercut the ‘‘collegiality’’ of the bishops, an idea that the Second Vatican Council had strongly supported, perhaps as a counterweight to the exclusive attention paid to the authority of the pope in the documents of the First Vatican Council a century earlier. Of course, appointing bishops with poor leadership skills was in itself one way of undercutting the authority of the national conference, but they were also directly challenged by a series of statements from Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith (and now Pope Benedict XVI). To some degree, these steps were motivated by Vatican unhappiness with two major statements of the U.S. bishops on the nuclear arms race (1984) and on the U.S. economy (1986). Not only had both documents been prepared through an extensive process of consultation with the whole church, but their conclusions directly challenged American policy in ways that led conservative American Catholics to criticize the bishops openly and, of course, to complain to the Vatican. Attention to the bishops in its turn brought scrutiny upon what may eventually turn out to have been the biggest contributory factor to the incidence of sexual abuse and the practice of covering it up, namely, the pathological element in clerical culture that goes by the name of ‘‘clericalism.’’ Anyone who knows anything about Catholicism is aware that there is a cultic and cultural divide between clergy and laity like no other Christian denomination. Even the Orthodox church includes many married clergy within its ranks. Though there have been minor modifications in ministries to allow for permanent married deacons and a very small number of convert clergy from other denominations who wish to serve as priests but are married, the overwhelming majority of Catholic clergy

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make a promise to live a celibate life. Their lifestyles even today are thus different in so many ways from those of lay Catholics. Although the gap between them and the laity may have changed considerably since Vatican II, they live within their careers so to speak: They live either in a small group of celibates or, more commonly these days, they live alone, and they exist without the usual structures of accountability that family or domestic life imposes upon lay people. Clerical culture becomes clericalism when the distinctive lifestyle of the few reflects a structure in which all voice, power, and decision making in the church is the private preserve of that clerical culture, and it acts as a closed society within the larger community. This is, of course, exactly the situation in the Roman Catholic Church. No lay person, male or female, has any formal decision-making authority in the church. No lay person, male or female, has any formal role in determining teaching on doctrinal or ethical issues. These are the facts, though it is equally true that many lay people are more experienced and effective leaders than at least some clergy, and many lay people are much better trained in theology and Christian ethics than are most clergy. Clericalism, then, refers to the de facto situation of a privileged elite who make all decisions and hold all positions of major responsibility in the institution. It is a particularly appropriate word to express the sense that this closed society is intent upon maintaining its own position, whether for good reasons or bad.9 One of the principal characteristics of tightly knit groups is that in moments of crisis they close ranks and act to protect themselves and their power within the particular system. This seems to be exactly what has happened in clericalism’s response to the scandal of sex abuse. It is this which explains the unwillingness to face the potential enormity of the crisis. It is this which allowed the bishops to bring upon themselves a much bigger scandal than would have occurred had they acted earlier and more decisively to put their own house in order. It is this which accounts for their long-standing inclination to care more for the good name of the accused priest than for the mental health and spiritual equilibrium of the victim. And although things today are certainly an improvement upon what they were even in 2000, this also explains the continued sluggish response of at least some bishops to the new structures developed by the Bishops’ Conference in Dallas in 2002 to help deal with the scandal. Above all, it explains the continuing reluctance of many bishops to pay due attention to the national oversight body which they themselves established. Is it entirely accidental many bishops do not take seriously a body overwhelmingly composed of lay people?

THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE CHURCH TODAY A crisis of such proportions has inevitably had major consequences for the American Catholic church. However, as the cliche puts it, every crisis is an opportunity, and it would be a mistake to imagine that it is all bad news. There are also some promising developments for the prevention of

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further scandal, for theology, and for the structures of the church. Nevertheless, the jury is still out, and will be out for some time to come, on whether or not the enduring consequences of the crisis will be more on the debit or the credit side of the equation. Good news or bad, however, it seems inevitable that the church will be dramatically changed. The unfortunate consequences of the scandal of sex abuse and the attendant crisis of leadership are mostly easy to see, large in their implications, and demoralizing to large sectors of the church. Trust in the clergy on the part of the lay faithful has been damaged, perhaps irreversibly. While this has not for the most part harmed attitudes to a particular pastor, the clergy as a whole are no longer a class of people deemed automatically trustworthy. Suspicion of the clergy is even stronger among people outside the Catholic church. The perception of moral failing and lack of spiritual leadership among the bishops in particular has led the lay faithful and even the American public to diminished respect for the ethical positions taken by the church, even when these have nothing at all to do with sex abuse. Prominent Catholic lay leaders like Justice Antonin Scalia can say publicly that the moral authority of the Catholic church is compromised. Nationally, an important voice in our cultural debates has become harder to hear. Within the church, religious practice has become harder not easier, and significant numbers of people have left the Catholic church or stopped practicing. Others have stopped contributing financially, especially to bishops’ appeals, even though that has meant that many worthy charitable organizations that depend on church largesse have been severely handicapped. Several dioceses have been forced to declare bankruptcy in the face of huge legal settlements for victims, and more will follow. Lay people have been placed in important positions in the house-cleaning that the church has been engaged in since 2002, and then their actions and conclusions have been second-guessed by bishops not accustomed to taking orders from anyone outside the hierarchical chain of command. To these indubitable effects, some would add that the new regulations and so-called ‘‘zero tolerance’’ policy have led to some priests being unjustly removed from their ministries because of one minor infraction committed many years ago. Others point to the fact that while many priests have been suspended and a few laicized as a result of the scandal, no bishop has yet lost his job because of mismanagement or poor leadership, though one or two have themselves been removed because of credible accusations of sexual impropriety. Efforts to bring an end to the scandal have led to the scapegoating of gay clergy, while almost no attention has been paid to the possible relationship between the clerical lifestyle and the incidence of emotional and sexual immaturity among ministers. Overall, it seems fair to say, this is not an easy time to be a Catholic, particularly not a Catholic priest or bishop. Many more liberal Catholics see this, however, as a chance to make broad and sweeping changes in church structures. And many more conservative Catholics suggest, in contrast, that holding fast to traditional patterns will be the best way to address the sex abuse scandals and, not incidentally, to begin to build a church for the

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future which, purged of liberals, will be smaller but more faithful and therefore more effective. Probably the single most promising outcome of the crisis in the church is the crisis itself. That is to say, beyond the horrors of sex abuse and the redress of victims’ grievances, the crisis of leadership has occasioned a debate of major proportions about the future directions in which the church might go and the structural changes that might be necessary to get there. At the heart of the conversation is the question of the relationship between the roles of lay people and clergy. Although Catholics as a whole tend either to throw up their hands in defeat and walk away from the church or, more commonly, to focus down upon their own parish and the Sunday worship, a significant minority of Catholics have been empowered and emboldened by what they see as the inadequacy of ecclesial responses to the crisis. Before the crisis, issues of clerical celibacy or the clerical lifestyle, of the relationship between lay and ordained ministry, of the place of women in the church, were not raised much in any serious manner outside the ranks of liberal theologians. Today, these questions—and a range of answers to them—have become common subjects of debate among more active Catholics. While there is no clear consensus on all or any of these questions, there is definitely a new sense that change can and perhaps should occur in a body whose faithful have tended in the past to see it in more monolithic terms. A liberal theologian might argue for new attention to the baptismal priesthood or the female diaconate on historical or theological grounds, but there is more impetus to change when the same issues and more come from grassroots Catholics moved simply by the alltoo-evident failure of the old clerical system. The degree to which one approves of the developing inclination of sectors of the laity to insert themselves into processes and issues which Catholics have traditionally left to the clergy is affected by the individual’s theological and perhaps social conservatism. Some on the right of the church are looking for a smaller, more ‘‘faithful’’ church to emerge in the wake of the crisis. To them, the louder voices of the laity represent the clamor of social liberals who are attempting to capitalize on the crisis to further their own agendas. Faithfulness to the gospel, faithfulness to ecclesial discipline, faithfulness to prayer are all advocated by more conservative Catholics, especially bishops, as the way to return to the supposed greater faithfulness of some previous age. There is powerful support for this view in the higher ranks of church leaders, a view in which a negative assessment of the upheavals of the 1960s and a conspiracy theory about liberals kidnapping Vatican II are blended into a particularly Catholic version of the culture wars. The confrontation between more liberal and more conservative evaluations of the cultural roots of the sex abuse scandal has become by degrees a debate about the future shape of the church. In the end, the disputes between those on the right and on the left are not about the importance of prayer, the virtue of celibacy, or the teaching authority of the bishops. They are about determining how an adult laity can and should function in a church whose polity was crafted in an age that no longer exists.10

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Despite the imperfections and abject failures that sometimes afflict the American political experiment, Americans expect true democracy and the rewards of living in an open society. American Catholics are no less American than those of other faiths, and they share these yearnings. What is new, perhaps, is that they are increasingly unwilling to exempt their church from the need to promote participation and a share in decision making that is the hallmark of democratic societies. Catholicism has always taken some of its governance structures from the prevailing secular polities. Always, that is, until democracy emerged in the aftermath of the French and American revolutions. For some reason, the church that adopted the patterns of imperial Rome and of absolutist monarchies has found it so far impossible to adapt to the democratic imperatives of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The ordained ministry, especially the priesthood, is turning out to be the battleground on which most of the issues of governance and participation are being fought out. Here a whole lot of concerns come together: the question of celibacy, the adequacy of seminary formation, the exclusion of women from ordained ministry, clerical culture and the clerical lifestyle, the issue of candidates for the priesthood who are gay but committed to celibacy, the legitimate roles of the laity in the rituals of public worship, processes for the selection of pastors and bishops, and the desirable extent of lay responsibility for decision making at the parish level, especially but not exclusively in financial matters. One of the major reasons that relations between clergy and laity are open for reconsideration at this time is that the role of the priest in Catholicism has changed greatly in recent years, not only or even primarily because of the scandal of sexual abuse. Although there remain large numbers of clergy who continue to hold to a broadly autocratic vision of the ordained ministry and although some of the younger, so-called ‘‘John Paul II priests’’ may be clinging to this particular perception, in effect most clergy try these days to adopt a collaborative and communal approach to the day-to-day running of parishes. Typically, Catholic parishes employ significant numbers of lay staff, some of them doing work that in an earlier generation would have been the preserve of priests or religious sisters, others engaged in more practical and less obviously ‘‘ministerial’’ roles. To some degree this changed role of the priest has been forced upon the clergy by the decline in their numbers. They are fewer and, on average, older, and consequently they cannot shoulder alone the work of a large parish, but must turn to laity for help. To some extent it is also recognition of the changed status of the Catholic laity. Sociologically, Catholic lay people are far better educated than they were a couple of generations ago, and one can no longer assume that the priest is the most learned member of the community, not even in theological matters. Theologically, the Second Vatican Council taught the need to recognize the rights and responsibilities of the lay members of the church to speak out for the good of the church and to engage constructively in its mission. Although there are hopeful signs in a more communitarian approach to parish ministry, the theology of ordained ministry in Catholicism continues

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to impede real change in lay/clergy relationships. The realignment in ministry that is sorely needed in the church is handicapped by an excessive focus on ordination and by a theology of orders that stresses substantial or ontological change. Moreover, any serious attention to those theological concerns is almost precluded by the institutional insistence on the norm of priestly celibacy and the exclusion of women from the ranks of the ordained. Addressing the theological issues involved in ministry would be a whole lot easier if it were not necessary to assume that the ordained person is a celibate man, since that very condition reinforces the inclination to think of the ordained as somehow fundamentally different from the nonordained. The ‘‘turn to the laity’’ that was one of Vatican II’s enduring legacies has its source in the rediscovery of the baptismal priesthood.11 It is a striking fact that Catholics in general would never think of their status as priestly, even as an afterthought, though Catholic theology is united in its recognition that baptism confers a priestly status on each individual Christian. Vatican II reaffirmed this sometimes forgotten piece of Catholic doctrine, though it was careful to clarify that ministerial priesthood differs in kind and not only in degree from that acquired through baptism. It is the priestly character of the baptized, of course, that gives the specifically theological impetus to the growth of lay ministry and the general sense that all the baptized possess a mission beyond that of merely obeying the pastors, which was what the First Vatican Council (1870) had indicated was their sole role. As the Catholic church faces the future, one can only imagine an intensification of the problems that exist in the church of today, since institutional authority seems to be so firmly on the side of maintaining the ecclesiastical status quo. In October 2005 the Rome Synod of Bishops deliberated over the place of the Eucharist in Catholic life and piety and concluded the two-week-long session by delivering fifty points for consideration to Pope Benedict XVI, which he was to use to help him craft an encyclical letter on this theme over the months that followed. The words of the bishops do not inspire confidence in those who would like to see change, though they doubtless confirm more conservative Catholics in their sincere commitment to the tried and trusted ways. In particular, the bishops drew back from two issues on which there had been speculation that they might wish to encourage change. They heard several bishops urge consideration of the possibility of a relaxation of the law of celibacy so that certain viri probati (mature men of virtue) might be advanced to ordination to the priesthood. But they rejected this suggestion and forcefully reaffirmed their belief in the central importance of celibacy for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Second, they gave more serious attention to the difficult position that divorced and remarried Catholics find themselves in when they attend worship. Technically, such Catholics may not receive the Eucharist. The pastoral concern of the bishops for this large group of people led them to think about a change in the law, presumably hearing the common argument that since the Eucharist, as the other sacraments, is a God-given aid to

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salvation, it should be available to those whose lives are more difficult, not just to those whom fortune has placed in a less stressful situation. Again, however, they stepped back from any change, only affirming their wish that the divorced and remarried should be made welcome at church, and offering the rather unrealistic solution that if they were able to live in their canonically irregular marriages—to use the time-honored phrase— ‘‘as brothers and sisters,’’ then they might be able to receive the Eucharist. The Rome Synod on the Eucharist is a suitable place to draw this discussion of the state of Catholicism after the sex abuse crisis to a close, since it provides a clear instance of the division among Catholics over major issues in the church today. All Catholics would agree that the Eucharist is absolutely central to what it means to be church, and most if not all would concur that the growing shortage of priests, relative to the numbers of Catholics, makes access to the Eucharist more rather than less difficult. The bishops themselves recognized this fact, and the one among their number who is reported to have said at an early session of the synod that the Eucharist is not a right but a privilege can be assumed to be a minority voice, if not a lone voice. However, their deliberations and conclusions would suggest that the bishops believe that access to the Eucharist is not so important that it should be allowed to override the long-established practice of a celibate clergy or the exclusion of the divorced and remarried from the sacrament. Gazing into a crystal ball, one can only say that if the leadership of the church is not willing to be more constructive in its approach to major problems, and more welcoming of a concerned and intelligent progressive sector of the laity, then the future of Roman Catholicism is going to be very different from the past that more traditional Catholics might long for. As the shortage of priests becomes critical around the world—and we should not forget that most Catholics live in parts of the world south of the Equator—there will be defections in larger numbers. In Africa it may be to Islam, in Latin America it will certainly be to evangelical Protestantism, and in the North it will almost certainly mean a slow drift into the postmodern relativism, materialism, and hedonism that Benedict XVI has set his papacy to reverse. In North America the priests will continue to age, and while lay ministry will supply for their lack of energy, the problem can only become more acute. In sum, by stages and over a couple of decades, it seems likely that the resistance to change now can only bring closer an eventual crisis. In the face of crisis, changes will probably begin to happen, and patterns of ministry will be adapted to allow for ordained ministers who are perhaps not necessarily either celibate or male. Of course, the need for change is better addressed at times when the problems have not become critical, but the practice of institutional governance, whether secular or religious, is usually to postpone difficult decisions until the casualties are inevitably larger, and even until it is just plain too late. Those who are committed to a lively future for the Catholic church have to hope that this will not be its fate.

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NOTES 1. For those who have no sense at all of the world I am describing, there is no better source for a picture of it, and of the attendant clerical culture than the incomparable stories of J.F. Powers. Read freely within The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). 2. A very accessible and entertaining source for the lives of young Catholics and their entry into priesthood and religious life during the years at which the sex abuse scandal was brewing is Peter Manseau’s engaging biography of his parents, Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son (New York: Free Press, 2005). 3. Richard Sipe was writing about these problems before the full extent of the scandal became apparent to the American public. See his Sex, Priests and Power (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1995). 4. While there are quite a few books on the unfolding crisis, the best place to go to get a sense of the drama is to the Web site of the Boston Globe, where you can explore the archives of the paper’s unparalleled coverage of the scandal of sex abuse. See http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse or Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, by the Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). 5. Voice of the Faithful continues to be a major progressive influence in the American church. It can be explored at www.votf.org. 6. This document is available on the Web at http://altarboys.tripod.com/ moutonreport/Mouton_Reportx.html. 7. Garry Wills, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 2001); and George Weigel, The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform and the Future of the Church (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 8. The Web site for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is http:// www.usccb.org/index.shtml. 9. For clericalism and its ill effects on the church see Donald Cozzens, Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2004). 10. See on this topic Paul Lakeland, The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church (New York: Continuum, 2003). 11. A very helpful discussion of the emerging theology of orders can be found in Ordering the Baptismal Priesthood: Theologies of Lay and Ordained Ministry, ed. Susan K. Wood (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2003).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Lakeland, Paul. The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church. New York: Continuum, 2003. Oakley, Francis, and Bruce Russett, eds. Governance, Accountability, and the Future of the Catholic Church. New York: Continuum, 2004. Pope, Stephen J., ed. Common Calling: The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. Steinfels, Peter. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

CHAPTER 4

The Spirit of the Law: Spirituality in American Judaism Sarah Imhoff

T

he first Jewish immigrants to colonial America functioned without a rabbi. So did their children. For almost 200 years, American Jews were without ordained leadership but managed to live, work, and practice Judaism. Since these pioneers, each successive generation of American Jews has juggled the desire to adhere to tradition and the need to cope creatively with new demands of its environment. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they turned their attention to worries about ‘‘decorum’’ and functioning in Christian society. Sparked in part by a wave of new Jewish immigrants, these concerns forced established and immigrant communities to negotiate ways to be American, even when it meant the appropriation of some outwardly Protestant forms of worship and education such as organs and unison prayer in synagogues. The early twentieth century marked another surge of immigrants and the rise of anti-Semitism, which forced Jews to craft an explanation for simultaneous sameness and difference from other Americans. A 1950s mile-wide, inch-deep ‘‘revival’’ swept religious communities with the spirit of universalism, interfaith involvement, and institution-building. But the mood of the 1950s faded in both Christian and Jewish communities, the Six Day War in Israel broke out, and once again American Jews turned their focus to what was distinctive about Judaism and Jewish people. Then in a development that historian Jonathan Sarna characterizes as a ‘‘turn inward,’’1 in the 1970s, American Judaism began to shift its focus from universalism and world Jewry to the cultivation of community and the individual soul. In 1967, Shlomo Carlebach, sometimes called ‘‘the Singing Rabbi’’ or ‘‘the Dancing Rabbi,’’ founded the House of Love and Prayer for Jewish hippies in search of something more. Another charismatic leader known as Reb Zalman agreed with the mystics of tradition and proclaimed: ‘‘[Y]ou

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can experience the Infinite right now.’’2 Small Jewish study groups unaffiliated with any synagogue, called havurot, listened to Reb Zalman and began to add a serious spiritual dimension to their study. These were just a few of the harbingers of the changing tide of American Judaism. Bubbling to the surface in the late twentieth century, spirituality among American Jews is coming to a full boil in the beginning of the twenty-first. The most commonly observed trend in turn-of-the-millennium American Judaism is a greater degree of observance across the Jewish spectrum, what some characterize as a general shift to the right. Orthodoxy—the most traditional of the four major movements—has attracted a significant number of young new adherents, the middle-way Conservative movement has seen a new emphasis on performance of commandments, and many of the liberal Reform Jews have re-embraced practices once discarded under the labels ‘‘indecorous’’ or ‘‘Oriental.’’ Even sectarian groups like Chabad Lubavitch continue to draw new members. But this widespread return to ritual is not a stand-alone phenomenon: Contained within these outward forms, although less obvious to the observer and less frequently commented upon, is the rise of Jewish spirituality. Given these trends, this chapter will organize the story of contemporary American Judaism around the idea of spirituality. Unfortunately, as any story, this one comes at the expense of others; important topics such as American-Israeli relations, Holocaust issues, and halakah or Jewish law—any of which arguably could have played the starring role—are the supporting cast here. Religion in the United States, historians have long noted, is voluntary. For American Jews, this ‘‘spiritual marketplace’’3 means the choice of one particular movement—Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstruction, or Reform—or none at all. When some American Jews wanted more spirituality but found synagogues incongruous with their religious needs, they had many avenues for cultivating this newly popular aspect of their religious lives. Beginning in the late 1970s, some American Jews began to form extra-denominational groups whose main draw was ‘‘spirituality.’’ By the mid-1990s, mainline synagogues were responding to the persistence of these movements and the popular quest for spirituality by mirroring many of the ideas, values, and practices from these movements.

WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY WITHIN JUDAISM? Is spirituality only ‘‘a catchword for whatever one finds lacking in contemporary Judaism’’?4 Because of spirituality’s current popularity and association with American (dominantly Christian) culture rather than specifically Jewish culture, some leaders are wary of continued calls for more personal religious experience in the synagogue. Are these genuine expressions of desire for a deeper Judaism, they wonder, or are they simply a request for some pleasant music, less structure, and a generally feel-good religion at the expense of truly Jewish content? Others suggest that any expression of interest in Judaism is worth serious consideration if it might draw more Jews back into the pews. Although some individuals may be after a warm and fuzzy, content-free worship, it seems that many American Jews interested

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in spirituality are in fact looking for a greater connection to Judaism and tradition. These two opposing views of the clamor for more spirituality highlight a more fundamental question: What is spirituality in Judaism? The Hebrew word for ‘‘spirituality,’’ ruhaniut (literally spirit-ness, from the root meaning spirit or wind), is a modern addition. The ancient and medieval Jewish thinkers did not employ such a category because, in their minds, spirituality was part and parcel of practice. Each action and commandment was to be accompanied by kavvanah, or proper intention, which they understood as aligning one’s mind or soul with God’s will. Most forms of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism dating back to the Middle Ages, give exclusively spiritual reasons for the performance of the commandments. The Hasidic movement later picked up on this ideology: It began as a populist reinterpretation of Judaism that valued the performance of the commandments as fundamentally an act of spiritual devotion. Thus, despite a long history of spiritual practices and ritual imbued with divine content, it was not until the popularity of spirituality as its own category in American culture that there was a widespread consideration of a separate role of ‘‘spirituality’’ within Judaism. Even the casual observer can immediately identify some Jewish practices as spiritual, however the term is defined. Prayer, perhaps the most apparent spiritual exercise, has enjoyed a long history both personally in the home and communally in the synagogue. (In fact, the Hebrew word for a synagogue service, teffilah, is the same word for prayer.) Another clearly spiritual exercise, personal reflection, is encouraged year-round, and especially so at the fall holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. The most popular rituals among less observant Jews are those that are less frequent, like yearly holidays and life-cycle events. Although many researchers have noted the community and family aspects of these rituals,5 most of these practices also foster an inner sense of awe, wonder, and connection to God and tradition. For example, when a bar or bat mitzvah reads a portion of the Torah or a woman lights Sabbath candles, the spiritual atmosphere is undeniable. But few would suggest that eating latkes, even though it is a popular ritual, constitutes a personal religious experience. So without a clear consensus on its value, must we be content to think of spirituality in the way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography: I cannot define it, ‘‘but I know it when I see it’’? One need only ask an average religious person in order to be convinced that there is something more to spirituality than simply semantics or observers’ opinions; in fact, the experiences of individual Jews themselves afford a useful foundation for defining spirituality. More often than not, these experiences are tied to the performance of a ritual or physical presence at a historic site, such as Auschwitz or Jerusalem. Despite her terror at her first call to read the Torah in a women’s prayer group, one Orthodox woman explained: ‘‘As I uttered the blessing, however, I felt myself moving through time and space.’’6 She used unquestionably spiritual language to describe her performance of this ritual, employing words of profound connection with tradition to describe her sensation. Another Orthodox woman wears the conventionally male garments because of the

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religious feelings they evoke. She said that the recitation of the traditional blessing ‘‘as I bind tefillin [phylacteries] on my arm, the awareness of being enveloped in a tallit [prayer shawl] evokes very powerful feelings in me.’’7 As one scholar paraphrased Jewish philosopher Franz Rosensweig: ‘‘[to] the pious Jew, the mitzvot are hardly laws but are a rhapsodic occasion to behold God’s Presence.’’8 Many first-time visitors to Israel also describe a unique feeling of connection to God, history, and the Jewish people. In a 2000 sociological study, participants described their visits to Israel as ‘‘the most powerful pro-Jewish experiences that I had’’ and ‘‘overwhelming.’’ Those who could articulate the source of their sense of awe traced it to physical ties with tradition and history. One unobservant respondent said: ‘‘One has to confront the fact that you have a wall or something and you see this piece of rock that people have been praying at, you know, for so long, and you have to confront a sort of mysticism. That actually holds some appeal for me.’’9 Only a minority of American Jews has visited Israel, but those who have frequently describe their experience in spiritual terms. Although some Jews are inclined to agree with the classical definition of spirituality as ‘‘the opposite of ÔcorporealityÕ or Ômateriality,Õ ’’10 these examples illustrate that for American Jews, the physical inspires the spiritual. Contra many Christian worldviews, the body and soul are not a dichotomy, not even two sides of one coin. The two are fundamentally interconnected: A twenty-first-century American woman, just like a sixteenth-century European male kabbalist, experiences a profoundly emotional connection to the divine when performing a commandment. These experiences were certainly not the same—in fact, likely quite dissimilar—but both illustrate the bond between body and soul, action and spirituality. Modern Jewish notions of spirituality, then, are not so far from traditional interpretations. Despite an emphasis on personal experience, the spiritual is not individual at the expense of being communal. In Spiritual Judaism, David Ariel defines spirituality as ‘‘a highly personal outlook about what is sacred to us.’’11 But most Jews develop this ‘‘personal outlook’’ with and through community. Although this is also true of many religions, community and peoplehood are fundamental values of Judaism. Reflecting on chanting her Torah portion on her bat mitzvah while surrounded by her community of observant women, one woman said simply: ‘‘This wonderful experience made me feel close to God.’’12 She had practiced chanting this portion many times by herself, but participation within her religious community was the source of her spiritual experience of intimacy with God. Modern Jewish spirituality, then, is steeped in people as well as values, the body as well as the soul, and the past as well as the present; it is a sense of awe, wonder, and profound respect for a greater good that one continually develops through interaction with tradition, ritual, and community.

AMERICAN JUDAISM’S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY According to a 2005 Newsweek poll, Jews were no different from most other Americans in their quest for spirituality: ‘‘Americans are looking for

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personal, ecstatic experiences of God, and, according to our poll, they don’t much care what the neighbors are doing.’’13 In addition to some distinctively Jewish factors, this American trend of rising personal religiosity crosses religious lines, which indicates additional cultural factors not limited to a specific religion. Jewish spirituality in American culture existed before the 1970s, but it was neither common nor institutional. For instance, in 1946 Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman published Peace of Mind, a book exploring social justice that touched on Jewish spirituality. But Liebman argued for spirituality only through the lens of psychology: He claimed that if one were to grow spiritually, she must first be psychologically mature. Few commented on Jewish spirituality, and when they did, it was only a tangential interest because of its relevance to social justice, psychology, or Israel. If the 1950s were about affiliation, joining, and universalism for American Judaism, then the 1960s and early 1970s were about world Jewry, the Holocaust, and Israel. When the Six Day War in 1967 raised American consciousness of Israel among individual Jews and institutions, Israel surged to the front page of American Jewish concerns; it became a focal point for fund-raising and education. But as the 1970s wore on, the political and social problems of Israel incited critique and marked the end of the honeymoon. Since 1977, when Israel elected a right-wing government, sociologist Steven Cohen explains, several political events have caused ‘‘considerable discomfort’’ for American Jews: hard-line policies toward the West Bank, Israeli instigation of the war with Lebanon, the election of racist Knesset member Meir Kahane, violent religious-secular conflicts in Israel, and the tough military responses to the Intifada.14 As these events transpired, a slow but steady decrease in pro-Israel philanthropy15 was accompanied by a drop in interest and participation among individual Jews. Cohen stated frankly: ‘‘Since the mid-1970s, . . . Israel no longer excites the passions of the top (or even middle) rung of Jewish volunteer leadership.’’16 The declining feeling of attachment is a result of actions and policies indicative of Israel as a modern political entity capable of wrongdoing in the eyes of American Jewry. As Chaim Waxman suggests, the change was less a weakening and more a transformation in nature: Americans saw Israel less through the lens of political and religious Zionism and more as modern society with sovereign Jews.17 As simply another modern, democratic country—albeit one with many Jews—rather than a symbol of the fulfillment of religious goals and prophecies, Israel no longer captivated American Jews as it once had. At worst, as it lost its salvific status, it contributed to disillusionment with modern culture and politics. Although the Holocaust remains an identifying marker of Jewish cultural identity, over time, like Israel, it has become less a part of institutional Jewish life. In 1992, sociologist Arnold Eisen noted: ‘‘Proximity to the Holocaust and to the founding of the State of Israel has stimulated Jewish energies for more than 40 years. There are already signs that the influence of these forces is on the wane.’’18 With greater incorporation into general American consciousness, the Holocaust has become less distinctly Jewish. The opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial

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Museum in Washington, D.C., and the addition of Holocaust studies to required public school curricula have increased non-Jewish interest while lightening the obligation of synagogues and Jewish schools to provide comprehensive instruction to all. Increased emphasis in American culture has thus made knowledge and history of the Holocaust less and less a marker of Jewishness and involvement in Jewish community. As the 1970s closed, interest in international issues of the Holocaust and Israel thus slowly took a backseat to new concerns. One of these new concerns was the effect of feminism. As women took more leadership roles in the Jewish community and became more visible in the synagogue, traditionally ‘‘feminine’’ qualities also gained more attention. Historically, women in Judaism, as well as in many other religions, have frequently been lauded as ‘‘more spiritual’’ than men, a characterization that has continued into the present. Anthropologist Susan Starr Sered found this sentiment expressed by men and women alike in her study of traditional Jewish women in Jerusalem: ‘‘the traditional female religious sphere may sometimes acquire new significance or prestige as women come to be seen as guardians of old ways, as experts in traditional religion. In a number of interviews, children of women I studied made comments such as, Ômy mother is closer to God than I am,Õ Ôthe way my mother does it [religion] is better, but I myself am not strong enough to do it like she does.Õ ’’19 Generally, women are perceived as possessing heightened spiritual qualities, and therefore, an expanding women’s role will result in increasing attention to spirituality. By the close of the 1970s, American culture had begun to move away from its former days of experiment, rebellion, and revolution. Individuals worried about themselves, and sweeping love-of-everyone faded. American Jews, too, began to turn their emphasis from world Jewry to themselves. Synagogue membership that had failed to rebound after the decrease of the early 1960s, dramatically increasing intermarriage rates, low birth rates, assimilation, and feminism—all on the home front—occupied the thoughts of those concerned about American Jewry. In retrospect, the 1980s were a time of personal questions. Less kindly, it was a decade of self-interest and self-indulgence, of yuppies and unemployment. Like American culture at large, American Jews as individuals and families concentrated on themselves and thereby created a more personally defined and practiced form of Jewishness. In 1992, one scholar explained this development: In short, there appears to be a decline in associational Jewishness, as expressed in denominational identification, and a corresponding increase in what Thomas Luckmann might have called invisible Jewishness: a privatized sense of longing, belonging, and meaning that is more psychological than communal, more felt than articulated. Such invisible religion, as Luckmann called it, draws from the same wellspring of collective symbols and memories as institutionalized religion. But it refuses to be constrained by the boundaries and social controls of the formal institutions (synagogues, Jewish organizations, schools).20

Prior to the late 1980s, scholars studied these ‘‘formal institutions’’ almost exclusively when they wanted to know about American Judaism. In

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the 1991 Jewish Identity in America, the editors presented a comprehensive review of the studies of American Jews in the preceding twenty years. Not one study asked questions or drew conclusions concerning spirituality; the closest was a survey question asking for the frequency of prayer.21 The scholars measured the number of American Jews, attendance, revenue, membership, intermarriage rate, and even ritual performance. But few seemed to notice the role of spirituality, which had begun to grow. In 1982, American religious historian Martin Marty suggested that in the United States, ‘‘rather than being contained within formal institutions, religion has unmistakably and increasingly diffused throughout culture, and has assumed highly particularized forms in the private lives of citizens.’’22 Although the trend encompasses both Christian and Jewish communities, this growth of private spirituality may be less noticeable within Jewish communities because of the forms it takes. Today many Christians voraciously devour devotional and spiritual media like the Left Behind series, The Passion of the Christ movie, and contemporary Christian music, but Jews turning to spirituality tend to approach it through less publicly visible modes of study and meditation. Since much of the spiritual growth among Jews has taken place outside of formal institutions and mass media, it took years for scholars and rabbis to understand its significance. But by the 1990s, the popularly perceived spiritual lack in American Jewish institutions was undeniable, and many who noticed were instant critics. When recession of both American economic and rational frameworks hit, Jews who turned to the synagogue looking for something other than community and study—something more like personal growth or affirmation of God—had to look hard. Author David Ariel said, ‘‘Many of us still do not feel at home in our synagogues. We see Jewish institutions, especially synagogues and temples, as too preoccupied with institutional rather than spiritual concerns.’’23 American Jews went looking for personal religious experience but found only scripted services and business concerns. Scholar of modern Judaism Deborah Lipstadt said of institutional Judaism in 1992, ‘‘There is no genuinely spiritual aspect present.’’24 Arthur Green lamented the plight of Jewish baby boomers and their children; they had missed the truly spiritual aspect of the synagogue: [They] know little of the real act of prayer, and their mostly negative associations, either with traditionalist rapid mumbling or with the formalism of the large liberal synagogue, will continue to serve as roadblocks. Only rabbis with smaller congregations and groups of Jews in informal havurot will be able to make accessible to Jews outside Orthodoxy a sense that prayer, including liturgy, needs to be the most spontaneous and least routinized of human activities. The popularity of such leaders and groups will be great, and not just among the young.25

Only the cultivation of personal spirituality could draw Jews back to Judaism, he claimed. Critics, however, were not wholly pessimistic about the future of the synagogue. Even Lipstadt, a strong voice of discontent, insisted that it was possible ‘‘to enhance the spiritual aspects of American Jewish life and to strengthen the realm of private or personal Jewish activities.’’26

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For Ariel the necessity was ‘‘to turn our synagogues into places of the heart once again.’’27 Like American Jews of the past, these analysts saw the opportunity to hold on to tradition while creatively instituting change to fit the needs of practitioners. When American Jews themselves—individuals, rabbis, and scholars— describe the root causes of their growing need for personal religiosity, they use different vocabulary to describe the growing importance of spirituality in individual lives and society, but many of them point to similar themes of disillusionment, vacuous culture, and the falsity of the American dream. In 1992, Jack Wertheimer cited ‘‘the failure of modern culture, especially the United States, to provide a coherent identity and communal anchor’’28 as the cause of a desperate search for a new feeling of religiosity. The immense diversity, change, and disagreement left individuals wondering where they fit in and feeling lost. Because tradition and peoplehood are fundamental Jewish principles, unstable American identity and community were certain to take a toll on the confidence Jews placed in American value systems. Ariel also held modernity ultimately responsible for the spiritual void: ‘‘The price of admission into the non-Jewish world has been the surrender of our spiritual integrity as Jews.’’29 The problem is not Judaism, but, rather, the choice of Jews to enter into the fundamentally flawed matrix of modernity. Modern Jews had wrestled with assimilation and tradition, chose to creatively engage modernity, and were eventually let down by the once-hidden holes in modernity. One Reform rabbi explained the new turn towards the spiritual in more traditionally religious language: ‘‘We have wanted our inner needs fulfilled, for we often feel empty inside, even though we seem to be full and satisfied on the outside. The physical home of the American dream has not filled the spiritual home of the Jewish dream. So many of us, along with our congregants, search. They and we may call it God. Yes, God is making a comeback because we seek and long for the spiritual side of ourselves.’’30 As a career pulpit rabbi, he uses God-language similar to that of his congregants to describe the quest for spirituality, but his diagnosis of the problem is consistent with both more observant and secular explanations. With the dawn of the twenty-first century, most Jews continue to put explanations in a national perspective. Even many Jews who do not label themselves ‘‘religious’’ recognize the need for spirituality and label society’s unkept promises as causes. They are more likely to use economic and pursuit-of-happiness terms to describe these failings, and like less observant, liberal Jews, they are less likely to blame modernity itself but rather specific cultures and media. A self-proclaimed ‘‘secular Jew,’’ one who does not believe in God but retains Jewish values and interest in Jewish social and political causes, explained: ‘‘despite the affluence, the last thirty years have been years of disillusionment and frustration for many young people. Urbanization, anonymity, mobility, unemployment, and family breakdown have taken their toll. People are no longer sure that ordinary power is available to guarantee their happiness.’’31 Even secular people, he insists, have begun to search for something other than ‘‘ordinary power.’’ Whether it be through yoga classes, meditation, or dedication to a cause

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such as environmental conservation, people need an anchor. Even if this anchor is not a traditional God, they need an organizing structure to their lives, and so they may begin a spiritual quest for a higher power. Another spokesman for secular Judaism explains the societal ills that plague modern Americans, leaving them with an empty feeling. ‘‘These main developments have made secular people, Jews and non-Jews alike, feel a need for a spiritual dimension to their lives: the break-up of communities, a cultural diet composed entirely of mass entertainment, and schools that have replaced cultural education with vocational training.’’32 He places the blame squarely on the media and on the lack of substantial culture. Without a coherent sense of culture to help them create personal or communal meaning, they desperately search for something else to fill the void. Since culture and media are the systems that have failed them, they eventually look for fulfillment outside those systems. Although the general consensus has been to describe a particularly American cause for spiritual emptiness, some scholars, like Arthur Green, changed the setting to one of global fear. In his 1992 prediction, he boldly asserted that the postmodern world and its technology have placed a heavy burden on the soul: The individual confrontation with mortality is heightened in our day by a collective sense of potential danger, making this an age in which the role of prayer is increased rather than diminished. . . . For all the continued growth of human knowledge in biomedical and other scientific areas, the sense that the keys to both life and death lie in hands that reach beyond human understanding or control has not been lost. Now as the greatest of human fears shifts from that of nuclear holocaust to that of ecological devastation (a shift that has taken place before our eyes), the sense of divine involvement in the fate of the world will grow.33

Because of human technological developments and mismanagement of resources, the human race is threatening its own long-term existence. With human mortality on display at every turn—the media, news, politics, healthcare—world citizens are forced either to contemplate their worldviews or live in a constant state of denial. Green has replaced the failure of the American dream with the failure of humankind: Technology and usage of resources that once seemed the promise of the future have turned out to be empty. People cannot derive positive meaning from these systems that threaten destruction, so they turn to a different version of the greater good. Modernity brought not only anxieties but also unrestricted inclusion in society. Therefore especially in the United States, many are concerned that Jews will lose their distinctiveness. No longer forcibly ghettoized and branded ‘‘Jew,’’ individuals can choose to cease practicing, even self-identifying, as Jews. The American suburbanization of the 1950s exacerbated this problem; no longer were the majority of Jews in urban, tight-knit Jewish communities. They were spread out, living in neighborhoods with few other Jews and no synagogues. If and when they decided to build a synagogue, they found that affiliation with one movement was

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their choice. Again, creatively negotiating with tradition and new life circumstances, American Jews found themselves making choices about how (and whether) to be Jewish. In the 1950s, the general American milieu of joining, belonging, and institution-building convinced many of these suburban Jews to remain within Judaism. But faced with similar choices of continuing to affiliate in an age of disillusionment and individuality, the Jews of the twenty-first century could choose to discard a Judaism that they find unfulfilling in favor of another religion or a secular life.

THE GROWTH OF SPIRITUALITY IN AMERICAN JUDAISM A fear of defection from institutional Judaism over lack of spiritual content is not an unfounded one. Across the American Jewish spectrum, from secular humanists to Chabad Jews, a renewed interest in spirituality has blossomed over the last decades. This distinctly modern spiritual quest(ion) has been put most eloquently by Jewish thinker Paul MendesFlohr: How can we ‘‘retrieve the Jewish past and an innocent faith without forfeiting knowledge?’’34 Modern Jews struggle to hold on to tradition and the history of a people while still interacting with modern science, technology, and history. Some solve this question by placing spirituality at the heart of their Judaism, understanding tradition and faith are through the heart and community, not through law. The Jewish Renewal movement, the legacy of Rabbi Zalman Schachter (or Reb Zalman), insists on an intellectual dimension of spirituality, not blind faith; it calls for experience and personal validation of its precepts. Michael Lerner explains the concept of transcendence in Jewish Renewal as ‘‘a spiritual reality—the ability to recognize God in one another.’’35 Jewish Renewal retains the values of both tradition and community, but it discards the need for absolute belief and practice consistent with a legislative Judaism. The movement has its foundation in the thought of Reb Zalman, an Orthodox Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to the United States. A seeker himself, Reb Zalman became a teacher of seekers. He sought to learn about other systems of belief—from Buddhism to Native American religions, all without leaving Judaism—and taught students young and old how to rediscover the joy and spirituality within Judaism. Jewish Renewal also builds on the thought of philosopher Martin Buber who believed that ‘‘the ultimate ground of Judaism as an enduring and existentially meaningful community of faith’’ is ‘‘an inner, spiritual process.’’36 This formulation does not negate tradition or text; instead it places them as valuable because they are means to nurture one’s relationship with God and humans. Jewish spirituality needs Sabbath observance, Jewish holidays, and revision—not rejection—of traditional prayer books. In fact, Lerner claims that the movement has reclaimed the original message of Judaism, which was ‘‘repressed and abandoned’’37 over the generations. Jewish Renewal is therefore sensitive to environmental, social, and gender issues; it strives to

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improve the world and nurture its adherents. Lerner and Ariel both emphasize tradition; Ariel calls the modern quest ‘‘the same journey that our ancestors took as they set out into the uncharted waters of their day,’’38 while Lerner concludes: ‘‘we stand on the shoulders of a hundred generations.’’39 Despite a desire to create a Jewish perspective different from those of existing institutions, supporters of Jewish Renewal continue to value tradition highly. Many others consciously began something new; they chose to create their own Jewish practice and balance innocent faith and knowledge for themselves. One group of young, educated Jews dissatisfied with both Jewish institutions and obsessive material culture formed the first small study group—havurah—called Havurat Shalom in 1967. They shunned strict hierarchies, welcomed women, dressed casually, exchanged ideas freely, sang and prayed together, and tried to forge a way to be Jewish that would resonate with their ideologies and emotions. As Reb Zalman, a founding member and continuing inspiration for other havurot, explained: ‘‘Our concern was to create a group that could function democratically as a Ôfamily of friends,Õ who shared the goal of spiritual growth.. . . We imagined a setting in which the inner experience of our souls’ search for God could take place with group support.’’40 The idea was catchy: All over the country, young people began to meet in small groups, sit in circles, study Torah, and pray by candlelight. Although at first they were not consciously feminist, many progressive women joined and became organizers. Judith Plaskow explained the close relationship between feminism and the havurah ideologies of personal development through community and human relationship with God: ‘‘Certainly, it is no accident that havurot have provided a first prayer home for many feminist Jews, at the same time that they have created an intimate space for the experience of God’s immanence.’’41 These havurot brought some women back into Judaism; for others, they provided a more comfortable home within the tradition. But in general they increased the involvement and affirmation of women as well as traditionally female modes of worship emphasizing spirituality. In 1973, the havurah movement went public: Several members compiled the Jewish Catalog, a do-it-yourself guide to Judaism. Its witty explanations, amusing illustrations, and inclusive tone charmed Jews across the country. Second to the Bible, it is the best-selling book ever published by the Jewish Publication Society. It seemed that American Jews were searching for their own personal ways to be Jewish; if they did not find enough support for personal religiosity within their synagogues, they found other resources and other people like them. Havurot did not vanish with many other seeking groups of the 1970s, and some found this resilience surprising. In 1992, one rabbi was struck by ‘‘the resurgence of [American Jews’] sense of religious and spiritual connection with some aspects of Jewish tradition—as understood by such teachers as Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mordecai Kaplan [three thinkers frequently cited as precursors to today’s spirituality]; as influenced by feminism; and as practiced in havurot and other networks of Jewish

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renewal.’’42 Although these groups marked a rise in interest in personal religiosity, they also revalued former institutional priorities through the lens of spirituality. As the emphasis on social justice decreased in institutions during the 1980s, it found new life through the havurah small-group model. Several liberal thinkers put their hope for the future of Jewish social justice in the hands and ideals of these very same people and movements. Another American Jewish scholar defines the ideal social justice for today’s American Judaism in spiritual terms: ‘‘I suggest that our challenge today in creating a socially just world . . . is to continue our pursuit of the Light of God and ultimately to bring it into the universe.’’43 Here social justice is primarily an exercise in inner religiosity. Arnold Eisen, in his prescription for an improving Jewish future, first calls for using havurah-style spirituality as a basis for increasing other aspects of Jewish communal life: ‘‘At a minimum, we can further reanimate our synagogues with havurot meant for life-cycle celebrations and Sabbath study, building outward from religious commitments to political action, ecological concern, and so on. . . . Every effort that serves Jewish bodies is an opportunity to serve Jewish spirits as well.’’44 Havurot, while still small, have proved to be not only more than a passing fad, but also a model for revaluing and revitalizing institutional values. Out of similar ideologies to the havurah movement came a Jewish retreat center, Elat Chayyim, in 1992. One of its founders explains its role as a place where American Jews ‘‘can be exposed to a contemporary version of Jewish life that emphasizes on the focus of oneness of God on all things’’45 through exposure to the Ba’al Shem Tov, an eighteenth-century mystic and primary inspiration of Reb Zalman. As the first major institution focused on Jewish spirituality, it served as a sort of pilot program in the field. Teaching and learning outside of a particular movement (drawing members from all four movements and unaffiliated Jews) was nothing new in the United States; nondenominational Jewish community centers had been doing it for years. But an institution organizing the teaching and practice of a kind of contemporary Jewish mysticism was unprecedented. The success of Elat Chayyim demonstrated the demand for spiritual resources outside of denominational lines. Rabbi Jeff Roth explained: ‘‘At the time we started, there was no serious exploration of spirituality, no organized way of accessing Jewish mystical practices.’’ Jews who were curious about exploring their spirituality through Judaism were forced to find an individual rabbi who was knowledgeable in the right texts and teachings and willing to help with a spiritual journey. Even interested rabbis had scant resources for exploring their own spiritual development, let alone the development of their members. When Elat Chayyim first opened its doors, Roth recounts, ‘‘teachers and students both gravitated toward us.’’46 The moderate growth of Elat Chayyim also points to an increase in Jewish meditation. Some types are very much in the public eye: Popular culture (figures such as singers Madonna and Britney Spears) and the Internet promote Kabbalah, and new books fly off bookstore shelves. But religiously serious Jews like those who study at Elat Chayyim, interested in

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more than a twenty-minute do-it-yourself enlightenment, have also shown increased interest. In 1996, Mark Verman, the author of The Histories and Varieties of Jewish Meditation, was finally able to sell his manuscript after fifteen years of attempts. Suddenly, it seemed to some (including publishers), Jews were interested in meditation. But like Jewish Renewal supporters, those who practice meditation deny they are doing something new. With chapter titles like ‘‘Ancient Roots of Jewish Meditation’’ and continued comparisons of modern meditating Jews to medieval mystics,47 Verman insists that meditation is nothing innovative; to the contrary, it connects the practitioner to tradition. Other noninstitutionalized Jewish movements perceived the cultural and personal need for spirituality and then incorporated spirituality into their already-existing ideologies. In the case of Jewish secular humanism, even in the absence of God, spirituality has become a critical piece of the philosophical puzzle. Proponents of this philosophy point to the decline of religion as the very cause of a cultural increase in spirituality. Sherwin Wine, an ordained rabbi and yet a self-proclaimed secular humanist, explains: ‘‘As faith in religion and political ideology crumbles, the desire strengthens for a spiritual dimension to life.’’48 The absence of religion in a human life would accentuate ‘‘the obvious human need for spirituality.’’49 As people rationally move away from superstitious and mythological religion, the need to nurture their souls becomes more and more apparent. Wine explains that the Jewish secular humanism’s ‘‘new spirituality’’ includes ‘‘transcendence,’’ a word already loaded with religious meaning, that is characterized by the feelings of ‘‘awe, wonder, and empowerment’’ and the distinct impression of ‘‘being part of something greater and more powerful than oneself.’’50 Education, study of text and art, and above all, communion with people and nature replace ‘‘God’’ as the crucial venues to experience and cultivate this spirituality. Even to those who deny the traditional God, many Jews across the spectrum of belief and practice have come to emphasize elements of the human spirit. Some individuals in search of spiritual answers turned to the other end of the spectrum on their quest for deeper religious experience. For example, Ba’alei Tshuva (BTs for short) are Jews who turn to strict Orthodoxy; their answer to the question of modernity is that the innocent faith in God and law is the foundational element of Judaism. One woman who turned to Chabad Lubavitch, a branch of Hasidism, recounted her previous spiritual quest to the other women at the study house: ‘‘She’d taken drugs and begun to get involved with the guru Maharaj ji by attending classes and meditations. She had really wanted to become a ÔpremieÕ (the name for Maharaj ji’s followers) and find higher truth.’’51 Finally she found her home at the study house; the form of spirituality offered there answered her questions and made sense with her experience of the world. Another woman there explained her attraction: ‘‘I needed a spiritual community. There is a whole other level of spiritual reality . . . so it’s very fulfilling for me to be a part of the spiritual community where that part of me can get exercise.’’52 She, too, had searched elsewhere, but found the spirituality she sought only in Chabad Lubavitch. Especially popular

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among young adults, the BT movement is a particularly visible example of two connected trends in American Judaism: increased spirituality and increased observance. Orthodox women also began to form prayer groups, or teffillot. While most of these women use language indicative of feminist consciousness, they simultaneously use spiritual words to indicate that their primary concern is spiritual development through Judaism. In a characteristic account, one woman pronounced: ‘‘Souls have no gender. Our souls have the same desire and need to get close to God and the Torah through learning as do men’s souls. Women’s prayer groups bring us one step closer to God.’’53 As another participant explained, ‘‘Experiencing the stirring spirituality and beauty of the prayer service has been my principal reason for belonging to the women’s davening [prayer] group. . . . [It is] a more satisfying religious experience than membership in a traditional Orthodox synagogue.’’54 For the most part, these women remain observant Jews, but they no longer rely exclusively on attendance at synagogues. Without the presence of men, they may read out loud from the Torah, pray most prayers, and even sing. Since women cannot speak or sing in most Orthodox services, and the women’s section is frequently located in a crowded balcony with poor sight lines, they created a different atmosphere where they could participate fully in Jewish practice as women. From the secular Jew who found spirituality in his encounters with nature to the BT who prayed and studied mysticism, many American Jews across the spectrum looked to develop their connections within themselves and to higher powers. Once again, these American Jews were creating new groups and venues to fit their desires, all the while holding on to a form of tradition. This is not to say that all lay Jews were desperately searching for spirituality, nor that all rabbis and denominational leaders were oblivious to such needs. As early as 1985, for instance, one prominent Orthodox rabbi, who willingly taught many students the art of Jewish meditation, explained: ‘‘If finding spiritual meaning is difficult for the uncommitted Jew, sometimes it is difficult for the Orthodox Jew as well. . . . When asked why they do not seek [meditation] within Judaism, they have the same answer as uncommitted Jews: they are not aware how such an experience can be found within Judaism.’’55 But he was ahead of his time; it was not until nearly a decade later that synagogues began to incorporate more spiritual content into their services and programs.

RENEWED SPIRITUALITY IN THE SYNAGOGUES As many practitioners noticed and commentators began to point out, the synagogues were not the forerunners in the trend of spirituality. Because of its American—as opposed to Jewish—origins, the spirituality ‘‘fad’’ made many Jewish leaders nervous. They were concerned that holding informal services and embracing practices such as meditation and spontaneous prayer would turn Judaism into a simply universalistic feel-good religion without the vital aspect of tradition. Complete accommodation of the requests of

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religious seekers would empty the content and distinctiveness of Judaism, leaving something equivalent to just another yoga class at the gym. The story of spirituality since the 1990s is a story about the gradual development of the push and pull between the American spiritual quest and Jewish tradition. As time went on, rabbis and synagogues found creative ways to do both. As the historian Mark Lee Raphael explains, this emphasis on spirituality in America ‘‘began in the 1990s (perhaps as early as the late 1980s in some synagogues), intensifying at the end of that decade into a search for new depths of meaning in Judaism. When rabbis announced a class in Jewish thought, modest numbers attended; when they used the word spirituality in the title, the course was packed. It is the cry of our age.’’56 For more liberal synagogues, this development is generally seen as a boon: more interest and maybe even more congregants. Orthodox and other traditional synagogues, while more wary, have viewed the increase in spiritual dimensions of religious life in terms of a return to traditional Jewish practices, such as the practices of the Hasidim and Jewish mysticism. But across denominational lines, both lay people and rabbis have incorporated a greater degree of spiritual emphasis in religious life. As with many changes in American Judaism, the gradual incorporation of spirituality into the synagogues began earliest in the more liberal movements and latest in the most traditional communities. One obvious institutional change that contributed to the growth of spirituality in three movements was the decision to ordain women as rabbis and cantors. Since 1972 in Reform, 1974 in Reconstruction, and 1985 in Conservative Judaism, women have become rabbis, preaching, teaching, and serving as an example to their congregants. If women are perceived as more spiritual, members may sense an atmosphere of spirituality in the synagogue when they have a female rabbi, whether or not she intended such a consequence. The rabbi, as a role model, can also make others feel more comfortable pursuing and expressing spiritual thoughts and journeys when they feel that she is a spiritual person. Moreover, personal religiosity then receives a legitimate place in the synagogue. Women, who are traditionally branded ‘‘private’’ to men’s ‘‘public,’’ are perceived as bringing the personal into the communal. One female rabbi explained bluntly: ‘‘[W]omen rabbis, like all women, are often not viewed as having distinct public and private lives.’’57 Whatever difficulties it may cause aside, this blurring of private or personal religious life with religious leadership further reinforces the welcome feelings of spirituality in the synagogue. In addition to the more diffuse factors of the growing role of women, the contributions of individual women, and the blurring of private and public spheres for rabbis, the Reform movement has devoted attention to the roles of synagogues and rabbis in cultivating spirituality. In fact, the movement’s annual conference in 1993 was organized around the theme of understanding and developing spirituality (and also dedicated to Sally Priesand, the first woman rabbi, on the twentieth anniversary of her ordination). The Dalai Lama, the honored guest speaker, plainly and eloquently explained the goal of the rabbis: ‘‘You all meet here, and the main purpose of your gathering is searching, searching, you see, for a deeper spiritual value.’’58 One Reform rabbi at the denominational conference,

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Steven Chester, lamented the past emphases of material society and called for a change in the rabbinate: [T]here has been an eclipse of God. . . . We were swallowed by the whale of success and materialism and we floated aimlessly. Suddenly, we were awakened to the realization that we needed more. We needed God, and God had been there all the time. We simply forgot how to relate to the Shechinah [the feminine, spiritual aspect of God]. We needed God to add a dimension to our lives, yes, even to our rabbinate.59

He went on to describe the former focus of the synagogue, explaining that it had overshadowed the ‘‘real’’ Judaism: ‘‘We stopped talking about God or preaching about God. . . . The Jewish people, Israel, Soviet Jewry, Social Action these became our sole reasons for occupying the pulpit. These were good reasons, but we forgot the cornerstone of our faith. . . . [We] banished God in the process.’’60 American Jewry had spent so much time on external issues, he explains, that it had neglected issues of the soul. Chester went on to ask: ‘‘Why has ÔspiritualityÕ become the topic of so many conferences?’’ His answer was simple: Our people asked for it. I believe it is because we have been forced to deal with these questions, have been forced to look at and even explain our individual relationships to God because our congregants have demanded it of us. . . . Not too long ago our congregants stopped fleeing and began asking. . . . As they returned to synagogue life, they asked about their spiritual lives, about their place in the universe, and we had to respond, and many of us have. We have looked into our souls.61

The Reform congregants themselves began this return to spirituality, and the rabbis decided that they should follow. And follow they did: At a 2005 conference of Reform leaders, the sessions on spirituality were the most highly attended, and the Houston Chronicle reported on the ‘‘Yoga Minyan: Connecting Body and Soul to the Divine,’’ a service consisting of prayers from the traditional liturgy matched to yoga poses. Rabbi Andrea London, who led the service, explained: ‘‘We took a service, and we embodied it fully.’’62 This new spirituality takes the form of changes in the regular service, as well as the addition of small groups and workshops offered in addition to it. Rabbis have begun to incorporate more time for personal reflection upon prayers and scripture. They encourage members to take time to consider what each word says to them during the service. Some have gone away from forward-facing pews in favor of circular formations or other more egalitarian arrangements. In addition to regular services, many synagogues offer extras, not only ‘‘yoga-minyan’’ types, but weekly spiritual growth workshops and small study groups focused on reconnecting with God. Few heartily object to the new emphasis on spirituality, but those who do—mostly older members—explain the reason, ironically, is tradition. Reform Judaism, since its inception, has been based on a rational model of religion. Both leaders and individuals would decide whether or not to practice or believe in a certain way by using their own judgment. The founders

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and many following generations shunned what they saw as elaborate rituals based on mythic events. Return to observing outdated commandments and reinstituting ‘‘hocus-pocus’’ is a step backwards, offending the hard work to assemble a meaningful, rational religion for enlightened people, these dissenters think. One rabbi told the Chronicle that ‘‘spiritual stuff’’ was a charged issue that had the potential to spark some disagreement within the denomination. Another institutional debate over a long-deliberated question also highlighted the turn to spirituality. The contentious ‘‘Who is a Jew?’’ question drives to the heart of defining Judaism itself. In years past, Judaism was passed on through the mother; a child with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother would not be Jewish regardless of upbringing. But in a time of mix-and-match family units and personal choice, it was not uncommon to find people who felt Jewish, but were told that they must undergo conversion to be ‘‘truly’’ Jewish. In the last half-century, both Reform (1983) and Reconstructionist Judaism (1968) have decided that the answer should be in terms of spirituality rather than biology: Children of one Jewish parent, mother or father, are Jewish if they practice Judaism. The matter depends on inner person, not on maternal contribution to the DNA. One scholar points out: ‘‘The great majority of Jews . . . have widely accepted patrilineal descent as the basis for Jewish identity.’’63 This decision is immensely popular within these denominations despite the acrimony it causes with more traditional Jews; few disagree that religion is something other than a matter of the heart. Taking a cue from disillusioned former members, synagogues in all four movements now organize their own study and prayer groups, some of which they even call havurot. Like the original intimate model, people form these groups based on similar interests or life situations. A Reconstructionist synagogue, for example, might sponsor a young adults’ havurah, a gay and lesbian havurah, and a women’s havurah. Unlike the unaffiliated havurot, the people who participate in these groups are also synagogue members who attend services. Unlike Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, which have embraced the popular growth of spirituality without significant concern, both Conservative and Orthodox branches worry about its authenticity. By 1999, Conservative Judaism in America decided that the still-growing issue demanded its time at the annual assembly of rabbis. Although some saw spirituality as ‘‘feel-good’’ Judaism without real content and found it threatening to substance, ritual, and commandments, the majority felt that a search for spirituality was worthy and traditional. In a discussion historically characteristic of Conservative Judaism, Jews looked to find a historical precedent for what they desired; once they found such a precedent, then they could embrace it through tradition. As Jewish Theological Seminary Professor Neil Gillman said, ‘‘There is nothing new about a meditative Judaism.’’64 The Conservative movement was founded as a middle way, a way that held tradition highly, but also wanted to make Judaism accessible to Americans in a changing environment. For better or for worse, although many like Gillman think it for the better, a Conservative rabbi

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must respond to the demands of American culture and address the spiritual needs of members rather than the more broadly political issues of the past: ‘‘[The] agenda has shifted from a primary concern with the issues of Jewish peoplehood to the issues of Jewish religion, from concern with the State of Israel, Russian Jewry, and anti-Semitism to God, prayer, mitzvah, why Ôbad things happen to good people,Õ and the afterlife.’’65 The movement has begun to notice and take steps to accommodate the changing priorities among its members, but most rabbis think that the synagogue can and should do more to nurture spirituality among its members. One explained: ‘‘I think that we do not have an adequate space yet in our institutions and in our synagogues for the individual seeker.’’66 Once leaders understand the idea of spirituality in Judaism as part of the tradition, they find it acceptable and want to help members by adding these elements, like slower prayer, directed meditation, and more silence, to their services. Conservative objectors to this new spirituality, although in the minority, still have a significant voice. They think that the search for a warmer, fuzzier Judaism is a wasted effort because the result ceases to be Jewish. At the 1999 convention, Elliot Abrams contended: ‘‘What many people want is what you should not give them. . . . Many want the Conservative synagogue to be more like the rest of American culture—easy, relaxed, no standards, new lifestyles, get in touch with your feelings, get out a lot more than you put in.’’67 What Conservative Judaism needs, he claimed, is not greater membership at the price of authenticity, but the cultivation of genuinely committed Jews. ‘‘Judaism should not be used to make us feel even better, which is what I think is often behind this call for more spirituality, instead of a call for more challenges, more observance, more Judaism.’’68 Abrams, like most dissenters, would prefer renewed emphasis on study and observation of commandments instead of their opponents’ interest in cultivating personal relationships with God. The Orthodox movement is more significantly divided on the issue, but nevertheless recognizes its growing popularity. In 2005, the Orthodox Forum, the major body of leaders, chose as its topic the proper place of ‘‘spirituality’’ in Judaism, and the ambivalence in the movement was palpable. The Orthodox community, in its traditional stance, is wary of both change and ‘‘popular religion.’’ The general American clamor for spirituality makes leaders concerned that ‘‘spiritual quests’’ and meditation are frequently inauthentically Jewish. Norman Lamm, an Orthodox scholar, claimed: ‘‘The contrast between the two—spirituality and law—is almost self-evident. Spirituality is subjective; the very fact of its inwardness implies a certain degree of anarchy; it is unfettered and self-directed, impulsive and spontaneous. In contrast, law is objective; it requires discipline, structure, obedience, order.’’69 But even Lamm found the human impulse for spirituality and its traditional place within Judaism so apparent that he concludes that the spiritual must be given a place alongside the legal. In the same forum, Chaim Waxman declared that, given the pervasiveness of spirituality in America, rabbis ought to give positive attention to spirituality if they wanted to sustain membership: ‘‘Given the extent of the contemporary spiritual quest in American society, those seeking to, at least,

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stem the tide of defection from Orthodoxy if not attract others to it, would appear to be advised to foster and encourage this spiritualism within legitimate halakhic boundaries.’’70 Once again, American Jewish leadership had to resourcefully balance American culture and its influences with Jewish tradition. The place of spirituality in American Judaism remains in transition; it proliferates outside of synagogue walls, and has now begun to creep through the doors. Previously contained in the private sphere and the domain of the feminine, in the last three decades, American Jewish spirituality has crossed gender lines and come out in public. Some, like Lawrence Kushner, suggest that spirituality is the raison d’etre of the synagogue: ‘‘When we look into the eyes of our children and our grandchildren, . . . we realize there is something beyond us. We are humbled and graced. We are reminded of our birth and of our death. We take our place in the long line. That is the root experience of religion. And that is why there are synagogues.’’71 Others insist that Judaism is and always has been about law and tradition. Although the future of spirituality in American Judaism remains unknown, one thing remains certain: American Jewry will continue to grapple with both American culture and Jewish tradition to forge a creative solution that is both distinctly American and distinctly Jewish.

NOTES 1. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 2. Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, First Steps to a New Jewish Spirit (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003). 3. Wade Clark Roof used the term to characterize the pick-and-choose nature of American religion. Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 4. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, ‘‘Jewish Spirituality: Past Models and Present Quest,’’ in Studies in Jewish Civilization XIII: Spiritual Dimensions of Judaism, ed. Leonard Greenspoon and Ronald Simkins (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2003), 4. 5. For a discussion, see Marshall Sklare, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier (New York: Basic Books, 1967). 6. Susan Alter, ‘‘The Sefer Torah Comes Home,’’ in Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue, ed. Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992), 281. 7. Dvora Weisberg, ‘‘On Wearing Tallit and Teffilin,’’ in Grossman and Haut, eds., 283. 8. Paul Mendes-Flohr, ‘‘The Retrieval of Innocence and Tradition: Jewish Spiritual Renewal in an Age of Liberal Individualism,’’ in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 290. 9. Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen, The Jew Within (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 150–51. 10. Tirosh-Samuelson, 4.

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11. David Ariel, Spiritual Judaism: Restoring Heart and Soul to Jewish Life (New York: Hyperion, 1998), 5. 12. Talya Penkower, ‘‘A Daughter’s Decision,’’ in Grossman and Haut, eds., 268. 13. Jerry Adler, ‘‘In Search of the Spiritual,’’ Newsweek (August 29, 2005): 46. 14. Steven Cohen, ‘‘Are American and Israeli Jews Drifting Apart?’’ in Imagining the Jewish Future, ed. David Teutch (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 119. 15. Ibid., 121. 16. Ibid., 122. 17. Chaim Waxman, ‘‘Weakening Ties: American Jewish Baby-Boomers and Israel,’’ in Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, ed. Allon Gal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 377–78. 18. Arnold Eisen, ‘‘Theology and Community,’’ in Teutch, ed., 248. 19. Susan Starr Sered, Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 123. 20. Egon Mayer, ‘‘The Coming Reformation in American Jewish Identity,’’ in Teutch, ed., 178. 21. Preface to Jewish Identity in America, ed. David Gordis and Yoav Ben-Horin (Los Angeles: University of Judaism, 1991), 14. 22. Martin Marty, ‘‘Religion in America Since Mid-Century,’’ in Religion and America: Spirituality in a Secular Age, ed. Mary Douglas and Steven Tipton (Boston: Beacon, 1982), 273. 23. Ariel, 2. 24. Deborah Lipstadt, ‘‘Tradition and Religious Practice,’’ in Teutch, ed., 40. 25. Arthur Green, ‘‘God, Prayer, and Religious Language,’’ in Teutch, ed., 17. 26. Lipstadt, 43. 27. Ariel, 3. 28. Wertheimer, ed., ix. 29. Ariel, 3. 30. Steven Chester, ‘‘The Rabbi—The Nature of Religious Leadership Today,’’ in Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, vol. 104 (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1994), 53. 31. Sherwin Wine, Judaism Beyond God (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1985), 221. 32. Yaakov Malkin, Secular Judaism: Faith, Values, and Spirituality (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2004), 41. 33. Green, 13–14. 34. Mendes-Flohr, 283. 35. Michael Lerner, Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994), 51. 36. Mendes-Flohr, 290. 37. Lerner, title of chapter 7. 38. Ariel, 285. 39. Lerner, 422. 40. Schachter-Shalomi, xxv. 41. Judith Plaskow, ‘‘God, Prayer, and Religious Language: A Response,’’ in Teutch, ed., 32. 42. Arthur Waskow, ‘‘Social Justice: Reenvisioning Our Vision,’’ in Teutch, ed., 201. 43. David Wortman, ‘‘Social Justice: Reenvisioning Our Vision: A Response,’’ in Teutch, ed., 218.

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44. Eisen, 254. 45. Rabbi Jeff Roth, personal interview with the author, December 15, 2005. 46. Ibid. 47. Mark Verman, The History and Varieties of Jewish Meditation (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996). 48. Malkin, 39. 49. Ibid., 37. 50. Wine, 221. 51. Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 24. 52. Ibid., 106. 53. Naomi Doron, ‘‘Building Synagogue Skills,’’ in Grossman and Haut, eds., 261. 54. Susan B. Aranoff, ‘‘On Being a Hazzanit,’’ in Grossman and Haut, eds., 263. 55. Aryeh Kaplan, Jewish Meditation: A Practical Guide (New York: Schocken, 1985), vii. 56. Mark Lee Raphael, Judaism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 117. 57. Nancy Kasten, ‘‘Mi Li? Ma Ani? Our Public and Private Lives,’’ in Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, 21. 58. Dalai Lama, ‘‘Special Address,’’ in Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, 70. 59. Chester, 53. 60. Ibid., 53. 61. Ibid., 54. 62. Tara Dooley, ‘‘This is a Movement in Transition,’’ Houston Chronicle (November 18, 2005). 63. Mayer, 180. 64. Neil Gillman, ‘‘The Renewed Yearning and a Search for God: A New Jewish Spirituality?’’ in Proceedings of the Rabbinical Academy (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2000), 29. 65. Ibid., 20. 66. Ibid., 29. 67. Elliot Abrams, response to Neil Gillman, in Proceedings of the Rabbinical Academy, 26. 68. Ibid., 27. 69. Norman Lamm, The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998), 6–7. 70. Chaim Waxman, ‘‘Religion, Spirituality, and the Future of American Judaism,’’ in Jewish Spirituality and Divine Law, ed. Adam Mintz and Lawrence Schiffman (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2005), 514–15. 71. Lawrence Kushner, ‘‘The Synagogue and Caring Community,’’ in Teutch, ed., 231.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Cohen, Steven, and Arnold Eisen. The Jew Within. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Greenspoon, Leonard, and Ronald Simkins, eds. Studies in Jewish Civilization XIII: Spiritual Dimensions of Judaism. Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2003.

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Lerner, Michael. Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994. Sarna, Jonathan. American Judaism: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Teutch, David, ed. Imagining the Jewish Future. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

CHAPTER 5

Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism: The Changing Face of Evangelicalism in America David G. Roebuck

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n July 17, 2005, the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, taped its weekly television program that airs in more than 140 countries around the world on networks such as Black Entertainment Television and USA Network as well as the major religious networks such as Trinity Broadcasting Network. This Sunday was different, however. The eyes of many religious and secular observers were on this Pentecostal congregation that, under the leadership of Pastor Joel Osteen and his wife Victoria, had achieved celebrity status. Today they were in their new sanctuary—the Compaq Center, former home of the Houston Rockets. With more than $95 million of renovation, the now 16,000 seat sanctuary, complete with three jumbotrons, two waterfalls, and a large gold-colored rotating globe, was renamed the Lakewood International Center and became the home of America’s largest church with some 30,000 members. New to much of the American public, this growing congregation has its roots deep within both the fundamentalist and Pentecostal traditions of American evangelicalism. But with only modest appreciation for its roots, it has quickly become the new face of evangelicalism in America.

THE EVANGELICAL MILIEU Evangelicalism has had renewed influence in American life in the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. This is evident in church attendance on Sunday mornings and in the polling places on election days. Although numbers are hard to come by, in his recent history of evangelicalism in America, the historian Douglas A. Sweeney suggests that one-tenth of the world’s population is evangelical. Sweeney goes on to describe evangelicals as ‘‘gospel people,’’ noting that the very label itself

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comes from the Greek word meaning ‘‘gospel’’ and that evangelicals are committed to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. Other more complex definitions of the word often look at a series of theological beliefs related to the nature of scripture, Jesus, salvation, and the role of the Christian in society. Yet Sweeney suggests that many definitions of evangelicalism tend to define little more than conservative, if not mainstream, Christianity.1 Thus it is not surprising that the public often confuses and interchanges terms such as evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and Pentecostalism. Contemporary evangelicalism began nearly 300 years ago, about the time of the Great Awakening, as Protestants who had previously been divided over issues that emerged from the Reformation began to join together for the promotion of revival, spiritual awakening, and common mission. Ministers such as John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield focused the attention of the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic on the common goal of evangelism. Out of this emphasis came a broad cooperative Protestant Christianity that has come to be called evangelicalism. This new evangelicalism was particularly successful in those areas in which Christianity was separated from the idea of a state religion such as in the United States. According to Sweeney, ‘‘Disestablishment created a free market for religion in which evangelical entrepreneurs enjoyed unparalleled success.’’2 Out of that success came the large variety of evangelical denominations that exist today in the United States. The nineteenth century proved to be a century of extraordinary growth for Methodists, and the twentieth proved to be just as successful for Baptists and Pentecostals. Of extraordinary importance in the twentieth century have been those segments of evangelicalism known as fundamentalism and Pentecostalism. Although fundamentalism and Pentecostalism may be viewed as almost identical religious movements from a distance, this is not the line of sight used by those within these movements who are particularly aware of their differences. Further, these differences get exaggerated by insiders because one of the common characteristics of both of these movements is that they historically set themselves off from other Christians and from each other. Fundamentalists are quick to distinguish themselves from Pentecostals. And although some Pentecostals consider themselves fundamentalists, most in the last twenty-five years would disparage the connection. For our purposes in this chapter, I will suggest that fundamentalism and Pentecostalism can be considered the two extremes of the vast group of Christians in America today who call themselves evangelicals. But these are in fact the two extremes of evangelicalism that have had the growth and the most public attention in the last twenty-five years. Thus they cannot be ignored by observers of religion in America, including journalists and scholars. An example of this is that in his recent book on the emergence of pluralism in American religion, Charles H. Lippy acknowledged the resurgence and influence of these movements, even suggesting that ‘‘the major challenge to the hegemony’’ of mainline Protestantism came from those religious groups rooted in the Pentecostal movement that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.3 According to Sweeney, the twentieth

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century saw an explosion of evangelicalism in the world. And the largest part of this includes Pentecostals and charismatics. Not to be outdone, fundamentalism continues to grow as well.

THE EMERGENCE OF FUNDAMENTALISM The term ‘‘fundamentalism’’ is a broad category that is not limited to one or more denominations but is often used to refer to a variety of Protestant Christians who passionately emphasize what they identify as the fundamentals of the faith. Today it is often used by the public and the media to describe many conservative evangelicals—especially those who might be Baptist or on television or support the Right to Life movement. But the historical, theological, and social story of fundamentalism is far more complex and narrow. Although the list of ‘‘fundamentals’’ will sometimes vary, they most often refer to the authority of an inerrant Bible, the virgin birth of Jesus, the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus to atone for sins, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the authenticity of biblical miracles, and Jesus’s return to earth to usher in a millennium of peace. But scholars such as George Marsden also note that while fundamentalists are deeply religious evangelicals, who hold to a specific set of doctrines, they have also been uniquely shaped by experiences in American culture.4 Fundamentalism as a more or less organized movement developed as a reaction against the growing modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernism was the label attributed to liberal Protestants who increasingly accepted both evolution as an explanation for human origins and ‘‘higher criticism’’ as the dominant method of biblical studies. ‘‘Higher criticism’’ described the move away from a literal reading of the Bible in favor of a historical and symbolic reading of those texts that did not seem congruent with modern science and experience. Its proponents suggested that while the Bible was true in terms of faith, it should not be considered reliable in the areas of history and science. The use of higher criticism was highlighted in arguments that questioned the miracles related in scripture, the nature of Jesus, and the Genesis accounts of creation. Following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, many scientists and Protestant theologians came to view some method of evolution—often theistic—rather than the Genesis accounts as a plausible model for understanding the emergence of life. By the 1880s college textbooks were beginning to include an evolutionary framework, and high school textbooks were not far behind. Such ideas also permeated the highest levels of theological training in America as well as some of the best known pulpits. Those who would come to be called fundamentalists reacted against this defection from the faith and began to call for publications and organizations to stem the modernist tide. Denominations like the Presbyterian Church were split over the pronouncements of biblical scholars such as Charles Briggs at Union Seminary in New York. Opponents such as Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield at Princeton Theological Seminary argued for an inerrant

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Bible and traditional theology. Yet even Princeton eventually succumbed to new ways of thinking. The situation in America was exacerbated with societal changes that were taking place. As immigrants poured into the United States throughout the nineteenth century, cities began to explode with both people and problems. The Christian response varied, but some such as Washington Galdden and Walter Rauschenbusch critiqued the traditional evangelical gospel as inadequate because it failed to deal with the social problems of humankind. They called for a social gospel that gave primacy to solving the urban problems of the day rather than to saving men and women from their individual sins. This liberal approach was rejected by evangelicals, who appeared to abandon the hope of changing society in order to save some before the soon return of Jesus Christ. In what has come to be called the ‘‘great reversal,’’ evangelicals in large numbers shifted from a post-millennial view of Christ’s return to a premillennial view. This premillennialism was bolstered by John Nelson Darby’s dispensationalism, which taught that human history was divided into seven dispensations and that the church would be raptured before the Great Tribulation and the millennium.5 Although neither side of the struggle between evangelicals and those who emphasized the social gospel was as one-sided as their opponents suggested, the social gospel’s ‘‘liberal’’ approach to salvation was one more reason for fundamentalists to react against the changes of the time. Sweeney suggests that fundamentalists are so well known in part because many of their battles took place among the educational and ecclesial institutions of America.6 For example, the Presbyterian General Assembly called for all ordained ministers to subscribe to five fundamental Christian doctrines but abandoned that requirement in 1924. Princeton Theological Seminary began to become more tolerant when the presidency of J. Ross Stevenson began in 1914. In response to these types of changes, those calling for adherence to the fundamentals of the faith sounded the alarm. Three million copies of a twelve-volume set titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth were sent to ministers and missionaries around the world. When more than 6,000 gathered for a conference of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919, fundamentalists had found an institutional home and signaled a renewed militancy. High on their enemies list was Darwinism, their most public spokesperson was former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and their most public battle in their war to call Americans to righteousness took place six years later in Dayton, Tennessee, in what has come to be called the Scopes Monkey Trial.7 Although the Dayton, Tennessee, trial should not be seen as the personification of fundamentalism, it brought to the public’s attention a cultural divide that had been increasingly widening. With growing numbers of students involved in secondary education by the 1920s, anti-evolutionists became alarmed at the possibility of millions of American youth being exposed to evolution in their science textbooks. Beginning with Kentucky, legislative efforts to ban the teaching of evolution were at the forefront of the efforts of anti-evolutionists. In January 1925, primitive Baptist John

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Washington Butler introduced a bill to prohibit teaching evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. Butler’s bill made it criminal to teach ‘‘any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.’’8 With support coming in countless sermons and newspaper articles, the Tennessee legislature passed the bill. Many Tennesseans, including Governor Austin Peay who had signed the bill into law, hoped the Butler law would allow time for the debate over evolution to subside. They expressed belief that the law would never be enforced. Such hopes did not anticipate an active American Civil Liberties Union, however, who, believing the bill was a violation of free speech, advertised in Tennessee newspapers for someone willing to test the new law. On May 5, 1925, a group of Dayton businessmen asked substitute science teacher John Thomas Scopes to test the law. They hoped such a test case would bring both publicity and prosperity to the small town. The resulting trial, which became known as the ‘‘Trial of the Century,’’ became a national display of both the best of public oratory and the best of American carnival. Joe Mendi, known as the ‘‘chimpanzee with the intelligence of a five-yearold child,’’ was brought to Dayton so that, according to advertisements, ‘‘Every man has a perfect right to decide for himself as to whether his Ôfamily treeÕ bore coconuts or not.’’9 The famed attorney Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. Bryan argued the case for the state of Tennessee. Almost two hundred journalists, including H.L. Mencken, covered the proceedings, and by the time Scopes was convicted on a misdemeanor, many considered Dayton the epicenter of backward culture and religious fanaticism. Scholars now see the trial as the quintessential clash between culture and values in America: between the North and the South, between urban industrialization and rural agrarian economies, and between Protestant liberalism and fundamentalism. With an onslaught of public ridicule, many erroneously believed that fundamentalism had experienced a death blow in American culture. Nothing was further from the truth, however. Rather, fundamentalist Christians quietly developed institutions and nurtured the faithful. Within denominations and independent congregations they formed networks and support groups. Indeed, the years since 1970 have seen an extraordinary surge of public activities of fundamentalists in American politics and a renewed public debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools.

THE EMERGENCE OF PENTECOSTALISM Pentecostals are those Christians who emphasize the immediate work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian. They claim an experience called the baptism of the Holy Spirit in which the Christian has a post-conversion encounter that is often accompanied by speaking in tongues and other gifts of the Holy Spirit. Pentecostals base their theology on biblical passages such as Joel 2:28–29 and Acts 2. According to Joel, the ‘‘word of the Lord’’ was: ‘‘Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams,

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and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.’’ Following the ascension of Jesus, the disciples who gathered on the Jewish feast day of Pentecost experienced ‘‘a sound like the rush of a violent wind’’ and ‘‘divided tongues as of fire.’’ According to Luke, ‘‘All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability’’ (Acts 2:4). When questioned about the event, Peter claimed that this was the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy (Acts 2:16–21). The historian Edith L. Blumhofer has suggested that although fundamentalism was primarily a reaction against modernism, Pentecostalism was primarily an attempt ‘‘to reverse the overwhelming trend toward ÔcarnalityÕ in the churches and among church members.’’10 Although fundamentalists focused on the theological battle with modernism, Pentecostals engaged more in a pietistic protest. Pentecostalism is one of the fastest growing religious movements in the United States today. Just as important, it has influenced large numbers of Christians in most denominations. Interpreters of Pentecostalism often talk about three waves of development. The first wave, or ‘‘classical’’ Pentecostalism, was born out of radical nineteenth-century perfectionism and restorationism. Those searching to perfect the soul and to restore the New Testament church turned to the language in the biblical book of Acts that describes the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. They concluded that they were living in the ‘‘last days’’ and that God was granting a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The evidence of that outpouring was supernatural gifts of the Spirit. In particular speaking in tongues was seen as the biblical evidence that the believer was ‘‘baptized in the Holy Spirit.’’ While the giving of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost was the ‘‘former rain’’ of the Spirit given to establish the church, this ‘‘latter rain’’ of the Holy Spirit was seen as the final preparation of the church in order to win the world for Christ in the last days. Pentecostals look to two events as foundational to the movement. Under the tutelage of holiness preacher Charles Fox Parham, Agnes Ozman spoke in tongues at Parham’s Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, on January 1, 1901. Although the history of Christianity has included others who have spoken in tongues, it was Parham who brought together the cluster of ideas that included the premillennial return of Christ, radical perfectionism, and the supernatural gifts of the Spirit. Parham concluded the Spirit was being poured out in the last days and that speaking in tongues was a supernatural impartation of a natural human language specifically to win the world before the soon return of Christ. Although Parham’s ideas and influence were limited, they were transmitted by one of his disciples to a revival in Los Angeles now known as the Azusa Street revival. William J. Seymour, an African American, attended Parham’s Bible School in Houston, Texas, in 1905 and was later invited to Los Angeles to pastor a small holiness mission. When participants in a home prayer meeting on Bonnie Brae Street experienced speaking in tongues, the neighborhood was so inundated with seekers and onlookers that the small group moved to facilities at 312 Azusa Street.

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There they established the Apostolic Faith Mission and conducted a revival that lasted from 1906 to 1913. News of events, bolstered in part by attempts to explain the concurrent San Francisco earthquake, spread quickly in both the secular and religious press, and many holiness denominations and independent ministries seeking spiritual gifts and some form of perfectionism were influenced by the revival. Already existing holiness groups, such as the Pentecostal Holiness Church of North Carolina and the Church of God in Christ, were swept into the Pentecostal movement. New denominations of Pentecostal believers, such as the Assemblies of God, soon formed as well. Parham’s theology and Seymour’s revival had ushered in what Vinson Synan describes as ‘‘the century of the Holy Spirit.’’11

THE PUBLIC TRANSFORMATION OF PENTECOSTALISM For the most part what we now call classical Pentecostalism remained hidden from public life in America during the first half of the twentieth century. Most congregations worshipped in small meeting houses on the other side of the railroad tracks or in storefronts that dotted downtowns. The occasional Pentecostal who garnered public notoriety such as Aimee Semple McPherson,12 did little to endear Pentecostals to most Americans. Yet Pentecostalism turned out to be an extraordinary missionary movement that slowly but surely built networks and institutions both within and without the United States. Along the way, its message of a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit began to influence some in Roman Catholic congregations and mainline Protestant denominations who were seeking renewal of their own traditions. This emphasis on renewal through the work of the Holy Spirit, which began in the second half of the twentieth century, came to be called the charismatic movement and is now referred to as the ‘‘second wave’’ of Pentecostalism. The beginning of the movement is generally attributed to Dennis Bennett who, as rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, announced his personal experience of speaking in tongues to his congregation in 1960. Although Bennett was forced to resign from St. Mark’s, ‘‘exile’’ to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, Washington, gave him an opportunity to share his story and influence thousands of Christians in mainline denominations. A new openness to an emphasis on the Holy Spirit existed in part owing to the emergence of the ‘‘healing evangelists’’ in the 1940s and 1950s. Countless numbers of people who considered themselves as mainstream Protestants were exposed to Pentecostal theology through television programs and tent meetings of evangelists such as Oral Roberts and T.L. Osborn. Others were brought into the baptism of the Holy Spirit through parachurch ministries, such as the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, which began in Los Angeles in 1951 and quickly spread throughout the United States. Although those who emphasized the gifts of the Spirit at the beginning of

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the twentieth century had often found themselves ostracized by their denominations and thus organized their new Pentecostal denominations, fifty years later these new converts to the Pentecostal message remained within their mainline denominations and attempted to renew them. These Christians came to call themselves ‘‘charismatics’’ in order to distinguish themselves from Pentecostals.13 The charismatic renewal also grew rapidly among Roman Catholics in the United States. This was particularly facilitated by Pope John XXIII, who called for a new general council of the Roman Catholic Church. Vatican II looked for a ‘‘new Pentecost,’’ recognized the work of the Holy Spirit in the ‘‘separated brothers’’ of Protestantism, and emphasized the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit—all of which opened doors for the newly emerging charismatic movement among Roman Catholics. The early development of the movement is attributed to events at two universities in 1967: Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. At both, faculty and students alike read books with Pentecostal testimonies, studied the biblical book of the Acts of the Apostles, and sought for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. From these two universities interests in the charismatic renewal of the Catholic church grew rapidly, especially among those affiliated with Catholic higher education. The results included an extraordinary amount of theological reflection and the publication of a large number of books for both popular and academic audiences. In 1977 Protestant and Roman Catholic charismatic leaders joined forces to hold a conference on charismatic renewal in Kansas City, Missouri. About half of the 45,000 attendees were Protestant and about half were Catholic.14 The term ‘‘charismatic’’ is also used to denote many independent churches that emphasize the gifts of the Spirit, but are not a part of any denomination. These tend to look more like classical Pentecostal churches than do charismatics in mainline Protestant or Roman Catholic churches. Examples include Victory Christian Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles, California. Many of these large independent churches are in what is called the ‘‘Faith/Word’’ movement, which teaches that God desires Christians to have the faith to experience personal health and prosperity and that such blessings are realized by speaking words of faith. The ‘‘third wave’’ or ‘‘neocharismatic renewal’’ is the most recent development in the history of Pentecostalism. This category is used to describe groups that emphasize the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts and Pentecostal-like experiences, signs and wonders, and power encounters, but do not use classical Pentecostal terminology. Third-wave groups often do not see speaking in tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism or as even a necessary part of the work of the Spirit in the life of the Christian. Most in the neocharismatic renewal are not historically or theologically linked to Pentecostals. The best known of these are Calvary Chapel Ministries and the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Calvary Chapel Ministries began as a single congregation in Costa Mesa, California, under the leadership of Chuck Smith, who received national attention during the 1970s ‘‘Jesus

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People’’ revival. Smith’s emphasis on casual worship and Bible study led to rapid growth and the birth of more than 300 other congregations throughout the United States. Initially founded by Ken Gullichson, the Association of Vineyard Churches experienced extraordinary growth when John Wimber joined after leaving Calvary Chapel Ministries. Wimber was a former musician who had earlier formed the rock group, the Righteous Brothers. He was converted in 1963 and made a spiritual pilgrimage from the Society of Friends to Calvary Chapel and into the Vineyard. By 2005 the Vineyard reported about 600 congregations in the United States. Perhaps because of Wimber’s musical background, they are particularly well known for a style of ‘‘praise’’ music that has influenced many churches across the evangelical spectrum. Typical of many third-wave churches, both Calvary Chapel Ministries and the Association of Vineyard Churches emphasize divine healing, signs and wonders, and power manifestations in which a spontaneous work of the Holy Spirit leads to a supernatural event. Although there is a place for speaking in tongues it is not considered the sign of a Spirit baptism experience as it is among classical Pentecostals. In a more general sense, the term third wave is also used as a broad category to place groups that emphasize the work of the Holy Spirit but do not fit into either classical Pentecostalism or the charismatic movement. This is particularly true of groups outside the United States. It is difficult to determine how many Pentecostals of all three waves there are in the United States and around the world. Pentecostals are not unique in that they count members or constituents in a variety of different ways and often to their best possible advantage. The statistics quoted most often are those generated by David B. Barrett, a research professor of missiometrics and global evangelization at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In the year 2000 Barrett reported 523 million worldwide, divided into 65 million classical Pentecostals, 175 million charismatics, and 295 million third wavers. Of these only 32 percent were in the Western world and just over 75,000,000 were in the United States.15 However they are counted, Pentecostals have emerged as an important force in contemporary religious life and may well represent the most influential Christian movement of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The renewed emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit, the millenarian missionary impulse, and vibrant worship style has led to extraordinary growth. This growth has undoubtedly been aided in part by the importance given to a personal expression of religious faith at a time when this has become a dominant value in the religious landscape. Although Christianity has always had the personal dimension, there emerged in the twentieth century what Charles H. Lippy calls an ‘‘astounding proliferation to the expression of personal spirituality.’’16 This proliferation spanned the spectrum of religious faith in America from Pentecostalism to Neopaganism as well as secular movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Its presence has been particularly helpful to the growth of movements such as Pentecostalism and fundamentalism. Recent Pentecostalism is different

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from that of its roots, however. And this difference is directly tied to the rebirth of public fundamentalism.

THE REBIRTH OF PUBLIC FUNDAMENTALISM Many observers of religion in America believed that fundamentalism had died with the legal victory but subsequent public discrediting in the Scopes Trial of 1925. Such was the opinion of the eminent editors of the famed Christian Century who touted the death of the movement they considered ‘‘hollow and artificial’’ and ‘‘lacking in qualities of constructive achievement or survival.’’17 This belief was decidedly mistaken, however. The heirs to fundamentalism began to establish a potent network of nondenominational congregations, Bible institutes and colleges, youth camps, periodicals, and other parachurch ministries that enabled them both to separate from compromising Christians and to inculcate their faith into their own constituency. Fundamentalist heroes arose who encouraged and nurtured the faithful along with providing places of formation for their youth. Perhaps the best known of these were evangelists like Bob Jones, who founded what is today Bob Jones University, and John R. Rice, whose Sword of the Lord was read religiously by countless devotees for decades. Instead of dying, fundamentalism divided into two primary camps. One camp withdrew from public life with the intention of remaining separate from those who had compromised and accommodated modernism. But another camp evolved and emerged with the intent of engaging and changing both religious and public life. Both of these camps remained hidden through the two decades that followed the Dayton, Tennessee, events, but neither remained dormant. Both emerged in the 1940s with public associations designed to give them presence and clout in the public arena. The largest of these associations was the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Founded in 1941 under the leadership of J. Elwin Wright and Harold John Ockenga, the NAE adopted a position of ‘‘cooperation without compromise.’’ They avoided the use of terms such as fundamentalist and preferred to be called ‘‘new evangelicals.’’ Their stance can be seen in the title of their periodical, United Evangelical Action, and they encouraged participation in the public arena through a public affairs office and a humanitarian agency known as World Relief. Some even softened their position on scripture by jettisoning language referring to the inerrancy of scripture in favor of language that affirmed the authority of scripture. Of particular importance was the development of a related organization, the National Religious Broadcasters, in order to capitalize on the airwaves as a means of spreading the gospel. These cooperating heirs to fundamentalism soon dominated Christian radio, and today they dominate Christian television, especially through cable and satellite networks such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Inspiration Network, and Daystar Television Network. In addition to broadcasting, the emergence of the magazine Christianity Today, which was the idea of evangelist Billy Graham, gave the new evangelicals a significant

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voice in the print media. Today publishing among the new evangelicals is big business. Outlets such as Family Bookstores occupy malls, and popular titles such as Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series sell millions and propagate fundamentalist theology among the masses. On television stations, in bookstores, and in pulpits across the nation these heirs of fundamentalism seemed in the last quarter of the twentieth century to have arrived. Particularly important to our story is that these fundamentalists-turned-newevangelicals welcomed, even if sometimes begrudgingly, the inclusion of Pentecostals, and Pentecostals leaped at the chance to be inside the new evangelical establishment. Pentecostals have often served as leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals and its related organizations. And Pentecostal churches represent 50 percent of the organization in terms of membership.18 Many new evangelicals and especially Pentecostals have done remarkably well in television. Edith Blumhofer suggests that as a popular religion, Pentecostalism excels on television for several reasons. First the rhetoric of evangelism does well on television. Television provides what many Pentecostals believe is an efficient way to communicate the gospel. Second, television serves as a showcase for demonstrating the blessings of God with the display of fine clothes, jewelry, sanctuaries, and stage furnishings. This has been especially true among Word/Faith preachers, such as Kenneth E. Hagin, who have taught that God’s people should expect physical and financial as well as spiritual prosperity.19 Finally Pentecostals have always been fascinated with modern technology. Although Pentecostals at first resisted television, they have generally been open to the latest technology and comforts of American culture.20 This openness to the modern has been a characteristic of Pentecostalism from its earliest days according to historian Grant Wacker in his extraordinary look at the early years of Pentecostalism, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture.21 Yet Billy Graham and his new evangelical colleagues have had their opponents among contemporary fundamentalists. Along with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), another group known as the American Council of Christian Churches was also founded in 1941. Its leader, Carl McIntire, sought to separate not only from the world but from those, such as Graham, who did not separate from the world. In pulpits and the printed page of his Christian Beacon he attacked not only the modernists and their representative voice, which at the time was the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, but he also attacked new evangelicals just as vigorously. Among other issues was the NAE’s acceptance of the Pentecostals. The results of this infighting are that fundamentalists and their heirs have continued to be divided over issues at the core of their faith. By 1957 the very popular Graham was criticized for including mainline Protestants on the stage during his evangelistic crusades. In the eyes of McIntire, Jones, and Rice, Graham was cooperating with the enemy and thus had become the enemy. When Fuller Theological Seminary, a bastion of evangelical thought, dropped language on the inerrancy of scripture from its statement of faith, it too was seen as having compromised with liberal Christianity. Perhaps the bloodiest battle has occurred among the

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Southern Baptist Convention, in which a civil war broke out in the late 1970s between so-called ‘‘fundamentalists’’ and ‘‘moderates,’’ over views of scripture. Once those in the ‘‘fundamentalist’’ camp had taken control over the major institutions such as the Baptist Sunday School Board (now LifeWay) and seminaries such as the Southern Theological Seminary in Louisville, many of the so-called moderates began to support the alternative Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Along the way the Southern Baptist Convention has grown even more conservative in its rejection of social change, such as refusing to accept women in the ordained ministry.22 It is difficult to know how many heads to count when estimating the number of fundamentalists in America in the early twenty-first century, but the movement had a remarkable resurgence in the last half of the twentieth century. Most churches that identify themselves as fundamentalist are independent, having long left the confinement of denominations that they considered liberal and worldly. Many of these can be identified by the use of ‘‘Bible’’ in their name. A few fundamentalist networks have emerged. Larry Eskridge presents a narrow but helpful definition on the Web site of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. He notes that: since the 1940s, the term fundamentalist has come to denote a particularly aggressive style related to the conviction that the separation from cultural decadence and apostate (read liberal) churches are telling marks of faithfulness to Christ. Most self-described fundamentalist churches today are conservative, separatist Baptist (though often calling themselves ‘‘Bible Baptist’’ or simply ‘‘Bible’’ churches) congregations such as the churches of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC), or the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (IFCA). Institutions associated with this movement would include Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC) and Tennessee Temple (Chattanooga, TN); representative publications would be the Sword of the Lord and the Biblical Evangelist.23

Most definitions of fundamentalism revolve around the rigid adherence to a sacred text—in the case of Christianity, the Bible; and many new evangelicals and Pentecostals fit into that category. Yet most evangelicals eschew the term not for doctrinal reasons but because of past stigma or because of the rigid separation demanded by fundamentalists. Should Pentecostals be included in the numbers when counting fundamentalists? Certainly those of the second and third waves should not be included. But what about classical Pentecostals? Fundamentalists themselves tend to reject Pentecostals, yet most classical Pentecostals would pass a fundamentalist test related to doctrine. Although neither a view of scripture as inerrant nor premillennial dispensationalism is historically Wesleyan, even those Pentecostal denominations out of the Wesleyan tradition have adopted these doctrinal positions practically if not officially. The Church of God (Cleveland, TN) is a case in point. The Church of God’s declaration of faith does not use the word ‘‘inerrant’’ in its discussion of the authority of scripture. Yet it can be argued that many of its members would use this term when discussing scripture and might even label themselves as

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fundamentalists. It is clear that the denomination officially avoids this characterization of the movement as fundamentalist, however. The movement’s official history describes the Church of God as ‘‘foundational’’ in reference to the basic doctrines of Christianity. But when these foundation doctrines are listed they are in fact the five ‘‘fundamentals.’’ This language is repeated on the denomination’s Web site as well.24 However they are counted, fundamentalists have been very visible in American life in recent years and have often been credited with being key to the elections of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the White House. They are also active participants in public discussion and policy making on a broad agenda that includes the availability of abortions, the selection of Supreme Court justices, the production of stem cells, and the use of school vouchers, as well as the ongoing place of evolution and creationism in public schools. It seems that politics have reunited the American religious right of all denominations, and fundamentalists seem to be at the heart of it despite their inability to cooperate with other evangelicals in other ways.25 Certainly Pentecostals have not only joined with fundamentalists in promoting a conservative political agenda, but many have become active participants in government. For example, Assemblies of God members who have been part of the institutions of government include James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Reagan, and John Ashcroft, who served as attorney general for George W. Bush after having served as governor of Missouri. M.G. ‘‘Pat’’ Robertson, a charismatic Baptist and one of the most public charismatic figures, made a significant run for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 1988. One should not limit the appeal of fundamentalism to the power of a political agenda, however. Within fundamentalism are powerful attractions for some people. Charles H. Lippy has noted the power of informal worship and absolute stands in a culture that is rocked by ambiguity on many of the moral and theological issues of the day.26

PRESENCE AND POWER TODAY AND TOMORROW Despite the emergence of fundamentalism in the last part of the twentieth century, the future of evangelicalism may lie with Pentecostalism or at least a Pentecostal-influenced evangelicalism. Although this influence is difficult to measure, it cannot be denied, even in those theological traditions most resistant, such as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Congregations that practice speaking in tongues are sometimes barred from local or state Baptist associations, but the national convention has not ruled on this issue because it considers this a local matter rather than a national matter. Baptist missionaries will not be sent if they testify to speaking in tongues, however.27 Despite such restrictions, there are significant numbers of Baptists who have been influenced by Pentecostalism in both subtle and overt ways. In her article, ‘‘Pentecostal Currents in the SBC,’’ Helen Lee Turner attempts to suggest some of the ways that Southern Baptists have been influenced by Pentecostalism. Among those are a more open stance toward immediate divine intervention and at least in some places an emphasis on

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the preacher as a prophet. Characteristics of the latter include the preacher kneeling for prayer prior to the sermon and a lively, loud preaching style. Turner also concludes that worship space and style have been influenced by Pentecostals. Although she admits the difficulty of showing cause and effect, she points to the move toward radial rather than rectangular worship space, which creates more of a community atmosphere and allows for more space for the response of the people; the use of smaller and translucent pulpits, which seem to eliminate some distance between the congregation and the preacher; the use of a larger platform area, which gives more space for musical ensembles and dramatic presentations; and the trend toward singing courses rather than hymns, which allows for music that is easily learned and easily sung and also frees the hands for worship.28 Despite Turner’s suggestive examples, it is difficult to know to what degree these currents are ‘‘Pentecostal’’ and to what degree they are simply societal changes that are being adapted by Pentecostals as well as other Christian groups.

THE FACE OF PENTECOSTALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY However one determines cause and effect, Lakewood International Center in Houston is a revealing example of a congregation’s move from fundamentalism to Pentecostalism and then to what may be the future look of evangelicalism. The Lakewood Church began under the leadership of John Osteen and his wife, Delores (Dodie). John Osteen, a Southern Baptist minister and pastor in Houston, experienced a personal baptism in the Holy Spirit in 1958 as well as the healing of his daughter from an injury she sustained at birth. When other church members received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Osteen found it difficult to remain in his local church and launched a healing ministry. Then on Mother’s Day in 1959 he started the Lakewood Baptist Church in an abandoned feed store just outside of Houston.29 The Osteens’ youngest son, Joel, attended Oral Roberts University for a brief time and then in 1981 came to work for the church in order to produce a television program. The program became very successful and by 2005 aired on many Christian television networks in both a one-hour and half-hour formats. The show is unique in that it never solicits money as part of the program. With John’s preaching style and Joel’s marketing abilities, the Lakewood Church achieved remarkable growth and became widely known in the Pentecostal and charismatic world. Six thousand people attended each Sunday by the time of John’s death in 1999. Despite his lack of experience, Joel became the senior pastor of the Lakewood Church, and the church quickly rose to the top of the growing ranks of megachurches in America. Even the 8,000-seat sanctuary built in 1987 was unable to accommodate those who came to worship, and the church began to look for a place to relocate. When the National Basketball Association’s

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Houston Rockets vacated the Compaq Center, Lakewood Church leased the facility and turned it into a 16,000 seat sanctuary. Once again an abandoned facility was transformed into a worship center. ‘‘I don’t want this to sound arrogant, but I believe one day we’re going to have 100,000 a weekend,’’ Osteen has said.30 Currently the church has a Saturday evening service and multiple services on Sunday, including a Sunday afternoon Spanish-language service. Lakewood is not a traditional Pentecostal church. Rather, it looks more like a third-wave congregation than a classical Pentecostal church. Neither is Joel Osteen a traditional Pentecostal preacher. He works hard to have a positive, upbeat, and relevant message. His signature theme is ‘‘Discover the Champion in You,’’ and his preaching focuses on practical living rather than fine points of theology. The message is one of inclusion rather than separation. Yet when one looks closely, one sees that the church is clearly rooted in both the fundamentalist and Pentecostal camps. The first declaration in its seven-point statement of faith is ‘‘We believe the entire Bible is inspired by God, without error and the authority on which we base our faith, conduct and doctrine.’’ One has to look more closely to find evidence of the charismatic movement, at least on the church’s Web site. Although there is no doctrinal statement on speaking in tongues, there is the mention of a monthly class on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The statement of faith also includes the call for each believer to yield to the Holy Spirit and the declaration that children of God ‘‘are overcomers and more than conquerors and God intends for each of us to experience the abundant life He has in store for us.’’ This latter point fits well with the Word of Faith strand of Pentecostalism that had been preached by John Osteen, as does the declaration that the congregation recites aloud before each sermon: This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do. Today I will be taught the Word of God. I boldly confess. My mind is alert. My heart is receptive. I will never be the same. I am about to receive the incorruptible, indestructible, ever-living seed of the Word of God. I will never be the same. Never, never, never. I’ll never be the same. In Jesus’ name.

As is typical in fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches of the past, each sermon ends with an altar call, in which dozens of people respond to the opportunity for salvation and dedication to Jesus Christ. There are some unique aspects of the Lakewood Church, however, including the fact that from its earliest days it has had nearly equal numbers of Hispanic,

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African American, and Anglo members. Such multiculturalism has been rare in Pentecostalism since the revival at the Azusa Street Mission in 1906. Like his father before him, Joel Osteen has become far more than a local pastor. His extensive television exposure has made him a religious celebrity. His book, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, was widely promoted on television talk and news shows such as Good Morning, America and Larry King Live! and quickly rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It has spawned a companion devotional book, Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now, so that the previous book can be consumed in ninety ‘‘bite-sized bits.’’31 In July 2004, Joel and Victoria began to tour major cities of the United States to hold ‘‘An Evening with Joel Osteen.’’ Hundreds of thousands have purchased $10 tickets through TicketMaster in order to have an evening with music, worship, and a motivational sermon complete with a traditional evangelical altar call. With its occupation of the Compaq Center, the Lakewood Church has greatly increased its visibility in Houston as well and is becoming a major player in the community. For example, in December 2005 the Lakewood Church hosted the Houston Symphony and Chorus, with the evening’s program narrated by Pastor Joel Osteen and his wife Victoria. Through megachurches such as the Lakewood Church, Pentecostalism will have even more influence on faith in America in the coming years. Megachurches are a new American phenomenon and are typically considered those churches with more than 2,000 in attendance on a given Sunday. Most of them are evangelical, and the largest number is Southern Baptist. But a growing number of them are Pentecostal—at least in background. Examples of Pentecostal megachurches include Brownsville Church (Assemblies of God) in Pensacola, Florida, Cornerstone Church in Houston, Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles, First Assembly of God in Phoenix, Arizona, The Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas, and World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. Their worship is often very contemporary, with an emphasis on dynamic and lively music that is made possible through the services of paid musicians and the best sound and video equipment that money can buy. Congregations have usually been built around one central personality, although in the case of Lakewood Church the ministry of the father has been extended through the son. Although megachurches are currently most successful in the Sunbelt and can exist only in areas with lots of people and property, their influence reaches far beyond the driving distance of its membership because many of them have television programs viewed by large audiences and their pastors often host or attend conferences for ministers and laity around the world. Thus these megachurches have become a type of ‘‘cathedral,’’ with the pastor serving as bishop of a large number of ministers.32 With their public and powerful presence, Pentecostals are no longer a marginalized sector of American Christianity. With the rise of neo-Pentecostalism and megachurches such as Lakewood Church, it is not surprising that Pentecostalism has had a major influence on evangelical Christianity. Douglas Sweeney calls attention to

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the fact that the casual ‘‘come as you are’’ style of the Calvary Chapels and Vineyard have been adopted by many congregations, as has a more casual and enthusiastic form of worship that includes heavy doses of folk and pop music. Sweeney concludes, ‘‘Now found in every Christian tradition in every corner of the world, uniquely Pentecostal passion for apostolic authenticity, the supernatural gifts, and energetic spirituality has excited the Christian piety and practices of billions. Perhaps the fastestgrowing movement that the church has ever seen, holiness-Pentecostalism— as conveyed by charismatics—has given the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church a facelift, rendering its features more evangelical in the process.’’33 Corwin E. Smidt and his colleagues concur that Pentecostalism has made ‘‘inroads within American religious life’’ and go on to suggest that in addition to the influence at the institutional level, important changes have occurred at the individual level.34 These include an increase in interaction between Pentecostals and other Christians, the fact that Pentecostals now come from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, the crossfertilization that the radio and television media has produced, and the apparent changes in worship styles across denominations.35

CHALLENGES FOR OVERCOMERS Although both fundamentalists and Pentecostals declare that the Christian can be an overcomer and although these movements have had tremendous impact on faith in America in the last twenty-five years, the movements themselves face a variety of challenges. Many of these are the typical challenges that face most Christian denominations in the United States. These include, for example, an aging ministry. The youthful Joel Osteen is unusual in pulpits today. The Church of God reports that only 15 percent of its pastors are under the age of forty, and it is likely that similar statistics can be reported by most other Pentecostal denominations and independent churches. Another challenge is the shift from the prominence of small churches in rural America to churches that serve the growing populations of the nation’s cities. As small towns decrease, so do the numbers of members of their churches. Yet those that remain need pastoral care. And planting churches in cities requires different strategies and increased resources. Also typical of other Christian groups is the struggle to become more inclusive in an increasingly racially diverse America on a shrinking globe. Following the founding days of the movement, Pentecostals quickly divided along racial, ethnic, and doctrinal lines. It was not until they became part of the National Association of Evangelicals that Pentecostal denominations began to look beyond their differences toward the possibilities of cooperation not only among other evangelicals but among themselves. In 1947 many Pentecostal denominations gathered together in Europe for the inaugural meeting of the World Pentecostal Conference in Zurich, Switzerland. Then in 1948 representatives of several U.S. denominations formed the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America (PFNA). They adopted the statement of faith of the National Association of Evangelicals,

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with the addition of an article on the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. All of the charter denominations and others that later joined were majority-white denominations. No denomination was invited to join that was a majority-black denomination. When Bishop Bernard E. Underwood of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church was elected as chairperson of the PFNA in 1991, he moved toward the inclusion of other races in the organization. At their annual meeting in Memphis in 1994, members disbanded the PFNA and organized a new group that included both black and white denominations, along with independent charismatic congregations and networks. By the time the meeting ended, delegates were calling the event the ‘‘Memphis Miracle.’’ Named the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America (PCCNA), this new organization has been led by black and white cochairs. Bishop Ithiel Clemmons of the Church of God in Christ became the first African American co-chair. Despite the powerful and groundbreaking beginning, the role of the PCCNA in the lives of its constituents remains uncertain. Attendance at large interdenominational gatherings both in the United States and abroad have tended to decline in recent years. There is also little evidence that the PCCNA has put forth an agenda that has helped to move Pentecostalism toward a more racially and ethnically inclusive posture in American life. Part of the issue is that organizations like the PCCNA have traditionally depended on well-attended events to promote their causes. With the proliferation of Pentecostal television and the popularity of evangelists, such as Benny Hinn, who routinely fill large auditoriums, the faithful are not as likely to be drawn to such events. In recent years, the PCCNA has attempted to focus on smaller gatherings of young leaders as it charts the future of the organization. The challenge of becoming more racially and ethnically diverse is compounded for Pentecostal denominations by the fact that much of their growth in recent years has come among the expanding immigrant populations in the United States. Many of the new congregations are being planted among Hispanic, Korean, Haitian, Romanian, and other ethnic populations, while church plants among white and African American populations are relatively flat. Although these new congregations are welcome, incorporating them into the life of a denomination that is majority-white or majority-black will require new ways of thinking among the classical denominations. Added to this challenge is the reality that Christianity, including its Pentecostal forms, is growing far more rapidly in the Southern hemisphere and in the East than it is in the West. All Christians in the West may by the middle of this century understand what it means to be part of a minority.36 In light of the growing presence of neo-Pentecostalism, the identity and place of classical Pentecostal denominations are undergoing challenging changes. Edith Blumhofer has suggested that Pentecostals have modeled themselves after their television celebrities and have substituted a celebration of the Spirit for their earlier emphasis on the soon return of Jesus.37 Although independent Pentecostal congregations may be growing,

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classical denominations are flat or declining. Edith Blumhofer has suggested that the Assemblies of God (and, I suggest, other denominations as well) are facing challenges that come to movements when they both conserve and expand. According to Blumhofer, the Assemblies of God began the last decade of the twentieth century by declaring it to be the ‘‘Decade of the Harvest,’’ and its leadership looked forward to achieving important growth goals as the movement entered the twenty-first century. Despite their rhetoric, Blumhofer suggests that Assemblies of God leadership both failed to inspire their ministers and members and instead masked the reality of what was more akin to a stagnant decade with only modest gains. For Blumhofer, the fact that denominational leadership measured success in terms of numbers indicated that it was no longer interested in living in tension with this world but longed to be a part of the American mainstream. Underneath the call for increased numbers was a denominational leadership out of touch with many of its constituencies, including women ministers. For Blumhofer, the location of the denomination’s U.S. headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, represents a cloistered reality out of touch with an increasingly urban America. She concludes that the few bright spots in Assemblies of God life are those megachurches that are successful numerically but do not represent the typical Assemblies of God congregation.38 At the heart of Pentecostal challenges regarding identity is the practice of speaking in tongues, which has most often been considered the evidence of Spirit baptism since the days of Charles Fox Parham’s Bethel Bible School. Classical Pentecostals fear that growing numbers of their constituency do not testify to a Spirit-baptism experience accompanied by tongues speech. For example, Thomas Trask, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, has lamented ‘‘that nearly 50 percent of the Assemblies of God laity did not have the experience.’’ He concluded, ‘‘We may be Pentecostal in doctrine, but not in experience.’’39 Trask is not far off the mark when compared to a study of 4,001 Americans of various denominations conducted by the Survey Research Center of the University of Akron in 1992. This study showed that 55.6 percent of white Pentecostals claimed to speak in tongues, while 33.1 percent of black Pentecostals reported tongues speech. Interestingly the percentage is much higher (74.6 percent) among nondenominational charismatics.40 Although Trask may indeed be correct, no significant study has charted the experience among Pentecostals through the decades. So it is impossible to compare the contemporary scene with that of earlier generations with any degree of accuracy. Whatever the reality, Pentecostal leaders are convinced that they have a problem. Their larger problem, however, may not be doctrine, but the very survival of the old denominations in an age that seems to favor megachurches and independent, personality-driven ministries. In her 1989 study The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads: Charisma and Institutional Dilemmas, Margaret M. Poloma suggested that although institutional success in the Assemblies of God has always been closely intertwined with charisma, there was evidence that charisma was being devalued by many of the

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denomination’s leaders and ministers. Further, she suggested that marriage between Pentecostals and new evangelicals had led to a lessening of the charismatic and experiential theology in the movement. As a result, the heart and soul, the very reason for the existence of Pentecostalism, was being preserved not in the movement’s institutional structures or even in many of its congregations. Rather, charisma was most often within the Assemblies of God seen in local congregations led by charismatic pastors and outside the Assemblies of God in the emerging charismatic and neocharismatic movements.41 If she were writing today it is likely that she would have included Joel Osteen and Lakewood Church on her list. Since the days of Jonathan Edwards, evangelical Christianity in America has witnessed the ebb and flow of both the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of church leaders to conserve the results of revivals into human institutions. There is little evidence to believe that this will cease in this millennium. The tension between charismata and institution building will continue to challenge leaders and laity alike. Yet with today’s immediacy of television and the inexpensive proliferation of publishing, events seem to be playing out on a much larger stage and in much greater numbers. Despite its call for separation, which seems to be part of its very essence, fundamentalism continues to play a major role in the public life of Americans as its challenges basic cultural values in the political arena. At the same time, Pentecostalism continues to influence the worship practices and vitality of Christianity far beyond the strength of its own numbers. There is much that classical Pentecostals can find to lament about their changing role in the Pentecostal movement and to complain about the emerging face of Pentecostalism in the twenty-first century. But as the movement enters its second century of existence it stands poised for yet another ‘‘century of the Holy Spirit.’’

NOTES 1. Douglas A. Sweeney, The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 9, 17–21. 2. Ibid., 61. 3. Charles H. Lippy, Pluralism Comes of Age (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 19. 4. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3. 5. For a brief discussion of the role of premillennialism in the evangelical movement see Timothy P. Weber, ‘‘Premillennialism and the Branches of Evangelicalism,’’ in The Variety of American Evangelicalism, ed. Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnson (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 5–21. 6. Sweeney, 155, 165–69. 7. For an excellent discussion of the Scopes trial, see Jeffery P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002). 8. Ibid., 21. 9. Ibid., 1.

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10. Edith L. Blumhofer, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism,’’ ed. Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), ix. 11. Vinson Synan, ed., The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001). For a history of the Pentecostal movement, see also Vinson Synan, The Holiness Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997). 12. For the best discussion of McPherson, see Edith L. Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993). 13. For a history of the healing evangelists, see David Edwin Harrell, Jr., All Things Possible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). For information on the charismatic renewal in the Protestant churches see Dennis Bennett, Nine O’Clock in the Morning (Plainfield, NJ: Bridge Publishing, 1970); Michael Harper, As At the Beginning: The Twentieth Century Pentecostal Revival (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965); and Synan, Century of the Holy Spirit. 14. For information on the charismatic movement among Roman Catholics, see Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, Catholic Pentecostals (Paramus, NJ: Paulist Press, 1969); Edward O’Connor, The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1971); and Francis A. Sullivan, Charisms and the Charismatic Renewal (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1982). 15. Actual numbers for the United States include 4,946,390 Pentecostals, 19,473,158 charismatics, and 50,736,451 neocharismatics. D.B. Barrett and T.M. Johnson, ‘‘Global Statistics,’’ in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, rev. ed., ed. Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard M. Van der Maas (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 277, 284, and 301. 16. Lippy, 93. 17. ‘‘Vanishing Fundamentalism,’’ Christian Century (June 24, 1926): 799, quoted in Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xi. 18. Arthur H. Matthews, Standing Up, Standing Together: The Emergence of the National Association of Evangelicals (Carol Stream, IL: National Association of Evangelicals, 1992), 167–75. 19. During his lifetime, Kenneth E. Hagin wrote many booklets propagating his theological ideas which have spread among many independent Pentecostals in particular. Hagin’s theology is often referred to as the Gospel of Health and Wealth. Some of Hagin’s booklets include The Believer’s Authority (Tulsa, OK: Faith Library, 1984); Healing Belongs to Us (Tulsa, OK: Kenneth E. Hagin, n.d.); and Redeemed from Poverty, Sickness and Death (Tulsa, OK: Faith Library, 1983). 20. Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 256. 21. Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 22. See Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Changes and Religious Conflicts in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 23. Larry Eskridge, ‘‘Defining Evangelicalism,’’ Web site of the Institute for the Study of Evangelicals, http://www.wheaton.edu/isae/defining_evangelicalism.html# Pentecostalism, accessed November 14, 2005. 24. Charles W. Conn, Like a Mighty Army: A History of the Church of God, definitive ed. (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1996), xxviii. See also http:// www.churchofgod.cc/about/church_is.cfm, accessed November 15, 2005.

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25. See Ed Dobson and Ed Hindson, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon: The Resurgence of Conservative Christianity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Galilee, 1981), 143–44. 26. Lippy, 33. 27. See John W. Kennedy, ‘‘The Art of Cooperation,’’ Christianity Today (April 24, 2000): 24. 28. Helen Lee Turner, ‘‘Pentecostal Currents in the SBC: Divine Intervention, Prophetic Preachers, and Charismatic Worship’’ in Blumhofer, Spittler, and Wacker, eds., 209–25. 29. See, as examples, John Osteen, The Confessions of a Baptist Preacher (Houston: John Osteen, 1983); John H. Osteen, How God Baptized Me in the Holy Ghost and Fire (Houston: John H. Osteen Evangelistic Association, 1961); and John H. Osteen, How You May Receive the Baptism of the Holy Ghost (Houston: John H. Osteen Evangelistic Association, 1961). 30. Quoted in Ernest Herndon, ‘‘How a Big Church Grew Bigger,’’ Charisma & Christian Life (June 2004): 42–50. 31. See Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (New York: Warner Faith, 2004); and Joel Osteen, Daily Readings from Your Best Life Now (New York: Warner Faith, 2005), vi. 32. For an excellent study of megachurches, see Scott Thumma, ‘‘Exploring the Megachurch Phenomena: Their Characteristics and Cultural Context,’’ http://hirr. hartsem.edu/bookshelf/thumma_article2.html, accessed November 14, 2005. 33. Sweeney, 152–53. 34. Corwin E. Smidt, Lyman A. Kellstedt, John C. Green, and James L. Guth, ‘‘The Spirit-Filled Movements in Contemporary America: A Survey Perspective,’’ in Blumhofer, Spittler, and Wacker, eds., 111. 35. Ibid., 111–12. 36. See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 37. Blumhofer, 257. 38. Ibid., 264–74. 39. Quoted in Smidt, et al., 129n6. 40. Ibid., 116. 41. Margaret M. Poloma, The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads: Charisma and Institutional Dilemmas (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 241–43.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Blumhofer, Edith L., Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker. Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Burgess, Stanley M., and Eduard M. Van der Maas, eds. The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, rev. ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002. Carpenter, Joel. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Sweeney, Douglas A. The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005. Synan, Vinson. The Holiness Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids. MI: Eerdmans, 1997.

CHAPTER 6

Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in America: The Impact of World Religions Khyati Y. Joshi

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hroughout American history, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism have been represented on American shores by both immigrants—individuals born in or descended from those Asian and African countries where the religions predominate—and domestic converts. Indeed, immigrants and their families still constitute the majority of American Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. While the theologies of these four religions are varied, they share certain similarities both in terms of their impact on the United States and its culture and in terms of America’s influence on their followers. American followers of these faiths have been relatively few in number until recently. The waxing and waning of the population of adherents of these world religions in America have been primarily impacted by two ‘‘push/pull’’ forces: (1) U.S. immigration policy and (2) the sociopolitical situation in the adherents’ countries of origin. At particular historical moments, ‘‘pull’’ factors such as the need for certain types of labor have influenced U.S. immigration policy. ‘‘Push’’ factors may include the pre-immigration characteristics of an immigrant cohort, such as majority or minority status in the country of origin or status as a refugee from war, political instability, or economic distress in the home country. The experience of an early wave of Asian immigrants (including many Buddhists) illustrates the interaction of push and pull factors: In the mid-1800s, during the California Gold Rush, laborers were needed to provide services like construction of the transcontinental railroad. Tens of thousands of immigrants from China were welcomed for this purpose. Alongside this ‘‘pull’’ factor was a ‘‘push’’ factor: Most men who came to the United States were second or third sons in their families in China, where family property typically went only to the first-born son.

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Also, China was then experiencing difficult economic times, and there was widespread poverty. This situation, combined with cultural traditions of inheritance, caused later-born male siblings to leave China to seek economic prosperity. Other religious communities, such as the relatively small number of Sikh agricultural workers from India, had similar experiences in the nineteenth century as a result of different ‘‘push’’ factors. Although these Asian immigrants were allowed to enter the United States, after arrival they were restricted to a few types of jobs; federal law forbade them to own land, become citizens, or establish businesses. Many states—including California, Oregon, and Washington—where most of the Asian immigrants resided, passed their own separate laws making aliens ineligible for citizenship. Many Asian immigrants challenged these laws, but were successful in only a few cases, resulting in a handful of exceptions for people wanting to buy land to own a home or start a business. The pendulum of support for Asian immigration soon swung in the opposite direction. Racial tensions increased as more Chinese created competition in the job market. By 1882, growing hostility against the Chinese resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act. Initially written as only a ten-year ban on Chinese immigration, the law later was extended indefinitely and made permanent in 1902. Immigration from the rest of Asia was possible until the 1917 Barred Zone Act, which recognized an Asiatic Barred Zone—a geographic region encompassing much of southern and eastern Asia and the Pacific islands, but excluding American territories of Guam and the Philippines—from which no immigrants would be admitted to the United States. Because these geographic regions were then home to many of the world’s Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, these religious groups were effectively shut out of the United States by the act. The Middle East was not included in the ‘‘barred zone,’’ and Arab immigrants, some who were Muslim, were still allowed to enter the country until 1924. The National Origins Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, dramatically slowed immigration by indexing foreign countries’ immigration quotas to the number of Americans of that national origin as reported in the 1890 census. Known as the 2-percent rule because the law capped new immigration at 2 percent of those of a particular national stock already in the United States, the provision functioned to preserve the American demographic profile of 1890, allowing only a handful of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern immigrants and even a relatively small number of southern and eastern Europeans. Later the 2-percent rule was replaced by an overall limit of 150,000 immigrants annually with countries’ proportions determined by ‘‘national origins’’ as revealed in the 1920 census.1 For more than forty years, most of these restrictions remained in place. The Asiatic Barred Zone was abolished by the McCarran Walter Act in 1952, which permitted up to one hundred people from each country in the world to immigrate each year and allowed a small number of individualized exceptions, such as the admission of two thousand Palestinian refugees in 1953. After 1924 there were other pieces of federal legislation that impacted selected Asian groups, but it was not until the Immigration

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Reform Act of 1965 that Asians, Africans, and Arabs could enter the United States again in large numbers. This time the ‘‘pull’’ was the United States’ need for physicians to supplement a medical workforce stretched thin by the Vietnam War and for engineers to bolster American efforts to keep up with its cold war enemy, the Soviet Union. Later, the ‘‘pull’’ was the technology boom of the 1990s. Immigration from Southeast Asia was expanded further by the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975, which established a program of domestic resettlement assistance for refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam. The post-1965 wave of immigration from former ‘‘barred zones’’ has resulted in substantial growth in the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh populations in the United States.2 How many Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs are there in the United States? It is virtually impossible to know the exact numbers. Whereas the decennial census affords us a clear look at the ethnic and racial makeup of the U.S. population, it does not provide the same with religion. The law expressly permits the Census Bureau to collect data on religious affiliation, but the Bureau declines to do so on the basis of a law that prohibits ‘‘mandatory’’ questions about religion.3 Most nongovernmental research surveys that collect data on religion do so based on local congregations. These surveys are unlikely to yield reliable data especially for followers of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism, since for them religious observance is not centered around the house of worship or the regularized congregational practice typical of the Abrahamic faiths. Nevertheless, by relying upon several data sources it is possible to come up with an approximate (and likely accurate) number for each religion. In 2005, the United States was home to approximately 1.5 million Buddhists and between 5.5 and 6 million Muslims of all races. It is believed there were between 1 million and 1.3 million Hindus in the United States, and 250,000 to 500,000 Sikhs. All four religious populations continue to grow and are part of life across the country, in suburbs and small towns as well as major metropolitan centers.4 Although each of these religions has American converts of all races, most of the communities are made up of first- and second-generation Asian, Arab, and African Americans. Buddhists have come primarily from Japan, Korea, China, Tibet, Thailand, and other Asian nations. Approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of Buddhists in America are Asian American with the remainder being white American converts. The majority of Hindus in the United States are originally from India, and some are twice migrants. That is, they first immigrated to the British Commonwealth nations of Africa and the Caribbean or Canada and later arrived in the United States. Islam is a panethnic religion; its American adherents hail from East, Southeast, Central, and South Asia; from Africa; and from the Arab world. There are also African American and European American (e.g., Albanian) Muslims. The ethnic origins of the Muslim community in America in the early twenty-first century is approximately 26.2 percent Middle East (Arab), 24.7 percent South Asia, 23.8 percent African American, 10.3 percent Middle East (non-Arab), 11.6 percent Other, and 6.4 percent East Asia.5 Most Sikhs are from the Indian subcontinent, specifically from

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a region called the Punjab that includes parts of present-day India and Pakistan. National origin is relevant to adherents’ religious experience in America in part because of the impact of social structures in country of origin. Consider, for example, the fact that Hindus arriving from India and Muslims arriving from countries such as Indonesia and Egypt were accustomed to being part of the majority community in their native lands, but on arrival in the United States suddenly found themselves part of a tiny minority invisible in the broader culture. By contrast, consider the experience of Sikhs and Muslims from India, who both left and arrived to a status as an arguably oppressed minority group. Finally, consider how all these immigrant communities’ social interaction with the broader American milieu was affected by their status as non-native speakers of English and in many cases by their status as racial minorities. While all four faiths have been present throughout the history of the United States, the most substantial impact on U.S. society and culture has come about because of the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 that allowed immigrants from Asia in particular to come in unprecedented numbers. Unlike earlier waves, which were often comprised primarily of young single men, the post-1965 wave of Asian immigrants and refugees included entire families in many cases. Their children enrolled in American schools, and developing Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities established centers that functioned not only to maintain a religious and cultural identity, but also to transmit it to the next generation. Each religion, with its theology, global history, and encounters with the American milieu, gives unique characteristics to the experiences of its adherents and their place in contemporary American society. Although there are American converts to each tradition as well, the focus of this chapter will center on the experience of the new immigrant generation.

AMERICAN BUDDHISM: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Sakyamuni (Sakya clan sage) or the Buddha, is credited with founding Buddhism over 2,500 years ago. He was born in the kingdom of the Sakayas, near the present-day border between India and Nepal. Fundamentally, the ultimate goal of Buddhism is to end the cycle of suffering and rebirth, samsara, and attain nirvana. Buddhists believe that one must rise above desires in order to reach a state of enlightenment. This can be accomplished by leading a virtuous life and gaining wisdom, which is attained as a result of long reflection and deep thought leading to insight into the nature of reality. Specifically it is the wisdom in following the Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering, the truth of arising, the truth of cessation, the truth of the path. Siddhartha reached enlightenment at the age of 35 and became a supreme Buddha. Although the Buddha never claimed to be anything more than a man, he was idolized and subsequently deified in some Buddhist circles. Many Western scholars place the Buddha’s lifetime from 563–483 B.C.E., while the Sri Lankan tradition believes the Buddha lived from 624–544 B.C.E.

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The teachings of the Buddha were transmitted by oral tradition for several centuries. When written teachings emerged, they were in two different forms, the Pali canon of the Theravada tradition (written down in Sri Lanka around the middle of the first century B.C.E.) and the Sanskrit of the northern Mahayana tradition. The Tripitaka is considered to be the major scripture and is comprised of: the Sutra Pitaka, the discourses of the Buddha; the Vinaya Pitaka, accounts on the origin of the sangha and the rules of monastic discipline; and the Abhidharma Pitaka, scholastic treatises on Buddhist psychology and philosophy. The traditions of the faith have migrated from India to other Asian countries, where the majority of followers can be found. This migration of faith has, in the passage of time, resulted in three historical streams: Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. America’s first encounter with Buddhism occurred when Chinese laborers immigrated to the United States to build the transcontinental railroad. The immigration of these Buddhists came to a halt with the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, but until the Asian Barred Zone Act of 1917, other Buddhists continued to arrive from Japan and Korea. About the same time that Asian Buddhist immigrants were first starting to arrive in America, some American intellectuals had their introduction with Buddhism. Especially drawn to Buddhist philosophy were those called the Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who published the first English version of a portion of the Lotus Sutra. One of the most significant encounters between Buddhism and the United States was the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago. China, Japan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka sent Buddhist delegates. The parliament provided the first major public forum from which Buddhists could address themselves directly to the Western public.6 In the first half of the twentieth century, Buddhist teachers from Japan played the most active role in disseminating Buddhism to the American public. The largest and most influential ethnic-based Buddhist organization in the United States is the Buddhist Churches of America, which originally was the Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA). Founded in 1914, it resulted from several Japanese Buddhist congregations coming together. The BMNA focused primarily on social and cultural activities for and ministry to the Japanese American communities. In the late 1920s, it first began to develop programs to train English-speaking priests for the benefit of the growing number of American-born parishioners. Things took a turn for the worse when Japanese and Japanese American Buddhists faced discrimination when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, placing people of Japanese descent into internment camps because they were perceived to be a threat during World War II. During the internment, the Buddhist Mission of North America took its current name in 1944. All of the Buddhist Mission’s leadership, along with almost the entire Japanese American population, had been interned during World War II. The name Buddhist Churches of America was adopted at Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. The use of the word ‘‘church,’’ which normally implies a Christian house of worship, was significant. After

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internment ended, some members returned to the West Coast and revitalized churches there, although a number of others moved to the Midwest and built new churches.7 Japanese Buddhists fought in the U.S. military, but were prohibited from having their Buddhist faith imprinted on their dog tags, in one sense erasing their Buddhist identities. Since passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the number of immigrants arriving from China, Vietnam, and the Theravada-practicing countries of Southeast Asia has greatly increased. Immigrant Buddhist congregations in North America are made up of followers from many Asian countries including China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, among others, and generally are mono-ethnic communities/congregations. Some scholars, such as Charles Prebish (1999), have suggested that there are several broad types of Buddhism in America. The oldest and largest of these is ‘‘immigrant’’ or ‘‘ethnic Buddhism’’ described above. The next oldest and arguably the most visible and best heralded type is referred to as ‘‘import Buddhism’’ because it came to America largely in response to the demand of interested American converts who sought it out, either by going abroad or by supporting foreign teachers. Representative of such is Henry Steele Olcott, who traveled to Sri Lanka in 1880 to learn about Buddhism and then disseminated the information in the United States. The three most notable trends of this type are Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Vipassana, which is an outgrowth of the Theravada tradition. The membership tends strongly to be drawn from among educated, white, native English speakers. This is sometimes also called ‘‘elite Buddhism’’ because its practitioners, especially early in the process, tended to come from social elites. The third type of Buddhism in America is ‘‘export’’ or ‘‘evangelical Buddhism,’’ groups that are based in another country but actively recruit members in America from various backgrounds. For example, the Hsi Lai Temple in California, Soka Gakkai, and the Buddhist Churches of America are actively engaged in evangelical efforts in hopes of recruiting converts from among the general public.

AMERICAN HINDUISM: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW The roots of Hinduism have been traced back to the Indus Valley civilization and the Indo-Aryan culture. Because residents of the Indus Valley practiced a religion possessing several features common with modern Hinduism, the beginnings of Hinduism have been dated back to the time in which the civilization flourished, approximately 2500 B.C.E. Indo-Europeans extended the name of the province of Sindh, in the northeast of modernday India, to the whole country lying across the Indus River. The inhabitants were simply called Hindus, Persian for ‘‘sindh.’’ The religion that came to be known as Hinduism does not owe its existence to any single historic event or person. Rather, it is a complex religion that has continually evolved and transformed over the course of millennia. Hinduism in its belief, from manners of practice to regional differences in the names and functions of various gods, is very diverse. The term and even the concept

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of Hinduism as a singular religion on par with the other world faiths was the result of a confluence of forces, namely the British Raj, Christian missionaries in India, and Orientalist scholars, all of whom began to use the term Hinduism. There are many different components of Hinduism, and there is wide variation in belief and practice, depending on the adherent’s caste, region, and socioeconomic class. The Hindu house of worship is a mandi, or temple. While popularly thought of as a polytheistic faith, Hinduism is both monotheistic and polytheistic. Diana Eck described Hinduism as having a ‘‘polytheistic imagination’’8 that points to a myriad of avenues to approach the divine. Here multiplicity becomes a way of expressing unity and oneness. Many Hindus worship deities in a physical form, such as a murti (statue), but the deity is not perceived to be limited to that form. There are many sacred texts in Hinduism, with none having an authoritative monopoly, particularly across all time periods. The sacred literature of Hinduism can be divided into two categories: sruti and smriti. Sruti refers to the manifestation of the divine in the world and, more specifically, to truths revealed by the deities to the early sages, or rishis. The shrutis include the Vedas, the four most ancient of the scriptures (Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda, and Atharva Veda); the Upanishads; the Brahmanas; and the Aranyakas. The Vedas, some of the most revered scripture, contain accounts of creation, information on ritual sacrifices, and prayers to the deities. Smriti is the other type of literature, that which is remembered or handed down. These texts are also considered to be based upon revealed truths, but composed by humans. The epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and the Puranas comprise the bulk of the Smriti literature. These sacred texts narrate episodes in the lives of the great warriors (the epics) or of the gods and goddesses (the Puranas). Even before Hindu immigrants arrived in substantial numbers, America had its earliest encounters with Hinduism in the writings of the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whose more philosophical works were significantly impacted by the Bhagavad Gita. Swami Vivekananda lectured on Hindu ideals in a public forum at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Vivekananda emphasized the Advaita Vedanta philosophy and later founded the Vedanta Society in New York. This group was the first Hindu organization primarily designed to attract American adherents and spread the tenets of Hindu philosophy worldwide. Hindu immigrants first arrived on the West Coast before the beginning of the nineteenth century. Most pursued agrarian professions because the law forbade them as Asians to acquire citizenship or to buy, own, or lease agricultural land. The impact of Hinduism on American culture actually increased during the years after the 1917 Barred Zone Act. Still, until 1965 most of those attending Hindu religious centers in the United States were non-Indians. Prior to that watershed year, a slow trickle of Indians from Bombay and Calcutta were able to immigrate after passage of the 1946 Luce-Cellar Act. Most settled on the West Coast, and when San Francisco’s ‘‘Old Temple’’ became too small for the growing population,

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a new temple was built to accommodate the growing number of Hindu immigrants. The next influx of Hindu immigrants was comprised mostly of students seeking graduate education in the 1950s and 1960s. By far the largest wave of Hindu immigrants has arrived in the years after 1965. Arriving with high educational capital, such as professional and advanced degrees, these immigrants—more likely than earlier waves to include entire families—have settled in cities across the United States. Subsequent waves of Indian Hindu immigration occurred after the Immigrant Reform and Control Act of 1986 liberalized ‘‘family reunification’’ policies to allow the parents and siblings of earlier immigrants to join their kin already in the United States. Yet another wave came about in the 1990s with the influx of high-tech workers from India. Today mandirs dot the American landscape and there are large Hindu communities in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and many other cities and towns.

AMERICAN ISLAM: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Islam is the third Abrahamic and monotheistic religion, after Judaism and Christianity. Muslims believe they are the descendents of the Prophet Abraham’s son Ishmael. Muhammad is credited with founding the religion in 620 C.E., in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Muslims believe in a chain of prophets beginning with Adam and including Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus. Muhammad is the final prophet. Islam has a creed of faith, the Shahada: ‘‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.’’ This declaration of one’s faith is one of the religion’s five pillars, the others being prayer, charitable giving, fasting, and pilgrimage. Muslims acknowledge one god and believe all individuals will face the Day of Judgment and will be accountable for their actions. Islam is a religion that focuses on the truth that God revealed to all his prophets throughout history. Most Muslims recognize two sacred texts, the Qur’an and the Hadith. The Qur’an is a collection of the scriptures of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Considered the direct word of God, it consists of 114 chapters that are arranged in order of length, not chronologically. The Hadith, the other major text in Islamic tradition, is a collection of Muhammad’s sayings as well as a narrative of his actions. Over time, various sects that interpret Islam’s teachings differently have developed. This main schism in Islam dates back to Muhammad’s death, when followers debated over who would succeed him as their spiritual leader. Two major subgroups developed: Sunni and the Shi’a. Sunnis, or ‘‘traditionalists,’’ are the largest sect of Islam, comprising about 87 percent of Muslims worldwide. Sunnis are united in their belief in the legitimacy of the first three caliphs (successors to Muhammad), Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman. By contrast, the Shi’a, or ‘‘partisans of the faith,’’ emphasize the importance of the descent from Muhammad’s family and feel that the Prophet’s first successor should have been Ali, the husband of Muhammad’s only surviving daughter, Fatima. Eventually, Ali did become the fourth caliph, but was assassinated by a member of another Muslim sect. While

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Sunnis accept Ali’s caliphate, they do not consider him as important as the Shi’ites do. There are many sects within Shi’a Islam, such as Isma’ilism (a sect that recognizes the Aga Khan as its spiritual leader). Shi’ites are the dominant Islamic sect in Bahrain, Iran, and Lebanon. There are a number of similarities between these two sects. However, there are two fundamental differences in their beliefs that have divided them for centuries. In addition to the dispute over Ali’s status, there are philosophical differences between Shi’ites and Sunnis. Shi’ites approach Islam through the practice of ijithad, the interpretation of the law by individual scholars, whereas Sunnis strictly believe in the ijma, the consensus of Muslim scholars, in addition to ijithad. Also, Shi’ites are less strict in their adherence to the five pillars and do not accept the Hadith as sacred. Prior to the twentieth century, Islam remained a relatively unknown religion and lifestyle to Americans. Some of the first Muslim adherents to arrive on U.S. shores were black Africans brought as slaves between 1530 and 1851. Yet the sole representative of Islam at the World’s Parliament of World Religions in 1893 was a white American convert, Mohammed Alexander Webb (1847–1916). Islamic countries chose not to send representatives to the Parliament because of anti-Islamic sentiment of the time. Thousands of Muslims had arrived in the United States in the 1870s, most from regions of the Ottoman Empire that comprise present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. These migrants were poorly educated laborers who came seeking greater economic stability; many returned, disenchanted, to their homeland. Those who stayed suffered isolation, although some managed to establish Islamic communities in unlikely places. For example, by 1920, Muslim immigrants worshiped in a rented hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and they built a masjid (mosque) there fifteen years later. Lebanese-Syrian Muslim communities did the same in Ross, North Dakota, and later in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Michigan City, Indiana. Many Muslims arrived at the end of World War I, with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The first wave of Muslim immigration ended in 1924 when the Johnson-Reed Act allowed only a trickle of Africans and ‘‘Asians,’’ a designation that included Arabs and South Asians, to enter. In addition to pre-1924 Muslim immigration, the twentieth century saw a substantial increase in Muslim affiliation in the United States thanks to the Black Muslim movement. Throughout its history, the Black Muslim movement, which ultimately became the Nation of Islam, proclaimed that black nationalism and Islamic faith together would help African Americans obtain success through discipline, racial pride, knowledge of God, and physical separation from white society. Islam in the life of black America strengthened with the mass migrations of Southern blacks to northern cities beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Noble Drew Ali established a black nationalist Islamic community, the Moorish Science Temple, in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913. After his death in 1929, one of the movement’s factions became the Nation of Islam, founded by Wallace D. Fard of Detroit who mysteriously disappeared in 1934. Elijah Muhammad then took control of the movement, attracting disenchanted

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and poor African Americans from the urban North. They converted for a variety of reasons. For some, the poverty and racism in those cities made the Nation of Islam’s message about ‘‘white devils’’ and ‘‘black superiority’’ plausible. Whites also converted to Islam during the twentieth century, though in much smaller numbers than blacks.9 The majority of Muslim immigrants arriving in the forty years after 1924 came from now-former Soviet republics. With the arrival of Palestinian refugees after 1948 and the more general opening of America’s doors in 1965, new waves of immigration from the Islamic world—including Muslims fleeing oppressive regimes in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and African and South Asian Muslims seeking economic opportunity—have dramatically increased the American Muslim population. In the 1990s Muslims arrived from the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Sudan. By the 1990s, Muslims had established more than six hundred masjids and centers across the United States.

AMERICAN SIKHISM: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Sikhism is a monotheistic revealed religion founded in the late fifteenth century by Guru Nanak. Sikhs consider Guru Nanak their prophet and first religious teacher and recognize nine successor gurus over the two centuries following Nanak’s death. Guru literally means the ‘‘light who dispels darkness’’ and comes from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘‘disciple,’’ emphasizing the importance of learning and seeking truth. Born into a Punjabi Hindu family in 1469 in what is now present-day Pakistan, Nanak was deeply meditative throughout his life. Nanak was influenced by the devotional (bhakti) movement of Hinduism and Islamic Sufi mysticism. Evidence of such influence includes his belief in reincarnation, his monotheism, and his emphasis on spirituality. Though primarily containing teachings by the Sikh gurus, Sikh scriptures also contain verses from both holy Hindu scriptures and the Qur’an. However, Nanak differed with traditional religious thought by rejecting any sort of idol worship and believing in a casteless society without any distinctions based on birthright, religion, or gender. The sacred text of the faith is the Guru Granth Sahib, which consists of hymns and writings by the first nine gurus. Guru Nanak emphasized the superfluous nature of tradition, preaching that there was a religion greater than the one embodied in tradition and rituals. Sikhs are prohibited from worshipping idols, images, or icons. Another important facet of Sikhism involves the Khalsa, the Sikh brotherhood and sisterhood. In 1699, Guru Gobind Singh freed Sikhs from the caste system by ordaining that all Sikh males incorporate ‘‘Singh’’ (and women ‘‘Kaur’’) into their names, thus shedding their caste identity and signifying their membership in the Khalsa. Sikhs wear a uniform to unify and bind them to the beliefs of the religion and to remind them of their commitment to the gurus at all times. This uniform serves as a highly visible marker, particularly for men, of a

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Sikh identity. Commitment to the Khalsa is demonstrated by keeping five physical signs (sometimes called ‘‘the five Ks’’): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Kesh (uncut hair), Kanga (a wooden comb), Kaccha (shorts worn under regular clothes), Kara (a steel bracelet), and Kirpan (a short sword, not ever used for violence but representing the Sikh’s willingness to protect self and community).

Sikhs hold worship services in what they call gurudwaras (‘‘gates to the gurus’’), the most revered of which is the Golden Temple in the city of Amritsar, in Punjab, India. These services contain a mixture of singing, meditation (believed to foster communication with God), and readings from the Guru Granth Sahib by the officiant or granthi. Sikhs recognize no one day of the week as more holy than others, but worship services are typically held on Sundays out of convenience because both India and the United States observe the Western Monday to Friday work week. The first American gurudwara was established in Stockton, California, in 1915.10 The Sikh migration to the United States can be seen in four segments and in some cases parallels Hindu immigration to the United States. Some of the first Sikhs to immigrate were single young men who arrived on the West Coast more than two hundred years ago; they came from small landowning families in the Punjab region of present-day India and Pakistan, and most of those who remained pursued agrarian lives. Most had been rural peasants, driven abroad, for instance, by land rights legislation that created unfavorable economic and social conditions in the early twentieth century.11 Sikhs, like other Asian immigrants of the time, were ineligible to acquire citizenship or, in California and Oregon, to buy, own, or lease agricultural land. Many Sikh men married Mexican Catholic women, and their children grew up as Catholics.12 Sikh immigration came to a halt with the 1917 Asian Barred Zone Act. The second wave of Sikhs, like Hindus, was comprised of students seeking graduate education in the 1950s and 1960s. The third wave of Sikh immigrants arrived after passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. For Sikhs, the fourth wave came about in the 1980s because of political persecution in India, East Africa, and Afghanistan. In 1984, the Indian military besieged and occupied the Golden Temple in response to domestic political unrest. In addition to causing an increase in Sikh emigration from India, this incident triggered a strong emotional reaction among Sikhs worldwide; it was interpreted as a threat to the community and caused many Sikhs to feel vulnerable. The attack thus also fostered a sense of collective fate, re-shaped the dynamics of Sikhs’ religious identity, and weakened the attachment of Sikhs abroad to India as compared to their attachment to Sikhism itself and to their host country. In this respect, Sikhs have a different relationship with India than Hindus. As a minority group in India that has faced persecution, Sikhs have been emigrating from India for centuries. Many Sikh communities in the

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United States coalesced around the ‘‘Khalistan movement,’’ which advocates an independent Sikh homeland in the Punjab. While some diasporic Sikhs have always supported the idea of secession, after the events of 1984 the community offered vociferous support for the formation of an independent Khalistan. Territory had not been a major element of Sikh political identity until recently, although the question of Punjab’s independence was raised in 1948 when the British showed a willingness to let Hindus and Muslims divide up the Punjab and granted India and Pakistan separate statehood for essentially religious reasons. The rise of effective new leaders helped to sustain the movement beyond the initial phase of mobilization. Support for Khalistan by diasporic Sikhs is generally attributed to anomie or alienation from migration; the desire to establish power and credibility as a community; and the strong ties these Sikhs have consistently maintained with Punjab through kinship, culture, and economic links.13

THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS: WORLD RELIGIONS IN AMERICA TODAY The story of these four religions in the United States really is one of newness. Although certain communities, such as Chinese and Japanese American Buddhists and Arab American Muslims, were present in substantial numbers by the end of the nineteenth century, the plurality (Islam, Buddhism) or even the majority (Hinduism, Sikhism) within each religious group is currently an immigrant and second-generation cohort. It was not until the years after 1965 that the United States saw the arrival of substantial numbers of immigrant families that established homes, built ethnoreligious communities, and sent their children into the American school system in substantial numbers. By dint of numbers and diversity, these new faiths now permeate American society across professions and trades in the workplace, in K–12 and collegiate classrooms, and increasingly (albeit haltingly) in the mainstream media. Just as important, these communities are becoming self-aware as groups with national reach and importance. While a small number of masjids, mandirs, temples, and gurudwaras was in existence before 1965, for example, their populations were relatively small and many adherents were neither aware of nor geographically proximate to them. Later immigrants constituted a highly educated group of professionals who arrived in the United States at a time when the world was ‘‘shrinking’’ and when cultural diversity was finding increased acceptance in the United States, as compared to the earlier migrants. They were able to break some barriers to economic and social success and, to a certain extent, influence the host community’s opinions of them and of immigrants in general. They were able to insure good education for their children and also set up mechanisms for elementary religious education. While anti-immigrant sentiment remains and discrimination against minority religions can flare up in response to contemporary events, the United States has come a long way towards appreciating the value of ethnic and religious diversity, thereby enabling immigrant communities to retain salient cultural traits rather than merely ‘‘assimilating.’’

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In light of each group’s presence in the United States prior to 1965, scholars have reported that all three religious groups ‘‘had a presence’’ here and did not arrive to a country ‘‘without’’ Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. Indeed, Hindu organizations like the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (‘‘Hare Krishna’’) and the Vedanta Society; a Sikh community in Yuba City, California; and ethnically white congregations of Buddhists did pre-exist the 1965 Act. However, these structures were of limited salience to the post-1965 immigrant wave, either because they were geographically distant or because the religious experiences and social capital available from older institutions were unappealing or irrelevant to new arrivals. During the first three decades after the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, immigrant Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities put down new roots; their religious structures and practice are now becoming visible to mainstream America. Religion has a vital role in the Americanization process for immigrants. Just as social services and places of ethnic solidarity help in transition to life in the United States, temples, churches, gurudwaras, mosques, and the broader contours of religion have sustained individuals and families, even as the specific religion has undergone changes in the Americanization process, and helped maintain transnational connections. Raymond B. Williams (1992) describes religion as a ‘‘sacred thread’’ that binds the personal and group identity for immigrants.14 Immigrants who arrived prior to about 1978 began laying the foundations for their respective religious communities. Initially individuals gathered in people’s homes where religious classes were held. Temples were established in former churches, and meetings would be held at business offices. Immigrants thus met at first in living rooms or rented halls, then perhaps in a building acquired for the specifically religious and cultural use of the community. A church may be ideal because it is already zoned for religious use; the Richmond Hill gurudwara in Queens is a former Methodist church. When a certain ‘‘critical mass’’ of population was achieved in a particular geographic area, ethnically homogeneously houses of worship—or, in some cases, separate ‘‘ethnic’’ services in a shared facility—were created.15 Ethnoreligious communities have built houses of worship in cities, suburbs, and small towns from coast to coast. In the 1980s and 1990s, Sikh gurudwaras were built in Detroit, Birmingham, and Reno, Nevada. South Asian Muslims arrived in a country with many masjids (mosques) already in existence and often worshipped at these facilities, but many communities went on to establish mosques of their own geared specifically to their own ethnoreligious needs and interests. Although most mosques remain nominally multi-ethnic, in reality nearly two-thirds still serve one dominant ethnic group, usually South Asian or African American. Often traditional buildings sprang up to replace or supplement earlier establishments that, because they used pre-existing or rented facilities, did not bear an external resemblance to traditional structures.16 For example, a mandir (Hindu temple) was established as part of the Indian Cultural and Religious Center in a former church building outside Atlanta in 1986. In 1993, the Hindu Temple of Atlanta, similar in architectural style of

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traditional Indian mandirs, started housing religious functions on an ongoing basis. Both mandirs continue to operate.

CURRENT ISSUES AND CHALLENGES These four faith communities face many challenges in the United States and are dealing with a range of issues that affect transnational religious communities: the reformulation of the religions through their encounter with the American social milieu, including theological and practical changes; the transmission of religious belief to second-generation youth; language, including second-generation language loss; the influence of transnational experiences; and sometimes-troubled interactions with wider society. Common themes emerge, as do points of divergence among the religions. We are seeing an American reformulation of these faiths, that is, the emergence of American forms of these faiths. The reformulation of these religions—the development, for example, of an ‘‘American Hinduism’’—is a source of tension for members in each community. In particular, the notion of authenticity is of concern. The country of origin is still the reference point for authenticity; the notion of performing prayers and rituals the way it was done ‘‘over there’’ is seen as having a spiritual and theological importance in many communities. For example, communities in the United States are going to great lengths to create houses of worship that resemble those in the country of origin. Examples include the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles, with its Ming- and Qing-style architecture, and the soaring South Indian-style Sri Venkateswara Temple near Pittsburgh. The concern over authenticity reflects a popular misconception of religion as static—eternal and, therefore, unchanging. ‘‘Over there’’ comes to define not only a place, but also a time. It evokes the manner in which rituals were performed at the time when immigrants left the countries decades ago. Competing with these concerns over authenticity are the needs of the contemporary community. Communities therefore also adapt to the American context. For example, when religious holidays fall during the work week, their observance is often scheduled on the weekend when it is more convenient for people to gather and celebrate. While necessary, these changes also contribute to the emotional link adherents make between geography and theology: Across these faiths, communities are struggling with issues of authenticity, and often comparing worship and ritual practices performed in the United States with those observed at ‘‘home.’’ Practice in America has come to be seen as less authentic. They are probably observed on a small level at home; for example, fasts may be observed, but then the program held on the weekend. Yet at the same time there are authenticity issues where people want to ‘‘do it the way it’s always been done.’’ Immigration continues from these countries, while at the same time an Americangrown version of the faith flourishes. Questions about who is a Buddhist or who is an ‘‘observant’’ Sikh abound. Influenced by the dominance of some strains of belief within each community and by the influence of wider American society, these religions

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are also formulating what Raymond Williams describes, for example, as an ‘‘ecumenical Hinduism.’’ The Hindu holidays and celebrations most celebrated in the United States are Diwali, Navaratri, Holi, and Raksha Bhandan, among others. Diwali in particular is becoming more important than its theology or its observance ‘‘over there’’ warrants. This is partly in response to Christian hegemony; Diwali, like the Jewish holiday Hannukah, is rendered important by its proximity to Christmas on the calendar. The Diwali phenomenon also represents the development of a ‘‘common ground’’ religion, a set of holidays and other cultural markers on which the broad range of American Hindus, otherwise divided by region, language, caste, and village traditions, can agree. The Chinese New Year has to a certain extent served the same function within the American Buddhist community, even to the point of providing common ground with Chinese American Christians. The phenomenon described above, whereby religion becomes frozen at the time and place of immigrants’ departure from the old country, also exerts an influence here. Regional traditions as practiced in the 1960s and 1970s in the ‘‘home’’ country contribute to the development of a common American version of each faith. At the same time, new immigrants of these four faiths have continued to arrive in the United States and often affiliate themselves with established religious and cultural centers. The arrival of new adherents with modern traditions and with social needs that differ from those of both older immigrants and the second generation is creating new challenges for houses of worship. To this challenge is added the fact that individual American houses of worship and cultural centers were built from the ground up, meaning in most cases that there are no over-arching religious structures that provide resources. All these religions have nonimmigrant adherents, such as the Gora Sikhs, Black Muslims, and others. Among Muslims and Buddhists in particular, the panethnic nature of the religion intersects with religion’s function as a tool for ethnic maintenance. That facet of the immigrant experience which is theologizing and drives immigrants to seek out others like themselves results, for example, in mosque communities where ethnic maintenance—speaking Arabic or Urdu, consuming ethnic or regional cuisine, and popular culture, and the like—is as important and attractive a function as worship. Thus, as noted earlier, although most mosques are nominally multi-ethnic, any given mosque will typically be dominated by a single ethnic group.17 Ethnicity, in place of or in conjunction with theology, often distinguishes one community or house of worship from the next. Scholars who study the Buddhist community have noted that most Buddhist groups can be described as ‘‘ethnic’’ or ‘‘import’’ Buddhists by reference to their mono-ethnic memberships. These four religions also face practical challenges with respect to preparedness and ability to provide appropriate services for the American milieu. For example, the Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim religious institutions in the United States must often hire clergy from overseas because each religion has few or even no American institutions where one can undertake the necessary studies. This has a variety of effects. For example, American

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clergy are often called on to undertake duties such as counseling and other services that in the Christian context might be called ‘‘pastoral care.’’ Pandits (Hindu priests) and Muslim imams trained abroad are often not prepared to undertake these tasks, nor to undertake the substantial tasks of facility management and fundraising for the religious community, tasks traditionally understood to be within the cleric’s purview in America. Likewise, as non-native speakers of English, these religious leaders may have a more difficult time relating to and providing appropriate services for secondgeneration youth in the American religious community. The language barrier often hinders their ability to interact with the wider community, such as taking part in interfaith activities. It remains to be seen how the communities will respond to these challenges. Will domestic training facilities be created, similar to those serving some Buddhist faith communities? Will training programs overseas develop specialized language and management programs for religious leaders to be placed in the United States? Will individual American religious communities develop new structures that spread the ‘‘pastoral’’ burden to others in the organization? The issue of language loss confronts all immigrant communities as the immigrant generation ages and second- and third-generation members raised in the American context demonstrate a range of language ability. The American reconceptualizations of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam all face a pair of language issues, one related to the language of scripture and worship and the other related to the transmission of the spoken vernacular language to the second generation. Across faiths, the understanding and retention of the scriptural language is an issue. Sanskrit, Hinduism’s scriptural language, is not a spoken one; some Muslims speak Islam’s scriptural language, Arabic; and although Gurumurkhi might be close to spoken Punjabi, most Sikhs do not understand the Sikh scriptural language. Sikh organizations have stressed the learning of Punjabi for the second generation, which has a social, familial, and religious purpose. For the Hindu second generation, even knowing one’s family language does not mean one will understand the Sanskrit prayers and hymns. For Muslim Americans, debates continue on the significance of knowing Arabic, for example, versus relying on Urdu, which Indian Muslims have tried to pass on to the second generation. Although it manifests itself differently in each community, the language issue leads to a series of questions over whether and how to retain the scriptural language as part of worship: Should we pray in English? When should we not pray in English? It is easy to see how this debate takes on theological importance. The answers, in turn, will lead to a host of practical challenges, from the transliteration of traditional prayers into the Latin alphabet to the translation of prayers and scripture into English. Undertaking such efforts responds to the problem of language loss, allowing second- and subsequent-generation adherents to participate with a greater understanding of ritual meaning. At the same time, resistance to the idea has fed efforts to teach the scriptural languages of each faith through religious classes. Thus many communities have developed ‘‘Sunday schools,’’ a term obviously borrowed from the Christian lexicon,

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to transmit ritual language and practice as well as other cultural traditions (often in translation) to each community’s American-born children.18 International migration is no longer a one-way process. Contemporary migrants and their children maintain transnational connections—familial, economic, cultural, and political ties across international borders. New technologies, especially involving inexpensive long-distance phone calls, emailing, and the relative ease of travel, serve to connect such networks with increasing speed and efficiency. Most of these religious communities are involved in transnationalism, the frequent and widespread movement back and forth between communities of origin and destination and the resulting economic and cultural transformation19 and religious transformation. For example, the Buddhist Churches of America is an affiliate of Japan’s Nishi Hongwanji, a sect of Jodo Shinshu, which is a form of Pure Land Buddhism, itself a branch of the Mahayana tradition. Transnational ties thanks to technology mean also that one need not consult with a priest or speak a language other than English to identify a holy day; specialized religious calendars on the Internet abound. It is also easier for followers of the faiths to go on pilgrimages. Religious organizations in other countries can and do depend on the relative wealth of the United States to support many of their activities overseas. Many adherents engage in transnational religious practices. Hindus can now even do darshan online; major temples have Webcams that allow devotees anywhere to do darshan. For all these religions, transnationalism may also take on a political aspect, as it does through American Sikhs’ support of the Khalistan movement and American Muslims’ support of Islamic charities that direct funds to social services and other efforts overseas. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs no longer face the strict limitations on their rights and overt public discrimination of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, even now, when they are on their way to becoming accepted and viewed as an important part of the religious mosaic of American life, followers of these four religions face challenges of social disadvantage. In particular, the majority of the followers are nonwhite immigrants. As racial minorities, they may face disadvantages and even violence. Moreover, because race is one of the preeminent organizing principles in U.S. society, adherents’ race may become associated with a particular religion. This process, called the racialization of religion, exerts a particularly strong effect on Arab and South Asian people. In many cases, brown skin comes to be seen as associated with, and therefore a proxy for, a particular faith. Since September 11, brown skin is linked especially with Islam, and brown-skinned people may be seen not only as different but also as a foreign enemy’s domestic ‘‘fifth column.’’ Race may exert another effect on Asian and Arab Americans. Since the American racial understanding remains bipolar—literally black and white—these communities are seen as ‘‘other,’’ ambiguous, and not fully American. Rather, these populations may be seen as perpetual foreigners, a status that often brings with it hostility from members of the dominant society in the form of xenophobia. Living in a society that is dominated by another religion, Christianity, raises many issues for these faith communities. In American society, there

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are individuals and organizations that desire to restrict, exclude, or attack immigrants. Religion, particularly when racialized, adds another dimension for abuse. This abuse has taken many forms, ranging from verbal epithets against ‘‘foreigners’’ and restrictive legislation to vandalism of property and murder. The American creation myth insists that the Puritans sought religious freedom; indeed they did, but only for themselves. Anabaptists, Quakers, Mormons, Catholics, Jews, and others have each in turn discovered that ‘‘religious freedom’’ is enjoyed disproportionately by Protestant Christians. Moreover, ‘‘freedom of religion’’ is not the same as having that choice accepted and supported, rather than ignored, marginalized, exoticized, or demonized. This fierce commitment to English norms, values, and ways of operating begins the trail to modern nativism.20 Contemporary non-Christian immigrants are simply its latest target. Notwithstanding the long history of the presence of minority religions in the United States and the nation’s self-image as a haven for those fleeing religious oppression, the reality of life in America for a devotee of a non-Western faith is one of misunderstanding, missed opportunities, and outright abuse. The followers of Sikhism, Islam, Hinduism, and other non-Western faith traditions encounter prejudice and discrimination because of religion. While the racialization of religion surely exacerbates the discrimination faced by adherents of these religions, it alone does not explain the discrimination. Nor does the excuse that the faiths are ‘‘Eastern’’ suffice. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is an Abrahamic faith with adherents of all ethnicities; yet Muslims in America face perhaps the most pervasive and virulent religious discrimination of the day, Islamophobia. Religious oppression refers specifically to the systematic subordination of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs by the dominant Christian milieu. This subordination is a product of power and the unequal power relationships among religious groups within American society; it is supported by the actions of individuals (religious discrimination), cultural norms and values, institutional structures, and societal practices. Through religious oppression, Christianity and its cultural manifestations function to marginalize, exclude, and deny the members and institutions of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religious groups in society the privileges and access that accompany a Christian affiliation.21 At the societal and institutional level, these groups are subject to oppression and face conflict on the basis of injustices that spring from their racial status, their religious status, or from the combination of the two. The racialization of religion can render religious oppression both invisible and acceptable. For example, various Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities have encountered opposition when attempting to erect houses of worship. Gurudwaras have been fought by city councils and zoning boards steered by xenophobic sentiments: the fear of the foreign, the unknown, and the ‘‘strange.’’22 Muslim and Hindu communities have encountered similar problems. At the same time, Hinduism and Buddhism struggle with their holy images being commodified and sold. Popular retail outlets sell statuettes of the Buddha or the Hindu goddess

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Saraswati, body lotions called ‘‘Om,’’ and even lunchboxes and underwear bearing holy images.23 Because American Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities are locally grown phenomena, their ability to participate on equal footing in national debates, without having unifying infrastructures like the National Council of Churches or even local or regional dioceses, is hampered. These communities are therefore underrepresented in interfaith conversations. They often struggle with questions of whether, when, and how to participate in mainstream civic life. Their presence as students and scholars in the educational arena is not yet reflected in chaplaincies. Let us consider that last example. How should the educational arena adapt to the growing presence of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism? The existence of these ‘‘new’’ religions demands that teachers and administrators know how to identify and confront religious discrimination and to promote religious pluralism in classrooms; to develop an understanding of the actual Supreme Court rulings on ‘‘religion’’ in the classroom and acknowledge that the presence of these communities complicates the issue of separation of church and state in America. Teachers must become more comfortable with ethnoreligious items and concepts because of the substantial overlap between religion and ‘‘culture’’ in these faiths. The aim should not be to exclude religion from the classroom more vigorously. Such efforts effectively exclude only non-Christian religions. Rather, educators must recognize the challenge of avoiding the promotion, exclusion, or limitation of religion—the First Amendment’s real mandate—while ensuring that when religion is present it encompasses the full diversity of contemporary America. For example, the debate over whether to teach ‘‘creationism’’ should involve not only the book of Genesis but also the creation stories of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism.

TRANSMISSION The children of the post-1965 immigrants—the second generation—are now reaching adulthood and starting families of their own; many more immigrant and second-generation children are now rising through American school systems. This raises a new set of questions for these religious groups: Growing up as religious minorities in a culture where Christianity is pervasive, what will the second and subsequent generations know about their home faiths? How will they learn it? What can be transmitted and what cannot? Communities create the aforementioned ‘‘Sunday schools’’ to formalize the transmission process. Individual parents teach what they can, but because they often come from countries where it is as ‘‘easy’’ to be nominally Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim as it is to be nominally Christian in the United States, many of these immigrant parents did not develop the required knowledge base to convey the home religion to their children’s satisfaction. As a result, research indicates that some in the second generation are undertaking their own searches for information, such as through college coursework. Influenced by the dominant Christian milieu, some long for

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an easy explanation of ‘‘the ten commandments’’ of their home religion. Others, convinced that they cannot match the religiosity of their parents by eschewing alcohol (Muslims) or beef (Hindus) or keeping the five Ks (Sikhs) or praying in the scriptural language, consider themselves not religious. All these phenomena offer hints, but only hints, about the future profile of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in the United States. Descendant generations will seek knowledge through study and transnational experiences, but probably will still feel increasingly disconnected from the authentic, ‘‘over there’’ religion of their parents and grandparents. American reconceptualizations of the religions may be embraced by many, but the communities will also have to respond and relate to a continuing influx of new immigrants. The continuing challenge of race and resources, and the devaluation of the religion through commercialization and caricature, will remain barriers to full membership in American culture. But with large and rapidly growing populations, all these American religions are here to stay.

NOTES 1. These pieces of legislation were designed to bar certain ethnic and national groups from entering the United States; as a result, they also excluded certain religious groups—in particular, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and other nonChristians. See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from A Different Shore: A History of Asians in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). 2. Ibid. 3. At one point, the Bureau of the Census collected information in the Census of Religious Bodies from 1906–1936. This information was obtained from religious organizations. The Census Bureau says, ‘‘Public Law 94-521 prohibits us from asking a question on religious affiliation on a mandatory basis; therefore, the Bureau of the Census is not the source for information on religion’’ (http:// www.census.gov/prod/www/religion.htm). In fact, the referenced public law, passed in 1976, doesn’t bar questions about religion but rather prohibits the punishment of respondents who decline to state their religion because doing so would violate its tenets. The relevant law is found at 26 U.S.C. section 225(d): ‘‘Where the doctrine, teaching, or discipline of any religious denomination or church prohibits the disclosure of information relative to membership,’’ a respondent may not be punished for ‘‘a refusal, in such circumstances, to furnish such information.’’ Because of its unique effectiveness in the collection of population-wide data, the Census should include in future decennial and other surveys optional questions on religious affiliation. (It would remain free to include in its presentations of data a caveat regarding the number of respondents who declined to answer.) 4. See The Pluralism Project, ‘‘Statistics: The Pluralism Project and Harvard University,’’ available at www.pluralism.org/resources/statistics/index.php, accessed February 3, 2004. Many social scientists often refer to the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). While ARIS tried to overcome congregational bias by using a random-digit-dialed telephone survey, its substantial undercount of Hindus (766,000), Muslims (1.1 million), and Sikhs (57,000) as compared to other estimates raises questions as to the degree of its success. See Barry Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keysar, American Religion Identification Survey 2001 (New York: The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2001).

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5. See Hussein Abdulwaheed Amin, ‘‘Islam in the United States,’’ available at www.islamfortoday.com/historyusa4.htm, accessed July 9, 2005. 6. See Thomas Tweed and Stephen Prothero, Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 7. See Richard H. Seager, Buddhism in America, Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 8. See Diana Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 22. 9. See Jane I. Smith, Islam in America, Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 10. See Gurinder Singh Mann, Sikhism, Religions of the World (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004). 11. See Sripati Chandreshekar, ‘‘A History of United States Legislation with Respect to Immigration from India: Some Statistics on Asian Indian Immigration to the United States of America,’’ in From India to America: A Brief History of Immigration, Problems, of Discrimination, Admission and Assimilation, ed. Sripati Chandrasekhar (La Jolla: Population Review, 1982), 11–29. 12. See Karen I. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 13. See Harnik Deol, Religion and Nationalism in India: The Case of the Punjab, Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia (New York: Routledge, 2000). 14. See Raymond B. Williams, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in A Sacred Thread: Modern Transmission of Hindu Traditions in India and Abroad, ed. Raymond B. Williams (Chambersburg, PA: ANIMA 1992), 3–6. 15. For a history of the development of houses of worship for the different religions, see Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001); Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Vasudha Narayanan, ‘‘Creating the South Indian ÔHinduÕ Experience in the United States,’’ in Williams, ed., 147–76; and Williams, ‘‘Introduction.’’ 16. See Ihasan Bagby, Paul M. Perl, and Brian T. Froehle, The Mosque in America: A National Portrait (Washington, DC: Council on American-Islamic Relations, 2001), 63. 17. See Khyati Y. Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 18. See Nina Glick Schiller, Linda G. Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992), 645. 19. See Joe R. Feagin, ‘‘Old Poison in New Bottles: The Deep Roots of Modern Nativism,’’ in Immigrants Out: The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States, ed. J.F. Perea (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 20. In reality, religious oppression affects all non-Christian faiths. One wellknown form of religious oppression is anti-Semitism. Indeed, even anti-Catholicism has not disappeared entirely from American culture. See Joshi. 21. See Jaideep Singh, ‘‘The Racialization of Minoritized Religious Identity: Constructing Sacred Sites at the Intersection of White and Christian Supremacy,’’ in Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America, ed. Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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22. See Joshi. 23. Ibid.; see also John Y. Fenton, Transplanting Religious Traditions: Asian Indians in America (New York: Praeger, 1988).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Eck, Diana. A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Joshi, Khyati Y. New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Prebish, Charles S. Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Seager, Richard Hughes. Buddhism in America. Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Smith, Jane I. Islam in America. Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asians in America. Boston: Little Brown, 1989.

CHAPTER 7

Porous Borders: Mexican Immigration and American Civic Culture Roberto Lint Sagarena

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n Christmas Eve 1969, Chicano-rights attorney Ricardo Cruz led a march of several hundred Mexican-origin Catholics to a protest at the newly completed, multimillion-dollar St. Basil’s Church in Los Angeles. The group picketed the church during mass, demanding that the clergy become more engaged with the religious and social concerns of Mexicanorigin communities. Although the protest would eventually spark a series of reforms, initially the church was cool to the demands of the demonstrators and the protest resulted in twenty-one arrests, including that of Cruz himself.1 The St. Basil’s demonstration and the hostile reaction to it on the part of church officials made public a long-standing rift between Mexican-origin Catholics and the American Catholic church. This rift was a result of more than a century of national, ethnic, and religious conflicts, which had long resulted in Mexican-origin Catholics being marginalized within the American church. However, neglect by the institution of the church fostered innovation in the expressions of religious faith by immigrant Catholic laity. And, as demographic changes have increased the Mexican-origin population of the United States, their religious culture has, in turn, come to greatly influence the mainstream church itself.

RELIGION IN THE BIRTH OF THE SOUTHWEST Mexican immigration is unique compared to any other group entering the United States, including other groups from Latin America, in that the main geographic locus of their migration (the U.S. Southwest) is a region that was taken from the immigrants’ home country by American military conquest. This conquest has largely been naturalized within American civic

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life and national history, but memories of the loss of the U.S. Invasion of Mexico remain strong on the Mexican side and have had great consequences on Mexican American e´migre´s’ views of migration and acculturation as well as on the shape of their religious lives. After Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, Catholic clergy were sparse in the nation’s northern frontier. As a result, the piety of Mexican people in this place and time can be characterized by the prominent role played by the laity in the creation and perpetuation of religious traditions. During Alta California’s Mexican period (1821–1848) the bulk of the territory’s numerous missions was secularized and lands fell into private hands. Similarly, in New Mexico during this period, Mexican priests were vastly outnumbered by lay Catholics.2 In their absence, lay penitential brotherhoods organized groups of male laity as religious and civic authorities. And, although seminaries were established in both Santa Barbara and Taos in an attempt to foster the birth of an indigenous clergy, this project was interrupted by war. Ultimately, the maintenance of religious belief among Mexican-origin people in the region remained in the hands of lay practitioners for much of the nineteenth century.3 The war between the United States and Mexico (1846–1848) resulted in an American conquest of the region and sparked massive demographic and social changes in what became the Southwestern States. Mexican immigration to the United States in any recognizable numbers began with the end of the U.S. Invasion of Mexico in 1848. Prior to the war, migration had largely run towards Mexico as considerable numbers of Americans migrated into the Mexican territories of Tejas and Alta California. These American Mexicans became Mexican citizens, often converted to Catholicism, often married into prominent Mexican families, and ultimately alarmed Mexican civil authorities with their growing numbers and political influence. Although the war between Mexico and the United States had many secular causes—struggles over the expansion of Southern slavery, the popularization of the idea of America’s manifest destiny, and the relatively undefended condition of Mexico’s northern frontier among many others—in many ways it was perceived on both sides as a religious and cultural conflict. Both sides often understood it as a larger cultural war between Anglo Protestantism and Latin American Catholicism.4 In the decades preceding war with Mexico, the arrival of huge waves of Irish Catholic immigrants in the United States precipitated the fiercest period of anti-Catholic nativism in the history of the nation. As immigration rose sharply after the 1830s (mostly from Ireland and Germany) nativists demonized immigrants for allegedly importing crime and disease, stealing jobs, and practicing a long list of imagined moral depravities. Since the majority of these new Americans were Catholic, they were often denounced as ‘‘Papist’’ adherents to a religion that was antithetical to American democracy. The rites of the Catholic church were seen as dangerous idolatry; Catholic rituals and iconography were caricaturized as sensuous earthly distractions that weakened the will, ultimately eroding America’s moral fabric and inviting catastrophe. For nativists, Catholicism symbolized all of the evils of the old world. By mid-century they had

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fostered a popular sentiment, articulated perhaps most clearly by Lyman Beecher and Samuel Morse, in which immigrants and unchecked immigration became culpable for a good number of the evils that threatened ‘‘orderly and godly’’ Americans. In time, many Catholic immigrants would themselves come to adopt and perpetuate this form of nativism as other ethnic and religious groups arrived after them.5 Unsurprisingly then, most American perceptions of Mexican Catholic religiosity prior to the war tended to be negative. For example, Josiah Gregg, one of the first American travelers to comment on Mexican religious practice was unsparing in his critique of Mexican veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Gregg saw Mexican Catholics as having been duped by clergy with the pious legend of Guadalupe’s apparition to the neophyte Juan Diego, now recently canonized as Saint Juan Diego. Rather than appreciating the complex role of Guadalupe in newly forming Mexican nationalism, Gregg saw veneration of a mixed-race virgin and the strongly devotional cast of Mexican religiosity as primitive and heretical. Although Gregg was a Protestant, it is noteworthy that much of the American Catholic clergy tended to agree with the tenor of his negative assessment of Mexican religious life.6 Nearly immediately after the end of the war, the California Gold Rush of 1849 precipitated a massive influx of immigrants from the world over to the newly Americanized territory. But the largest immigrant group heeding the call of gold was miners from northern Mexico. Thanks to this first wave of Mexican immigration to the United States in the 1850s, the Mexican-born population of California would actually be higher after losing the territory than before. These immigrants would create the first barrios (Mexican neighborhoods) in the United States. Americans would call them ‘‘Sonora-towns’’ after the Mexican state that most of the immigrant miners came from. This appellation, as well as the enactment of foreign miners’ taxes and brutal racist violence, worked to reinforce an American understanding of the Mexican-born population as foreign and unwelcome to a region that had been part of their nation just a few years prior.7 Anglo Americans came to dominate the region politically and culturally, and Mexican-origin peoples were cast as alien to the region. For much of the nineteenth century, native-born Mexican-origin people in Texas and California were referred to by Americans as Texans (Tejano) and Californians. But, as early as the 1880s, Americans began to claim the title of ‘‘Texan’’ and ‘‘Californian’’ for their own native-born population. This shift in ethnic ascription finally marked those of Mexican origin as outsiders in much of the Southwest. Mexican citizens living in the newly conquered region were given the option of American citizenship or exile to Mexico. But because of the problematic relationship between Mexican immigrants and territories that had only recently been Mexican, the initial Americanization of the region was predicated largely on the assumption that Mexican-origin residents would not assimilate. Rather, for American claims to place to be normalized, Mexicans would be expected simply to ‘‘fade away’’ as Native

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Americans had or ‘‘return’’ to neighboring Mexico, out of the way of the advance of American culture and civic institutions.8 Changes in secular authority in the region also resulted in changes in religious authority, as Mexico’s northern frontier became the Southwestern United States, political transformations brought about religious transformations. Catholic authority in the region was ceded to the American church, itself an embattled institution at the time of war with Mexico as this was the high point of American anti-Catholic nativism. As American Catholic clergy entered the region after the war they tended to perpetuate this understanding of American citizens of Mexican origin as inassimilable and focused their ministerial efforts towards the needs of arriving European American Catholics. Upon arrival in California, Bishop Alemany, the first American bishop of the state, made the creation of a new physical infrastructure to serve American Catholics his first priority. Alemany was successful in lobbying the U.S. government to intervene and transfer ownership of secularized missions to the American Catholic church from private hands. These colonial buildings became public monuments that connected early Spanish pioneers to contemporary American Catholics. The fact that these missions had been secularized under Mexican rule allowed Americans to cast secular Mexican authorities as enemies of the ‘‘civilizing’’ project of the Spanish missionaries, again reinforcing a divide between the church and the Mexican-origin laity.9 In New Mexico, Jean Baptiste Lamy, the first American bishop there, implemented a host of reforms (most controversially, the institution of a tithe) aimed squarely at curbing lay authority. Lamy’s reforms were resisted by powerful penitential brotherhoods as well as a resistive clergy (most notably Father Antonio Martinez of Taos), creating deep and abiding rifts between himself and the Hispano community. Ultimately, Lamy was successful in limiting the power of the local clergy by recruiting sympathetic priests and nuns from the seminary that trained him in France to replace the few indigenous clergy. Although there has been a long and vibrant continuation of penitente and santero traditions among New Mexico’s Hispano laity, the Catholic clergy in the state was almost entirely of French origin until the early 1970s, maintaining rifts between Hispano laity and the American church for almost a century.10

MEXICAN AMERICA Mexican immigration to the United States increased dramatically during the 1910s as the Mexican Revolution ravaged the country and tens of thousands fled for their lives; one out of every eight Mexicans was killed by the war’s violence. In the 1920s, Mexican immigration intensified even further with the explosive growth of agribusiness in the American West. American firms actively and illegally recruited cheap Mexican labor to come to work in the United States. Census data show that between the years of 1900 and 1930, the Mexican-born population of the United States grew from 103,000 to 1,400,000, with the largest waves of immigration occurring in the 1920s.11

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American Catholics credited their church with a central role in the settlement and Americanization of the Southwest. By favorably contrasting American Catholic traditions against Mexican Catholic traditions, American Catholicism could be understood as a unified tradition that was unquestionably American. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American Catholics supported an unprecedented displacement of prejudices. Mexican-origin Catholics were burdened with the same negative attributes that had been previously applied to Catholics by Protestant writers during the most virulent peaks of nativism. Mexican laity was cast as the dupes of tyrannical, despotic priests with questionable sexual mores. Thus, by negatively describing Mexican Catholicism and assuming the foreignness of Mexican culture in the Southwest, many promoters of a unified American Catholic culture appropriated anti-Catholic rhetoric in an effort to define the church’s boundaries and limit the divisiveness of ethnic and cultural pluralism.12 Although a great number of Mexico’s Catholic clergy also came to the Southwest during the 1910s and 1920s, their travels northward were largely a result of involuntary exile and their principal concern was in returning to Mexico as soon as possible, not the spiritual well-being of Mexican congregations in the United States. With the exception of limited Americanization campaigns and the funding of Sunday schools for Mexican children, Mexican and Mexican American communities were largely neglected by the American Catholic clergy well into the 1940s. But the neglect often went both ways. Although Mexican immigrants were still nominally Catholic, the anti-clerical violence of the war had left many of them unaccustomed to regular church attendance and others were themselves staunchly anti-clerical.13 Although Mexican participation in American Catholic services was low, domestic piety in the form of home altars and prayer groups maintained connections to the Catholic faith, much as it had for earlier Catholic immigrant groups. The proximity of the Mexican border and the speed of rail travel further limited incentives to actively assimilate or convert. These factors, combined with racism and segregation, resulted in fairly insular Mexican and Mexican American communities in California in the early twentieth century; from 1910–1930, only 5–13 percent of Mexican nationals in the United States applied for permanent residency or citizenship.14 In the early 1930s, global economic depression fanned the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and spurred on the creation of a program designed to rid the United States of unwelcome Mexican immigrants. Los Angeles, the American city with the largest Mexicanorigin population at the time, became a focal point for repatriation efforts. Roughly 50,000, or about a third, of the city’s Mexican residents returned to Mexico from 1920 to 1939, many forcibly, some voluntarily. Although repatriation campaigns were largely fueled by racist rhetoric and nativist legislation, for much of the decade the American Immigration Service was aided by Mexican consular officials in carrying out the campaigns. The Mexican government was eager to facilitate the homecoming of its

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citizens; the return of those who had left in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution would not only increase the ranks of Mexico’s skilled laborers, it would also ease the embarrassment of Mexican nationalists at having such a large e´migre´ community in the United States.15 By the mid-1930s, most Mexicans wishing to repatriate had done so; those who chose to stay in California continued to face the risk of forced repatriation as well as a steady increase in anti-Mexican sentiment. Immigrants attempting to create more settled lives for themselves in the United States and no longer intending to return to Mexico faced serious issues surrounding their identity; they were now more de afuera (of the outside) than Mexican, and yet unable to integrate into American society, as they were ostracized by wealthy and poor migratory whites alike. But Mexican repatriation efforts would not last. Beginning in 1942, just three years after the end of the repatriation campaigns, the United States government initiated a bi-lateral labor agreement with the Mexican government to recruit poor rural Mexican workers; with the advent of World War II and the end of the Great Depression, Mexican labor was needed once more. This agreement, known as the Bracero program, brought more than 220,000 Mexicans to the United States, more than half of them coming to the agricultural fields of California. Although most Braceros would eventually return to Mexico, their presence greatly increased the size of the region’s Mexican American communities. More importantly, the Bracero program firmly established a virtually tidal pattern for Mexican immigration to the United States that would last through the rest of the twentieth century; during times of plenty, Mexican laborers would cross the border, and during lean times, they would return to Mexico, resulting in prolonged cultural exchanges between Mexican and nascent Mexican American cultures.16 In the midst of this renewal of Mexican cultures within the United States, the American Catholic church launched its first concerted Americanization campaigns among Mexican-origin peoples. These campaigns can be characterized as a combination of English language lessons and a catechism that was largely hostile to Mexican lay devotional traditions. Perhaps the most successful Catholic outreach of the mid-twentieth century was the Cursillo movement. Originating in Majorca, Spain, in 1947 and brought to the United States a decade later, the Cursillo phenomenon has had a great impact on Mexican-origin Catholics throughout the Southwest. Participants in the Cursillo undertake three-day ‘‘retreats’’ for religious renewal and dedication. Although the clergy would often participate in organizing the retreats, the aim of the Cursillo was to stress greater responsibility among lay persons in the maintenance of the church and their own spiritual lives. Further, the Cursillo movement had a significant impact on larger American culture because it fostered social activism among Mexicanorigin Catholics. The Cursillo movement can be credited with influencing Catholic leadership during the civil rights era. Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers (UFW), for example, became a Cursillista.17 During the 1950s, Mexican Americans became encouraged by the advent of the civil rights movement; as they witnessed African Americans’

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successes through demonstrations, picketing, and direct confrontations with racism, they began to emulate these tactics in both the political and religious spheres. Beginning in 1958, Reies Tijerina, a Pentecostal minister, radicalized questions of land ownership in New Mexico. Citing the oft broken provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that guaranteed the retention of lands by Mexican citizens remaining in the annexed territories, Tijerina called for the return of property that had been taken through American deception and fraud, including large tracts that were now under the management of the United States Forestry Service.18 In 1965, Ce´sar Cha´vez headed the first attempts by Mexican agricultural workers in California to unionize under the banner of the United Farm Workers (UFW). During Lent of 1966, members of the new union undertook a 300-mile march of ‘‘Pilgrimage, Penitence, and Revolution’’ from Delano to Sacramento under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe and both Mexican and American flags. The use of the image of Guadalupe by the UFW was in part an expression of ethnic identity and in part a strategic use of symbolism to counter accusations of communist subversion from the right. Criticism of the union helped to foster communication and dialogue between field workers and American Catholic clergy as both sides reached out to each other, with union leaders seeking protection from cold war nativism and a new generation of activist clergy seeking to participate in the moral renewal of the civil rights movement. In Cha´vez’s own words, ‘‘we had the Virgin with us. And people, see, people said no they’re not communists, once they saw the church around us. That was the way we broke the red-baiting.’’19 As a result of the prominence given to the symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe by the UFW, one of the most innovative and lasting legacies of the union is the transformation of Guadalupe into more than an emblem of Mexican nationalism. In the context of the American civil rights movement, the image of Guadalupe at once became a radicalized religious symbol for popular protest and also an emblem for Chicano nationalism.

NEW CHURCH, NEW IMMIGRATION Although the civil rights movement provided an opportunity for some reconciliation between the American Catholic church and Mexican-origin laity to occur, the relationship continued to be contentious well into the next decade. Protests such as the one at St. Basil’s are credited as a source of the political pressure that prompted the church to commission the first Mexican-origin bishops and cardinals in the 1970s. And ultimately, the confluence of several factors in the late 1960s would change the public character of American Catholicism (especially in the Southwest). Many reforms instituted by Vatican II, such as the vernacular mass, provided powerful new methods for outreach in ethnic parishes. In the early 1970s, Spanish language services became increasingly popular and took inventive new forms such as the ‘‘mariachi mass’’ that featured Mexican musicians in the performance of the liturgy.20 Although Mexican-origin Catholics welcomed the integration of Mexican cultural elements into

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services that targeted them, churches that sponsored these types of masses faced considerable criticism from many American Catholics who were wary of the rise of ethnic particularism within their church. At the same historical moment that Mexican culture and Mexican-origin Catholics were making inroads into the American Catholic church, the study of race and ethnicity was being formalized within the academy. Early ethnic studies programs fostered a politicized sense of identity for Mexicanorigin peoples as Chicano\as and promoted active resistance to Americanization. Like members of the early UFW, Chicano\a nationalists often employed religious iconography, most importantly that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as emblems of ethnicity. Chicano\a artists have reinvented Guadalupe in a variety of forms symbolizing political and cultural autonomy. Although the image of Guadalupe has retained its sacredness, many artists depict the Virgin in a manner that radically departs from Catholic orthodoxy. Chicano\a artists often depict Guadalupe in ways that stress her connection to the Aztec goddess Tonantzin in an attempt to valorize and claim continuity with the indigenous cultures of Mexico. Further, Chicana feminists have re-imagined Guadalupe in a host of forms suggestive of feminine strength and sexuality. Among a multiplicity of forms, Guadalupe has been cast as a black-belt karate practitioner, as jogger, as factory worker, as a powerful nude, and as the subject of countless tattoos.21 As Chicano\as embarked on the project of creating a culture betwixt and between Mexican and American cultures, the liberalization of American immigration laws resulted in a massive influx of Mexican-origin people. In the 1980s, large-scale immigration from Mexico became one of the largest elements of what scholars of immigration to the United States have come to term ‘‘the new immigration.’’ In specific consideration of Mexicans, this immigration is characterized by large-scale flow of documented and undocumented immigrants that intensified rapidly after 1980. In the 1990s there were more legal immigrants to the United States from Mexico than from all of the countries of Europe combined.22 Many of these ‘‘new’’ Mexican immigrants in the United States are transnational citizens rather than simple transplants. These recent arrivals are emerging as important actors in American society and civic life while still participating in Mexico’s religious, economic, political, and cultural spheres, a situation that is not lost on Mexican politicians. Mexican President Vicente Fox toured the border region in December 2000 to welcome back personally a few of the estimated 1 million Mexicans traveling south for Christmas. The popularity of Fox’s dual nationality initiative, whereby Mexican immigrants becoming U.S. citizens retain a host of political rights in Mexico, suggests an emerging transnational framework for the identities of ‘‘new’’ immigrants.23 Although contemporary immigrants have found the American Catholic church more sympathetic than earlier generations did, Protestant denominations (especially charismatic churches) have had significant success in their conversion efforts. Many of these churches make use of transnational networks to establish satellite congregations in Mexican hometowns

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thereby creating important support networks for their members and religious cultures that are American and Mexican all at once.24 The transnational character of the religious lives of many new Mexican immigrants has also led to great innovations in Catholic devotional life in the borderlands. Among the most noteworthy is the existence of two separate cults of patron saints of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Juan Soldado and San Toribio Romo. Although not recognized by the Catholic church, Juan Castillo Morales, commonly known as Juan Soldado, has long been understood to be a patron saint of undocumented Mexican immigrants. Morales served as a soldier in Tijuana when he was accused of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, a crime for which he was executed in 1938. His hagiography claims that he was framed by a superior officer who was actually guilty of the horrible act. As he was led to his execution, he swore that his innocence would be proven when miracles were asked and granted in his name after his death. ‘‘Juan Soldado’’ is buried in Tijuana’s Panteon 2, which has become a pilgrimage spot for the faithful to ask for intercession in issues of immigration: crossing the border safely, dealing with the border patrol, and negotiating permanent residency and citizenship. Devoted followers have built a chapel on the site of his grave that is decorated with thanksgivings in the form of photographs, letters, gifts, candles, flowers, and copies of green cards.25 In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized twenty-four martyrs killed in Mexico’s Cristero revolt, an insurrection against a repressively anti-clerical Mexican government that occurred in the late 1920s. One of these newly minted saints is Father Toribio Romo, a priest shot and killed by government forces in an ambush in Tequila, Mexico. Since canonization, Romo has gained considerable popularity among Mexican migrants and is credited with leading many lost or injured people safely across the border. Although Romo’s relics reside in a church in central Mexico, it is significant that all of Romo’s surviving relatives have emigrated from Mexico and live in the United States.

A CHURCH REBUILT In California, the Northridge earthquake of 1994 damaged Los Angeles’s St. Vibiana’s Cathedral badly enough to warrant its condemnation by structural engineers. However, plans for a grander cathedral were quickly drawn up and by the following year the campaign to build a new structure was well under way. In September 2002, the massive new cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels was dedicated and opened to the public. Like St. Basil’s Church noted earlier, the new cathedral makes use of a simple, modern, and very controversial architectural vocabulary. However, the design of Our Lady of the Angels is radically different from that of its predecessor. In some ways the architecture of the new cathedral can be read as a compensatory gesture by the American church to ethnic and national Catholics. Its architect and the clergy very self-consciously created the building as an emblem of a pluralistic vision of American Catholicism

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and civic culture. The entrance to the cathedral is surmounted by a statue of Mary that ‘‘does not wear the traditional veil. Her arms are bare, outstretched to welcome all. Her carriage is confident, and her hands are strong, the hands of a working woman. From the side can be seen a thick braid of hair down her back that summons thoughts of Native American or Latina women. Other characteristics, such as her eyes, lips, and nose convey Asian, African, and Caucasian features.’’26 Below the multiracial statue of Mary are monumental cathedral doors designed by a Mexican-born artist and emblazoned with fifteen distinct Marian images from around the world. As the laity enter the cathedral, they pass a series of side-chapels that are designed to house and acknowledge the important role of the diverse ethnic parishes of the city. The interior walls of the cathedral are decorated with large tapestries that depict the communion of saints. Catholic saints, revered individuals, and children of all nationalities and epochs are present in an eclectic mix. But of these symbols of inclusivity, the one that would be most striking to the Chicano\a protesters of 1969 at St. Basil’s is the installation of a full-scale replica of Our Lady of Guadalupe placed just outside the exit of the cathedral. This Mexican Virgin is visible both to all visitors and to the thousands of commuters passing the cathedral on the 101 freeway that runs adjacent to the building. The tremendous array of ethnic religious emblems that adorn the new cathedral marks a dramatic change in the American Catholic church. The church seems to have come full circle to an ethnic parish model, but as a more complex American church made up of many transnational ethnic parishes, not as a church that stands over and against ethnic particularity. Given that the cathedral’s design and its location near government offices in downtown Los Angeles promote its use as a ceremonial and public center for the city, it seems likely that the religious culture and symbols of immigrant ethnic Catholics, most notably Mexican-origin Catholics, will only come into greater prominence in the civic life and culture of the city. In doing so, they may well represent the future for Mexican influence on the whole of American religious life.

NOTES 1. The events of this protest are treated in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s autobiography, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (New York: Vintage, 1973). 2. See David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), for a clear treatment of missionization and secularization. ˜ o Tradiciones Nuevomexicanas: Hispano Arts 3. For examples, see Mary Montan and Culture of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001); and Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella, eds., Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 4. For discussions of perceptions of the war on the U.S. side see John Eisenhower, So Far From God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); and Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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5. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955). For a primary example see Lyman Beecher’s widely reprinted sermon, ‘‘Plea for the West.’’ 6. Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies (1845; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). 7. See Kevin Starr and Richard Orsi, eds., Barbarous Soil: People, Culture and Community in Gold Rush California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); and Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 8. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 9. John Bernard McGloin, California’s First Archbishop: The Life of Joseph Sadoc Alemany, 1814–1888 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966). 10. See Ray John De Aragon, Padre Martinez and Bishop Lamy (Las Vegas: Pan American, 1978); and Alberto Lopez Pulido, The Sacred World of the Penitentes (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). 11. See George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 12. Consider the enthusiastic response of American Catholic clergy to Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel that portrays the struggle between American and Mexican forms of Catholicism. 13. See Mathew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacan, 1927–1929 (London: British Academy, 2004). 14. See Sanchez. 15. See Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 16. See Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (New York: McNally and Loftin, 1964). 17. Richard Etulain, Cesar Chavez: A Brief Biography with Documents (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002). 18. See Rudy Busto, King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reies Lo´pez Tijerina (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). 19. F. Arturo Rosales, ed., Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican American Struggle for Civil Rights (Houston: Arte Publico, 2000), 283. 20. See Martin McMurtrey, Mariachi Bishop the Life Story of Patrick Flores (San Antonio, TX: Corona Publishing, 1988), on post–Vatican II Spanish-language liturgical changes in the Southwest. 21. The classic article on the topic is Shifra Goldman, ‘‘The Iconography of Chicano Self-Determination: Race, Ethnicity, and Class,’’ Art Journal 49, 2 (1990): 167–73. See also Marie-Pierre Colle, Guadalupe Body and Soul (New York: Vendome, 2005); and Carla Trujillo, ‘‘La Virgen de Guadalupe and Her Reconstruction in Chicana Lesbian Desire,’’ in Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998). 22. For a broad discussion of the contemporary effects of Latin American immigration see Marcelo Suraez-Orozco and Mariela M. Paez, eds., Latinos: Remaking America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 23. See Carlos Veles-Ibanez and Anna Sampaio, eds., Transnational Latino/a Communities: Politics, Processes and Cultures (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

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24. See Luis Leon, La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and David Maciel and Maria Herrera Sobek, eds., Cultures Across Borders: Mexican Immigration and Popular Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). 25. See the first book-length treatment: Paul J. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Saint (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 26. From the Los Angeles Cathedral Web site, available at http://www. olacathedral.org/cathedral/art/doors1.html; accessed January 20, 2006.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Cantu, Norma, and Olga Najers-Ramirez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. Mujerista Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996. Leon, Luis. La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Sandoval, Moises. On the Move: A History of the Hispanic Church in the United States. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990.

CHAPTER 8

The Shifting Role of the Latter-day Saints as the Quintessential American Religion Ethan Yorgason

M

any Americans know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest and most prominent body in the Mormon tradition,1 as one of the country’s fastest-growing churches. Somewhat less commonly known is this movement’s label as ‘‘the quintessential American religion.’’2 Since its establishment some critics have decried Mormonism as not even a legitimate faith. How then, this chapter asks, have many others viewed it as the quintessential American religion? This chapter also poses questions of why and whither. Why has Mormonism been given this designation? Whither the relationship between Mormonism and the American-essence label? In ancient Greek and medieval European philosophy, ‘‘quintessence’’ meant aether, the fifth element of the universe along with fire, earth, air, and water. By the nineteenth century, aether named the invisible element that permeated the universe. Mark Twain famously linked this aether with Mormonism when he called the Book of Mormon ‘‘chloroform in print.’’3 The pun alluded both to aether’s supposedly gaseous nature as well as to the capacity of the Book of Mormon—of which the book of Ether forms a part—to induce sleep, like chloroform gas. Not many years later, aether became the Achilles heel of Newtonian physics, as scientists famously abandoned the search for this quintessence. This chapter raises the question of whether the label of Mormonism as the quintessential American religion might similarly evaporate. Could this label, like aether, become more of a reminder how people used to think than a notion that provides insight? The label of Mormonism as the quintessential American religion gained greatest resonance in the mid-to-late twentieth century. I ask whether the label will have staying power into the twenty-first. It is probably too soon to provide confident answers. Yet I think the question deserves to be posed.

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Peter Williams recently wrote, ‘‘Mormonism has been called the most American of religions, and at times has been treated as subversively unAmerican. It is clearly a community of apparent paradoxes. . . .’’4 This chapter does not concentrate on arguments that Mormonism was un-American, but such charges were almost constant during the nineteenth century because of polygamy, prophets, theocracy, denial of traditional Christianity, and communalism; and some continue to make such charges today.5 On the other side of the paradox, the ‘‘quintessential’’ label is somewhat shallower than it might appear. Many fewer people fully endorse the argument than note that it has been made by others. There are shades to the ‘‘quintessential’’ argument; some use the precise label and straightforwardly argue that Mormonism is the most American religion, while others merely make suggestions in that direction. In what follows, before more fully posing the staying-power question, I explore arguments that approach the ‘‘quintessential’’ claim without directly endorsing it, as well as those that more fully make it.

DOCTRINAL AND FORMAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE ‘‘QUINTESSENTIAL’’ ARGUMENT The ‘‘quintessential’’ claim draws on various aspects of Latter-day Saints (LDS) history. I wish, however, to suggest first that this claim depends on a foundation of Mormonism’s doctrinal and formal characteristics. Basic LDS teachings are relevant to the United States. The Book of Mormon, for example, tells of ancient inhabitants of the American continent. Mormons typically interpret those inhabitants’ prophecies for ‘‘this land’’ and ‘‘this nation’’ as referring to the United States. Mormonism’s canonized ‘‘Articles of Faith’’ include the enjoinder to be subject to the rulers of the land and the prophecy that Zion, the New Jerusalem, will be built on the American continent. Joseph Smith identified western Missouri as the actual site of the biblical Garden of Eden, the place to and from which Christ will return and rule at the Second Coming. As well, Mormons have held the United States Constitution to be divinely inspired, perhaps even revealed. It was not simply the best possible outcome at the historical moment, but the universally paramount guide for a nontheocratic world. The United States, throughout much of LDS doctrinal history, was not just a promised land. It was, along with Palestine, the promised land. Four basic formal elements also ground most ‘‘quintessential’’ arguments. First and perhaps most simply, though not most trivially, Mormonism’s numerical success bolsters the ‘‘quintessential’’ claim. Mormonism was not unique in many of the impulses we today regard as novel. But it is the movement among those that advocated such novelty that succeeded and continues to succeed. Other movements that seemed to be better candidates for much of the nineteenth century, such as the Disciples movement, have stagnated numerically by comparison.6 They seem to lack the vitality the quintessential American religion should possess. Mormonism’s strong and fairly consistent growth implies vitality. Second, Mormonism possesses manifestly American origins. Observers have historically given priority to origination over adaptation. Protestantism,

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in its many varieties, dominates American religious life numerically and ideologically. Its nonsectarian form is the de facto basis for the presumed common religious values that have grounded and continue to permeate American public life.7 It has proven highly adaptable to and supportive of American nationalism.8 Yet most Protestant denominations, and Protestantism as a whole, have European origins. Many observers thus seem to imply that these groups cannot constitute pure American essence. Similarly, Catholicism, by far the dominant single religious institution in the United States, exists in America because of immigration, and its institutional loyalty is still exported. Third, and related, Mormonism, according to many accounts, created something distinct from earlier religious categories. It was novel. ‘‘Our deep [American] need for originality gave us Joseph Smith even as it gave us Emerson and Emily Dickinson, Whitman and Melville, Henry and William James, even as it gave us Lincoln. . . .’’9 Mormonism did not claim allegiance to Protestantism, nor did outsiders often place it there.10 Mormonism claims to be Christian, but it does not claim the institutional Christian tradition, as never-ending debates over Mormonism’s qualifications to be called Christian demonstrate.11 Finally, Mormonism created strong, tightly integrated leadership and membership. Mormonism has often been labeled a cult in part because of its influence throughout the breadth of its members’ lives. Mormonism has not been simply a loose coalition of similarly minded believers. The movement’s novelty and strong integration have led many observers to find Mormonism more essentially American than the Pentecostal movement, for example, which is both numerically large (much larger than Mormonism), vital, and American in origin. Thus Mormonism can be characterized as a large, consistently vital movement springing from American soil without obvious connections elsewhere,12 one with manifestly distinctive content and one that motivates high levels of loyalty and comradeship. To the extent that those looking for the quintessential American religion find these formal characteristics attractive, few religions in America can match Mormonism. Add Mormonism’s theological statements about America, and the LDS church becomes the quintessential American religion by near default. These doctrinal and formal elements, whether left implicit or made explicit, typically ground arguments about Mormonism as the quintessential American religion. Without these building blocks, the claim would be difficult to sustain. Yet those who make the ‘‘quintessential’’ argument often insist that there is much more.13 Mormonism, they say, profoundly participates in, manifests, or shapes something of the American ethos. Just how it does so varies, depending on who makes the argument.

QUINTESSENTIAL THROUGH AMERICANIZATION Many scholars have argued that the Americanization period of Mormonism (1880–1930) led to conditions that allowed Mormons to be subsequently regarded as super-Americans.14 Some of my own work has followed this basic

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theme.15 Strong late-nineteenth-century non-Mormon pressure—of legal, social, political, and cultural varieties—induced Mormons generally to accept a narrow form of Americanness, more narrow in fact than that which existed in America or even Protestantism as a whole.16 By the twentieth century, strict Victorian ideals replaced greater gender tolerance. The nascent LDS feminist movement was a casualty of the pressure as much as polygamy was. Commitment to capitalism and its cultural logic assumed priority over egalitarian economic ideals. And a nearly axiomatic jingoism pushed aside carefully considered national loyalty, with its capacity for critique. With early Mormonism’s strong millennial expectations of retreat from the world having faded substantially, Mormons moved beyond simple declarations that God inspired the U.S. Constitution and that Mormons would build Zion within the boundaries of the United States. Mormons came to see the American nation as an active agent in spreading God’s agenda, rather than just as an entity providing place and protection for the church to grow. Mormons explicitly argued that they were spreading the gospel of Americanism as much as that of Mormonism.17 Although not unique among churches in making such professions, Mormonism espoused doctrines that added a more direct theological claim to them. Mormons did not have to tenuously rely on the Bible to support beliefs in American exceptionalism. As Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton put it: ‘‘By the end of World War I in America, if not before, the Mormons were more American than most Americans. Patriotism, respect for the law, love of the Constitution, and obedience to political authority reigned as principles of the faith.’’18 Thus one sense of Mormons as the quintessential American religionists asserts that the Latter-day Saints deeply embraced basic American values, ideologies, and practices near the turn of the twentieth century. As this process continued throughout the century, some observers began to label Mormons ‘‘super-Americans’’ or ‘‘model Americans.’’19 Ideologically, Mormons approached mainstream American society most closely from about 1920–1965.20 Utah voting patterns largely mirrored national trends then.21 Mormonism’s racialized priesthood and conservative gender tendencies fit mainstream moods. Capitalism took strong hold in Utah, and mainstream Protestantism extended social, if not theological, tolerance toward Mormons. Growing economic and nationalist conservatism within parts of LDS leadership matched broader American cold war tendencies. At times, this notion of Mormons embodying American values slid into assertions that Mormon culture represented the essence of traditional, rather than contemporary, America.22 Mormonism’s presumed communitymindedness, patriarchal gender roles, and strict sexual morality reminded many of an America that used to exist.23 Mormonism, in this variation, offers little insight into contemporary or future American life; instead it provides a living heritage museum that helps America access its past. Other observers, however, found Mormonism a leader in many aspects of contemporary American life. Such areas include health-consciousness (the LDS Word of Wisdom), corporate-mindedness (business-oriented church leadership and membership), and international awareness (due to Mormonism’s missionary program).24 I suspect that scholars and other

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observers may in the future look more in this vein to Mormonism for insight into American globalization.25 Mormonism offers possibilities for analyzing global attraction or rejection of things with American origins.26 Mormonism also has apparently taken on a prototypical American challenge within globalization, managing and accommodating itself to international diversity, even while maintaining both the priority of key American-born ideologies and practices and also the perpetuation of American institutional primacy and hierarchical focus.

QUINTESSENTIAL THROUGH WESTERN EXPERIENCE Another common argument locates Mormonism’s essential Americanness at an earlier point in history. In this regard, Mormonism represents America not so much because of twentieth-century cultural accommodation, but because of its nineteenth-century flight from mainstream America. Mormonism thus participated centrally in the creation of the American frontier. Or, alternatively, Mormonism’s experience provides insight into America’s obsession with Western space. According to the first version, Mormonism shaped, and was shaped by, the frontier through its migrations toward and settling of the Salt Lake Valley.27 Positive and negative shadings of this version exist. On the one hand, Mormonism’s saga, especially its westward movement, demonstrates the nobility, tenacity, and success of the principled American quest for freedom. Alternatively, Mormonism offers a cautionary tale of the degradation produced on the wild frontier. In either case, Mormonism functions as a central element within the American frontier mythos. Since the frontier itself stood for many years as a key symbol of American uniqueness, it was only a short step to calling Mormonism the quintessential American religion. In recent years, scholars have critiqued mythologized interpretations of the frontier. Nevertheless, many continue to suggest that America’s obsession with the frontier and with the Western United States more generally was a key element of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. In this more sophisticated version of the West’s role in American life, Mormonism at times remains central.28 A recent and particularly interesting account argued that to early-nineteenth-century Americans, ‘‘the notion of America as an ideal of freedom was in many respects removed from the concrete realities of the landscape itself.’’ Western space only became symbolically important to America after religious dissidents, Mormons among the foremost of these, first ‘‘saw the potential of the landscape itself to become redemptive.’’29 Perhaps, then, Mormons were key shapers of the American geographical mythos. Others similarly called Mormonism a signal marker for the American characteristics of migration, mobility, and the capacity for social and individual renewal. Still others read Mormonism as enacting American Manifest Destiny historically and theologically.30 Another interpretation holds Mormonism as quintessentially American because it created a people. This assertion goes beyond typical observations that Mormonism created a tightly knit religious group. It

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additionally suggests that Mormonism’s integration had staying power over generations. Both insiders and outsiders recognized and cultivated its sense of distinctiveness. It created a separate culture—or at least a subculture, not just a tightly organized voluntary association—complete for a time with its own economy and spatial boundaries. According to one highly influential formulation, Mormonism not only created a people, but also at certain historical moments became nearly a nation.31 Laurence Moore recently made this argument. He found Mormonism’s peoplehood little diminished even in the late twentieth century. Mormonism, he suggested, originated out of a desire for distinctiveness, and this distinctiveness has been cultivated ever since: The Mormons have retained the main quality of sect-like behavior, which is insistence on a difference that matters between themselves and everyone else. . . . Many non-Mormon Americans living in western states continue to believe that present-day Mormons in secret councils hatch conspiratorial schemes against other Americans. Objective differences persist of the very same sort that laid the basis for the Mormon controversy in the nineteenth century. Mormons are . . . a singularly concentrated group. Mormons have not abandoned the Book of Mormon; they give a great deal of deference to their church authorities; and they proselytize aggressively. A sense of difference has persisted so strongly among Mormons that they have probably gained an ethnic as well as a religious identity, thus becoming like the Jewish people they have always emulated.32

Moore recognizes that difference does not, at first blush, sound like an argument for centrality. But, he asserts, it is precisely this creation of difference that constitutes the American essence: Mormons taught the American religion, or at least a vital aspect of it, but not because their doctrines somehow sprouted naturally out of the American frontier and provided a domestic alternative to faiths imported from Europe. Mormons followed a lesson, already by their time well established in American experience, that one way of becoming American was to invent oneself out of a sense of opposition. . . . In defining themselves as being apart from the mainstream, Mormons were in fact laying claim to it. By declaring themselves outsiders, they were moving to the center.33

QUINTESSENTIAL THROUGH ORIGINARY IMPULSES Finally, another category of ‘‘quintessential’’ arguments claims that Mormonism, usually through Joseph Smith’s originary teachings, tapped into deeply rooted American cultural/religious longings and habits. To Klaus Hansen, one of the most perceptive observers of the Mormon– American relationship, the Book of Mormon’s physical setting plays only a minor role in Mormonism’s Americanism. Instead: More typically American is the optimistic, progressive, ‘‘materialistic’’ nature of Mormon theology; its denial of original sin and its Arminian thrust. But

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perhaps most typical of all is its practical, nonutopian emphasis, not only in its social thought . . . but also in its metaphysics. Mormon cosmology [of uncreated matter, eternal progression, etc.] fits readily into the framework of nineteenth-century American science—at least as it was perceived in the popular mind.34

Others variously argued that Mormonism fundamentally typifies America’s republican heritage, its search for authority amid conflict, or its populist and democratizing sensibilities (with a lay priesthood of most male believers and populist economic rhetoric, for example).35 Others suggested that Mormonism reenacts America’s Puritan heritage, distills and attempts to resolve key early debates from the Northeast United States, or provides an authentic declaration of independence for America from religious tradition.36 The Yale literary critic Harold Bloom gave probably the most provocative and insightful recent example within this category of argument.37 Although he also presented some highly original claims, Bloom’s argument pulled together many earlier assertions in this ‘‘originary’’ category. Joseph Smith, Bloom flatly stated, was a ‘‘religious genius.’’38 Though he insisted that no single group wholly embodies ‘‘the American Religion,’’ Bloom regarded Mormons and Southern Baptists as those that come closest. Given recent fundamentalist trends among Southern Baptists, he thought, Mormonism may offer the most insight for the future.39 For Bloom, ‘‘our unofficial but pervasive national faith . . . does not believe or trust, it knows, though it always wants to know more.’’40 Mormons, he implied, know their place in the cosmos. ‘‘The God of the American Religion is not a creator-God, because the American never was created, and so the American has at least part of the God within herself.’’41 Thus, the Mormon God is fundamentally American by being subject to time and space.42 The Mormon Gods are a sequence of American fathers, each progressing from human to divine on the basis of hard work and obedience to the laws of the universe, which turn out to be the maxims of the Latter-day Saints Church. Organization, replacing creation, becomes a sacred idea, and every good Mormon indeed remains an organization man or woman.43

Bloom thus argued that much of what makes Americans Americans at the deepest levels is celebrated and developed within Mormonism. As it turns out, there is more to Bloom’s image of Mormon centrality in American religion. Bloom wrote in 1992 with what, as a geographer, I characterize as a geopolitical vision. To him, Mormonism’s Americanness also lay in its currently sublimated drive—in, through, and beyond America and its ideals—to produce the Kingdom of God on earth. This drive for power over American space made the LDS manifestation of American religion simultaneously attractively audacious and frightening to Bloom. Mormonism, he was certain, will become the de facto religion of the American West, just as the Southern Baptist Convention is for the South: I surmise . . . that the heirs of Smith and of Brigham Young have not altogether given up the aspiration to achieve the Mormon vision of the

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Kingdom of God in America. No one really knows what portion of the liquid wealth in America’s portfolios is held by the Latter-day Saints Church. Yet it is clear that Mormon financial and political power is exerted in Washington to a degree far beyond what one would expect from one voter in fifty. The Republican regimes of Reagan and Bush have enjoyed fierce Mormon financial and moral support, and the Salt Lake City hierarchy in turn can make itself heard in the White House. The nation will not always be only two percent Mormon. The Saints outlive the rest of us, have more children than all but a few American groups, and convert on a grand scale, both here and abroad. . . . [M]y own guess is that by the year 2020 . . . they could well form at least ten percent of our population, and probably rather more than that. Their future is immense: the Mormon people consistently are the hardest-working, most cohesive bloc in our society; only Asian-Americans rival them in zeal, ambition, and intensity. Salt Lake City may yet become the religious capital of the United States.44

Nevertheless, Bloom also frequently argued that contemporary Mormons have forgotten or downplayed Smith’s original vision. He never entirely reconciled that assertion with his confidence that church leadership could easily call the geopolitical scenario into existence. His membership predictions also wildly mislead, as we shall see below. Yet here is a highly respected non-Mormon scholar suggesting that the Mormonism of past, present, and future is central to understanding American religious essence.

ORIGINS AND BACKGROUND OF THE MORMONISM-AS-QUINTESSENTIAL ARGUMENT Let us now turn to the issues of who has made these ‘‘quintessential’’ arguments and why they were made. Factors extending beyond the content of Mormonism and American essence have provided the background upon which the ‘‘quintessential’’ argument flourished. Both Mormons and non-Mormons had reasons at various times to make the ‘‘quintessential’’ argument. In the twentieth century, particularly its second half, these motivations converged: Mormon desires to be seen as American, and nonMormon American scholarly and cultural yearnings to identify a quintessential American religion. Mormons, as noted earlier, had from Joseph Smith’s day valued America and its Constitution. They felt the country operated under the world’s best possible system, in spite of arguing in the nineteenth century that Americans did not extend religious freedom to the Saints and in spite of a theology that expected the Kingdom of God to supersede America and all other nations. Throughout the nineteenth century, they claimed to be loyal Americans. Repeated flights from what they perceived as religious persecution reminded them of the Pilgrims and Puritans, to whom many Mormons explicitly claimed direct lineage.45 They regarded the Mormon Battalion’s service in the Mexican War as more recent proof of their patriotism. Yet Mormons seem to have had little sense until the late nineteenth century that they might be enacting something essential to the American experience. Earlier, they had more regularly explained their originality and contributions to the world in religious terms: They were following in the

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model of the great Protestant dissidents, or they were breaking from Protestantism altogether and returning to Christ’s original church. But near the turn of the twentieth century, Mormons developed a sense of themselves partaking centrally in the American experience based in part on claims made in written sources. In 1888, five years after the statement first appeared in print, LDS Apostle George Q. Cannon quoted in his biography of Joseph Smith from Josiah Quincy’s Figures of the Past :46 It is by no means improbable that some future textbook, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen? And it is by no means impossible that the answer to that interrogatory may be thus written: Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. And the reply, absurd as it doubtless seems to most men now living, may be an obvious common-place to their descendants. History deals in surprises and paradoxes quite as startling as this.47

Americans do not yet regard Joseph Smith in quite this manner, of course, but Quincy was remarkably prescient nevertheless. However, the prediction very probably helped to create the situation it described. To say that Quincy wrote self-fulfilling prophecy is an overstatement. Many people with little personal stake in bolstering Joseph Smith’s reputation took part in the process. But a relationship exists between the fact that these words were written and the extent to which they came to pass. Mormons repeated the quote over and over in the twentieth century, mostly for internal consumption.48 Mormons undoubtedly came to consider Joseph Smith, and Mormonism by extension, as fundamentally important to America partly because of this quote. It cannot help but have led Mormons to find pride in the ‘‘quintessential’’ argument, a pride many Mormons certainly still feel today. Non-Mormons more often came to the ‘‘quintessential’’ argument through a ‘‘Leo Tolstoy’’ quotation. But even here, Mormons preceded them. And here, the history becomes messy. According to the common version of the story, Tolstoy once told Dr. Andrew White, who served as both U.S. ambassador to Germany and president of Cornell University: Catholicism originated in Rome; the Episcopal Church originated in England; the Lutheran Church in Germany, but the [American religion] . . . is commonly known as the Mormon Church. . . . The Mormon people teach the American religion; their principles teach the people not only of Heaven and its attendant glories, but how to live so that their social and economic relations with each other are placed on a sound basis. If the people follow the teachings of this Church, nothing can stop their progress—it will be limitless. There have been great movements started in the past but they have died or been modified before they reached maturity. If Mormonism is able to endure, unmodified, until it reaches the third and fourth generation, it is destined to become the greatest power the world has ever known.49

Factually, the story seems to be largely mistaken. But few people realized the problem.50 Mormon scholars and apostles, non-Mormon scholars and

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journalists, and many others took the story at face value. Laurence Moore and Harold Bloom, to mention examples noted above, supplemented their own interpretations of Mormonism as quintessential by frequently stating that Tolstoy had it right. Calling the story wholly false is too strong. We may never know the precise details. What we do know comes primarily from Leland Fetzer’s research.51 Tolstoy did indeed speak with White about Mormonism. Also, he did modestly compliment Mormons in an area or two. But the supremely flattering assessment of Mormonism and its fortunes is very probably a figment of LDS imaginations. According to Fetzer, Susa Young Gates, Brigham Young’s daughter and an important actor in Mormonism’s transition into the twentieth century,52 read that Tolstoy had decried America’s oppression of both the Chinese and the Mormons. On the strength of that information, she initiated a brief correspondence in 1888–1889 with Tolstoy and his daughter. Along with the correspondence, she sent him a Book of Mormon and a copy of Cannon’s biography of Joseph Smith, the book quoting Josiah Quincy’s assessment of Joseph Smith. The letters to Gates from the Tolstoy family have apparently been lost, but Tolstoy recorded short notes about the correspondence and the two books in his journal. He was as appalled by the deception he thought Mormonism encompassed as by that of any other organized religion. But he regarded such deception, as with other organized religions, as a necessary social myth. When Tolstoy spoke with White about Mormonism, five years after the last Gates correspondence, he wryly said that he preferred deception that comes from the earth (Joseph Smith’s golden plates) over that which comes from the heavens. He also expressed interest in the church’s women and its success in enjoining chastity.53 Nevertheless, Fetzer found no direct evidence that Tolstoy either speculated on Mormonism’s future or regarded Mormonism as a whole in positive terms. Fetzer tracked LDS modifications to this presumably accurate account of the conversation. Gradually, he argued, storytellers added elements that favored Mormonism, until the currently popular version emerged in a church magazine in 1939.54 This version came from an LDS former Cornell student who reported to have received his information from White himself more than 30 years earlier. For various reasons, Fetzer strongly distrusts the 1939 version, but it nonetheless became dominant among both Mormons and non-Mormons. Whether Josiah Quincy’s concern about the future reputation of Joseph Smith led Tolstoy to express positive interest in the future of Mormonism or whether such interest was simply imputed to Tolstoy by Mormons may be impossible to finally determine.55 It seems highly likely, however, that the specific prognosis of Mormonism usually assigned to Tolstoy did not originate from him. In reality, it matters little where the historical truth lies. Mormons believed and told the story of Tolstoy, and non-Mormons also came to believe it. The story served important interests for both groups. Mormons near the turn of the twentieth century yearned to interpret LDS history as acceptably American. But so, too, did some non-Mormons.

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Even before much attention was given to Tolstoy, Mormon and nonMormon interpretations converged within Utah’s early-twentieth-century popular culture on the conclusion that Mormon colonization of the Great Basin importantly participated in the American story of Western colonization. This joint interpretation aided regional peace.56 As Mormons felt ever less harassed in the twentieth century, the boldness and breadth of the American claim increased. By 1933, for example, John Henry Evans could release with a national publisher his Joseph Smith: An American Prophet.57 As the twentieth century progressed and American nationalism became more dominant in Mormonism, stronger statements arose. These included more frequently a recollection of a statement of Joseph Smith. The Latter-day Saints, he is reported to have prophesied, will save the U.S. Constitution during an hour in which it hangs by a thread.58 Mormons, in many LDS minds, were not only historically American, but were also destined to become saviors of the nation. Twentieth-century non-Mormons outside of Utah gradually freed themselves from the interpretive strangleholds of polygamy and heresy, and likewise found something uniquely important in Mormonism. A relatively few nineteenth-century non-Mormon writers had looked beyond the usual condemnatory interpretations to provide more balanced accounts of Mormonism.59 But at that point, those writers had little incentive to do more than situate Mormonism within the American experience: It was something unusual or interesting, perhaps, but not vital to the understanding of America.60 The situation for non-Mormons changed in the twentieth century, although more slowly than in Utah. Perhaps most important was the 1903 assessment by the economist Richard Ely that Mormonism constituted the most perfect social organization outside of the German army.61 Ely did not directly link Mormonism to American essence, but his conclusion gave Mormons and non-Mormons scholarly authorization to speak of Mormonism as enacting something fundamentally important. From the other side of the admiration spectrum, the scathing, sarcastic story of Mormonism by historian/essayist Bernard DeVoto, a non-Mormon Utah native who had since left Utah, hardly constituted a full argument for Mormonism as the quintessential American religion. Yet his account did have Mormonism searching misguidedly for ‘‘the perfect American religion.’’62 By the 1940s and 1950s, the theme of Mormonism as representative of America became prominent among scholars.63 Particularly influential were Thomas O’Dea, who strongly argued that Mormons were a fundamentally American people, and David Brion Davis, who located Mormonism’s roots in early New England culture. Significant numbers of Mormon and nonMormon observers thereafter joined in portraying Mormons as quintessentially American at some level. Discussion then flourished on what the American essence was that Mormonism had tapped into. Where did scholars and other non-Mormons outside of Utah find such underlying motivation to view Mormonism as the quintessential American religion? Cultural historians tell us that twentieth-century America was obsessed with diversity. Theorists early in the century formulated models

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of American pluralism, and the rest of that century can be interpreted as an attempt to work through the implications of diversity.64 Americans eventually saw diversity as essential to the American spirit. Thus elements from beyond the mainstream could encompass something essentially American, especially if they had American origins.65 The nineteenth century had not regarded diversity in this manner. When Mormonism was considered in an American sense then, writers used Mormonism to illustrate unfortunate, twisted, and marginal American offspring rather than American essence. In the twentieth century, a tendency to celebrate diversity arose, though an ambivalent one. Chiung Hwang Chen helped us understand this tendency by charting the development of two ‘‘model minority discourses’’ that paralleled each other in content and chronology.66 She showed that American news and popular magazines portrayed both Mormons and Asian Americans as model minorities, groups that supposedly partook substantially of the American essence, especially in producing economic success, even though they were not incorporated into the mainstream culturally. The ‘‘model minority’’ label itself is much more commonly applied to Asian Americans, of course, but the magazines found model aspects in Mormons a bit earlier (the 1930s) than they did for Asian Americans (after World War II). The diversity Mormonism provided the country, I would thus like to suggest, ironically aided its interpretation as quintessential.67 Equally important motivation exists in the country’s basic, longstanding, and taken-for-granted search for essences. Though the general urge to identify essences has been a part of general Euro-American thought for centuries, the quest for the national society’s essence is an especially modern phenomenon, one that accompanies the equally modern phenomenon of nationalism. America realized by the twentieth century that it could not call upon a single ethnic identity as essence. And so ethos and mythos became especially valuable as markers of essence. This search for American essences helped the nation locate its place in the world.68 In fact, much of the twentieth century’s scholarly project on America centered on identifying such essences.69 The fear has been that without such unifying themes—myths as we often call them today—America stands in danger of disintegrating.70 Unity through diversity, in fact, is one such myth.71 This drive for essences, when combined with the American tendency to value diversity and the Mormon need to feel sufficiently American, produced fertile ground. By planting the LDS movement’s characteristics in this soil, Mormonism’s observers made the ‘‘quintessential’’ argument bloom. ‘‘Tolstoy’s’’ quotation became believable. Josiah Quincy became a prophet.

PROSPECTS FOR CHANGE? LDS growth rates increased after World War II, producing a ten-fold increase in membership in fifty years, as did the Mormon presence outside its traditional core; church leaders explicitly drew on early-twentiethcentury statements recommending that converts not gather to Utah and

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America, but instead build up the church where they were. Hence, by the 1960s, this growth was clearly international, with rapid increases in Latin America and East Asia. The church embarked on a program of ‘‘correlation’’ during that decade, a program designed to regularize administrative and theological control of Mormon practice. The church has since famously excommunicated a relatively small handful on both its left and right wings. Most Mormons remain conservative, however. By the 1960s and 1970s, Mormon conservatism prompted complaint from some quarters that Mormonism was fundamentally racist, sexist, anti-liberal, jingoistic, and perhaps even anti-intellectual. Although Mormonism’s racialism has diminished substantially over the past three decades, many argue that LDS leaders have fortified gender distinctions. During the twentieth century, the church developed a principle of acting politically only on moral issues.72 The church thus agitated on topics such as prohibition, gambling, and abortion. More recently, the church spoke out on matters that concern (in currently popular LDS parlance) ‘‘the natural family.’’ It sanctioned advocacy against the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s and 1980s, efforts some regard as decisive. In the past decade, Latter-day Saints have opposed gay marriage.73 These political actions indicate a social move toward the conservative wing of American Christianity. Some observers have also discerned an increased recent LDS insistence that its Christian origins be recognized as such.74 This may in part be a response to the increased religious attacks from the many conservative Protestants who regard Mormonism as a dangerous cult. Meanwhile church membership continues to grow. It now contains more than 12 million members, a bit more than half of whom live outside the United States. Latin Americans comprise close to 40 percent of church members. Activity levels in the United States are substantially higher than those elsewhere, however. The hierarchy is still overwhelmingly American. Given this situation, will this ‘‘quintessential’’ label flourish in the twenty-first century? This chapter initially raised the question of whether the label might vanish as quickly and completely as did aether. At this point, that comparison seems overblown. It would be foolhardy to predict any sudden change. Too much scholarship, tradition, and perhaps even validity exist for the label to disappear quickly. Observers variously advocate the label for one or all of three major periods in Mormon history—origins, Western pioneering, and twentieth-century American accommodation.75 In an era where religious and socially conservative nationalists seem to determine elections, the ‘‘quintessential’’ interpretation may still be on the rise. Scholars might also find an essential match between Mormonism and America as both entities participate in a globalizing world. Nevertheless, some modest, potentially counter trends deserve attention. They leave many of the factors that led to the ‘‘quintessential’’ label undisturbed at this point. If the trends strengthen, however, it is possible to imagine the label withering to some degree. First, and most widely commented upon, Mormonism’s membership composition is rapidly changing.76 Mormons are no longer 80–90 percent

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American. Depending on how one reckons, the LDS church may not be a majority American religion anymore. Central LDS leadership may even lose its American majority at some point over the next several decades, though this will surely lag behind membership shifts. Many American Mormons may not have noticed it yet, but church leaders are expending substantial effort to dampen some flagrantly American aspects of LDS practice in response to international growth. The adjustments may not be fast or deep enough to suit those desiring less nationalistic content from Mormonism, but change is occurring. If the early-twentieth-century transformation is an appropriate comparison, the process could produce unexpected ideological results.77 Perhaps just as importantly, the international membership growth adds to the complexity of creating and maintaining a people. If Mormonism appears as simply another denomination on the international religious landscape,78 rather than as a people rooted in the American physical and social landscape, will its American quintessentialness fade? Other aspects of LDS membership trends may come into play.79 Growth rates slowed substantially over the past decade—by approximately 40–50 percent. The sociologist Rodney Stark predicted in the 1980s and early 1990s, just before LDS growth rates declined, that Mormonism would become the world’s next great global religion. He gave a qualified estimate that it would reach 265 million members by 2080.80 Harold Bloom wrote in 1992 and understandably relied on these or similar estimates. Contrary to Bloom’s extrapolations, however, Mormonism is not even now a full 2 percent of the U.S. population, and at 5.7 million in 2005 it most certainly will not reach more than 30 million U.S. members in 2020.81 Also, for the first time since the early twentieth century, the percentage of LDS Americans who live outside of Utah dropped between 1980 and 2000 very slightly, from just over to just under 70 percent of all American Mormons. The last decade of this decrease also saw Utah’s percentage of Mormons, compared to the total state population, fall as well. This is not to say that Mormons are declining in the United States; Mormonism’s growth rate still exceeds the American growth rate, but now by less than seven-tenths of 1 percent. In any case, Harold Bloom’s population-based geopolitical vision of Mormonism in the United States does not offer a realistic forecast for the near- and medium-term future. If the trends toward slower growth and U.S. concentration in Utah continue, observers might find reason to rethink LDS quintessentialism. Beyond the issue of sheer numbers, it is not yet clear where observers will find continued American vitality within Mormonism. Mormonism’s ‘‘quintessential’’ label often stemmed from proactive programs or doctrines that seem to expand the American spirit: new American scriptures, potential to become gods, the Mormon flight and fight for religious freedom, the Mormon welfare program, family home evening, the health code, temples, and genealogy, etc. Perhaps global growth will allow Mormonism to demonstrate continuing vitality.82 Nevertheless, one dominant image of the current Mormon agenda within the United States, whether merited or not, is of a reactionary movement most concerned

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with protecting narrowly conceived traditional social relations.83 Mormonism has often faced this charge, but if growth becomes less dependable, it might be harder to observers to see beyond the negative image. There may also be shifts in the underlying motivation to declare Mormonism the quintessential American religion. Mormonism’s doctrinal scholarship seems increasingly disinclined to read Mormonism as basically American. Thomas Alexander noted that Mormonism’s critics often use the Mormonism-as-Americanism argument to discount the validity of the Book of Mormon and other early LDS doctrines.84 Those critics suggest that LDS doctrine seems designed to answer questions that directly confronted people in 1820s upstate New York and is thus limited in time, space, and scope. Terryl Givens observed that the Book of Mormon contains a built-in rebuttal in its claim that its prophets saw the latter days; Mormons thus expect the Book of Mormon to address debates of nineteenth-century America.85 Yet that answer may ring increasingly hollow to an ever more international LDS audience. American Latter-day Saints have an increasingly ambivalent attitude toward the ‘‘quintessential’’ label. Although it can still produce pride where it seems to be a compliment, especially among the general membership in the United States, many non-American Mormons are ever more wary of the label’s potential to work against contemporary Mormon objectives. LDS doctrinal scholars on the whole increasingly emphasize more universalistic themes instead.86 Finally, just as Mormons may have reasons to play down the ‘‘quintessential’’ label, so too may non-Mormon scholars and observers. The postmodern turn in certain quarters of the academy has severely critiqued the search for essences, particularly social essences.87 There is no such thing as a historically transcendent national essence, many scholars argue. Where there are dominant themes within the nation or trends that might be called a dominant American spirit, they are always historically constituted. More typically, there may at best be historically changing myths, ideas and ideals that will be constantly subject to evaluation to determine whether they still resonate. The myths may not apply across large spans of time. Others go further and suggest that any search for essences masks a drive for power and justifies oppression against those who do not seem to conform. Humanists and social scientists, the groups that will make most of the judgments about Mormonism, have been particularly influenced by these arguments. Could assessments of Mormonism as the quintessential American religion decline simply because scholars shy away from discussion of essences? Or, alternatively, will a changing Mormonism of the twentyfirst century once again have to prove that its dominant trends match those of a changing America? Similarly, historians remind us that histories are always interpretations with contemporary considerations in mind.88 Ultimately, to some very real extent, the label of some x as quintessential to y, has more to do with what people think y is than what x is. The arguments for Mormonism as quintessentially American may tell us more about America than about Mormonism. The historical considerations—perhaps even cultural needs— that allowed Mormonism to be viewed as the quintessential American

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religion might not persist. Even if scholars continue to look for essences, their evaluation of what constitutes American essences will undoubtedly shift over time. It is entirely possible, for example, to imagine the American concern for diversity passing Mormonism by. It is hard to argue that America’s obsession with diversity has diminished or stands poised to decrease. Increasingly, many leading scholars now concern themselves more with minorities that have not apparently prospered in America than with those who seemed to thrive.89 America’s cultural needs that lead it to find particular types of essences will not remain static; will Mormonism of the future be able to fill these needs? Thus, factors having little to do with the content of Mormonism could lead to the ‘‘quintessential’’ label’s decline. However, none of these trends is definitive at this point. A continued shift toward a higher proportion of international LDS membership may be the safest bet, but it could lead to fresh arguments for Mormonism as quintessentially American as much as it works against the label. The recent slowdown in growth rates may simply be a temporary aberration. Mormonism could exhibit vitality in latent or unanticipated emphases. The political climate may change such that both non-Mormons and Mormons are prouder to emphasize the movement’s American origins. Anti-essentialism may prove to be nothing more than a brief intellectual footnote to much more powerful scholarly trends. Certainly many scholars pay little attention to it now. Shelves and shelves of recent books at university libraries continue attempts to discern American essence.90 Or the momentum of the ‘‘quintessential’’ label may simply overwhelm any or all of these potentially contrary trends. After all, most of its fundamental bases remained unchanged. Yet, the trends bear watching. The history of aether testifies that quintessence may not be eternally valid.

NOTES I should like to thank Davis Bitton, Chiung Hwang Chen, and Laurence Yorgason for their helpful suggestions. 1. Although Mormonism may be said to include all the churches that give loyalty to the teachings of Joseph Smith, I use the label here for convenience to refer to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (I also use ‘‘LDS’’). It is that Mormon body toward which observers use the ‘‘quintessential’’ appellation. 2. Of course, many observers disagree with this label. Perhaps even more simply ignore the label. Alternative categorizations toward Mormonism have included, for example: heresy, universal truth, stupidity, a unique but marginal footnote to American religious history, a sect within the American denominational framework, or a quest for power disguised as religion. Many volumes written on American religion hardly mention Mormonism at all or give no hint of it as the quintessential American religion. A couple of important recent examples: Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Harry S. Stout and D.G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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3. Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1886), 127. 4. Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the TwentyFirst Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 398. 5. Of course, most of these same charges later were used to argue for Mormon Americanism. The best treatment of anti-American charges is Terryl L. Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 6. Although he does not quite make this argument, see Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 158–62. 7. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury, 1975); Robert T. Handy, Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America, 1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do about It (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005). Those who do not consider Mormonism the quintessential American religion usually find America’s religious center in Protestantism, or perhaps the Protestantism-Catholicism-Judaism triad. 8. Wuthnow, 241–67. 9. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 127. 10. Jan Shipps verified this sense of difference, though also took it a bit further in arguing that Mormonism constitutes a religious tradition that stands in relation to Christianity as Christianity stands to Judaism. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 11. Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 335–57. 12. For an intriguing, controversial attempt to establish such links, see John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 13. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1975), 614. 14. Shipps, Sojourner, 308. Recent work that supports this thesis to various degrees and in quite different ways includes, among many others: Gustive Larson, The Americanization of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1971); Mark P. Leone, Roots of Modern Mormonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Thomas G. Alexander, Transition in Mormonism: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 15. Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 16. Though John Sorenson might differ in whether the resultant change is properly labeled Americanization, he is precisely correct in arguing that Mormonism’s version of Americanism did not mean that Mormons became indistinguishable from other contemporary Americans. The point instead is that Mormons profoundly internalized traits and habits of political thought that were seen by many, both Mormons and non-Mormons, as the essence of good Americanness. John

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Sorenson, ‘‘Mormon World View and American Culture,’’ Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, 2 (1973): 17–29. 17. Yorgason, 164–68. 18. Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Knopf, 1979), 184. 19. Chiung Hwang Chen, Mormon and Asian American Model Minority Discourses in News and Popular Magazines (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004). 20. Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 21. James B. Mayfield, ‘‘Electoral Patterns,’’ with maps by Deon C. Greer, in Atlas of Utah, ed. Wayne L. Wahlquist (Provo, UT: Weber State College and Brigham Young University Press, 1981), 170–71. 22. Tony Kushner’s famous play (and now HBO special) Angels in America has been interpreted in this way. Mormonism, according to Mario DePillis, serves as the hidebound, intolerant symbol of traditional America in contrast to a promising, progressive future American ethos that might be imagined. Mario S. DePillis, ‘‘The Emergence of Mormon Power since 1945,’’ Journal of Mormon History 22, 1 (1996): 5–9. For an interesting partial dissent, one that reads Mormonism’s theology as much more central to Kushner’s American progressivism, see Michael Austin, ‘‘Theology for the Approaching Millennium: Angels in America, Activism, and the American Religion,’’ Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 30, 1 (1997): 25–44. Among other arguments, Austin notes (29) that Kushner himself called the angel Moroni (of Joseph Smith’s gold plates) the ‘‘prototypical American angel.’’ 23. For example, see Robert Lindsey, ‘‘The Mormons: Growth, Prosperity and Controversy,’’ New York Times Magazine (January 12, 1986): 24. 24. Malise Ruthven, ‘‘The Mormons’ Progress,’’ Wilson Quarterly 15, 2 (1991): 22–50. The Hasbro game company began promoting ‘‘Family Game Night’’ in recent years. To Mormons, this sounds much like the Family Home Evenings the LDS church has advocated since the early twentieth century. While I have not found evidence of direct connection between these phenomena, this is the kind of parallelism-based evidence Mormons use when they argue that Mormonism leads in wholesome American trends. 25. Philip Barlow, ‘‘Jan Shipps and the Mainstreaming of Mormon Studies,’’ Church History 73 (2004): 425. 26. See Robert Remini’s comments in ‘‘The Worlds of Joseph Smith,’’ a 2005 conference co-sponsored by the Library of Congress and Brigham Young University. While the proceedings are expected to be published in BYU Studies, an online recording can be utilized through the LDS church’s Web page at http://www.lds. org/library/display/0,4945,510-1-3067-1,00.html. 27. Ronald W. Walker, David J. Whittaker, and James B. Allen, Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 43–44; see also the critique of such frontier interpretations of Mormonism by David Brion Davis, ‘‘New England Origins of Mormonism,’’ New England Quarterly 26 (1953): 148. 28. Though for an argument about the marginalization of Mormonism in Western history, see Shipps, Sojourner, 17–44. 29. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, ‘‘Routing the Republic: Religion and the American West,’’ in Lectures on Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, ed. John W. Welch with Stephen J. Fleming (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2003), 125–36; quotes from 128, 130. 30. Hughes, 160; Remini, ‘‘Worlds of Joseph Smith.’’

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31. Thomas O’Dea, ‘‘Mormonism and the Avoidance of Sectarian Stagnation: A Study of Church, Sect, and Incipient Nationality,’’ American Journal of Sociology 60 (1954): 285–93. 32. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 44. 33. Ibid., 45, 46. 34. Hansen, 82. 35. Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830– 1846 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 113–22. 36. Davis, ‘‘The New England Origins’’; Hughes, 158–59; Remini, ‘‘Worlds of Joseph Smith.’’ 37. See Bloom, The American Religion. 38. Ibid., 80. Bloom also made the rather remarkable argument that Judaism, Catholicism, and traditional Protestantism are not truly biblical. Instead, Mormonism comes much closer. Smith, Bloom suggested, produced a biblical reading so powerful (a ‘‘creative misreading,’’ as Bloom called it) that he broke through all extant orthodoxies and intuited much of the essence of ancient Jewish religion. 39. One could perhaps argue that fundamentalism (in its loose, technically inaccurate, but more popular sense as deeply conservative religion) has much to do with helping us understand quintessential American religion of the future. And some have come close to making this argument, suggesting that understanding the future of American religion lies in understanding the social (if not theological) convergence between groups such as conservative Protestants, conservative Catholics, and Mormons. Bloom, however, brooked none of this argument. What makes American religion, for him with aesthetic sensibility, is not numerical or simply political domination but authentically innovative extensions of the American spirit. 40. Bloom, 31. 41. Ibid., 114. 42. Ibid., 115. 43. Ibid., 116. 44. Ibid., 112–13. 45. See, for example, George A. Smith’s declarations in Journal of Discourses (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854–1886), 2:24, 5:110. 46. Josiah Quincy, a former mayor of Boston, had made a visit to Joseph Smith in Nauvoo before the latter’s death. Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past: From the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883). 47. George Q. Cannon, The Life of Joseph Smith, The Prophet (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986 [1888]), 346–47. 48. A word search on the LDS database, Gospel Link 2001, published by Deseret Book confirms that Mormons used the quotation frequently during the century. 49. LeGrand Richards, A Marvelous Work and a Wonder (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1950), 413. 50. To his credit, the New Yorker writer, Lawrence Wright was one of the few to recognize that the facts may be elsewhere than the usually quoted narrative. Lawrence Wright, ‘‘Lives of the Saints,’’ New Yorker (January 21, 2002): 57. 51. Leland A. Fetzer, ‘‘Tolstoy and Mormonism,’’ Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 (Spring 1971): 13–29.

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52. Yorgason, 200. 53. The account of this conversation comes from notes White took as they were interpreted in a magazine article and a book he subsequently wrote. 54. Thomas J. Yates, ‘‘Count Tolstoi and the ÔAmerican Religion,Õ ’’ Improvement Era (February 1939): 94. For an important accretion Fetzer missed, see Ben E. Rich, Conference Reports of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1880, 1897–1973 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, April 1913): 24. For an early LDS expression of Mormonism as ‘‘the American religion’’—sentiment that may have made its way into the ‘‘Tolstoy’’ quotation, see Nephi Anderson, ‘‘Are We Americans?’’ Improvement Era (October 1900): 933–36. 55. Perhaps it was simply that since Mormons knew, from Susa Young Gates, that Tolstoy would have had access to Quincy’s assessment, they mistakenly began to conflate the stories about these two famous men who had surprisingly spoken on Mormonism. 56. Yorgason, 159–61. 57. John Henry Evans, Joseph Smith: An American Prophet (New York: Macmillan, 1933). Isaac Russell also furthered the Mormonism-as-America notion by asserting that Joseph Smith intentionally sought to fulfill America’s manifest destiny. Isaac Russell, ‘‘Joseph Smith and the Great West,’’ Improvement Era (published serially, 1925–1927). 58. Among a whole genre that deals with such issues, see ‘‘The Constitution Will Hang by a Thread’’: Prophecies on the Constitution, Quotes from Journal of Discourses (Salt Lake City: Hawkes Publishing, 1975). 59. Walker, Whittaker, and Allen, Mormon History, 9–11, 18–21. 60. Alexander Campbell may have inadvertently started this tradition in 1832 when he condemned the Book of Mormon for repeating ‘‘every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the past ten years.’’ Alexander Campbell, Delusions. An Analysis of the Book of Mormon; with an Examination of its Internal and External Evidences, and a Refutation of its Pretences to Divine Authority (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1832), 85. 61. Richard T. Ely, ‘‘Economic Aspects of Mormonism,’’ Harper’s Monthly (April 1903): 668. A church leader elaborated on Ely’s comment nearly a decade later, using the term ‘‘quintessence,’’ but like Ely without linking the notion to anything essentially American. Orson F. Whitney, Gospel Themes (Salt Lake City: n.p., 1914), 80–81. I should note that I have not been able to track down the origins of the precise term ‘‘quintessential’’ to describe Mormonism’s relationship to American religion. A possibility: Whitney’s gloss on Ely’s quote and Tolstoy’s ascribed label became conflated over time. 62. Bernard A. DeVoto, ‘‘The Centennial of Mormonism,’’ The American Mercury (January 1930): 1–13. DeVoto, in locating Mormonism specifically in American culture, can be read as carrying on the tradition of nineteenth-century travel writers, many of whom were European and visited Utah in search of American novelty. However, see also DeVoto’s comment about Mormonism’s irrelevance to America noted in Barlow, 424. 63. Marvin S. Hill and James B. Allen, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Mormonism and American Culture, ed. Marvin S. Hill and James B. Allen (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 4–5. They identify Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought: An Intellectual History Since 1815 (New York: Ronald Press, 1940); Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944); Whitney Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950); Davis,

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‘‘The New England Origins of Mormonism,’’ 147–68; and Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Whether Davis knew of the much less sophisticated popular LDS arguments that Mormonism recapitulated early American Puritanism, he endorsed a similar conclusion. 64. Werner Sollors, Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 65. Stephen Stein may be largely correct in suggesting that for many historians of American religion, the diversity encompassed by ‘‘indigenous sectarian religion movements,’’ Mormonism included, could not be considered in non-condemnatory terms until nearly the 1980s. Until then, he argued, heresy and eccentricity were dominant interpretive motifs. I would, however, argue that Mormonism’s twentiethcentury social accommodation allowed scholars whose primary emphasis was not religion per se to begin to discern an acceptable Mormon Americanness several decades earlier. Stephen J. Stein, ‘‘History, Historians, and the Historiography of Indigenous Sectarian Religious Movements in America,’’ in Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Studies in Traditions and Cultures, ed. Walter H. Conser Jr. and Sumner B. Twiss (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 128–29. 66. See Chen, Mormon and Asian American. 67. Diversity may be a double-edged sword. Although some commentators probably consider Mormonism as particularly important because it has been a minority (the Disciples movement offers an instructive example, by contrast, in its mainstreaming), others point to increasing Mormon power in the American mainstream as an additional sign of its quintessentialness. Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1999). Jan Shipps has begun to consider some of the possible consequences of LDS mainstreaming in Sojourner, esp. 112–16. 68. An outside observer who can point to such essences, such as Tocqueville, becomes invaluable to the nation. Tocqueville’s role in America, of course, parallels that played by Josiah Quincy, ‘‘Tolstoy,’’ Thomas O’Dea, Jan Shipps, and Harold Bloom in Mormonism. 69. Browsing the American history section of any decent library demonstrates this. 70. Hughes, 4. 71. Judith Goode, ‘‘Teaching against Culturalist Essentialism,’’ in Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader, ed. Ida Susser and Thomas C. Patterson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 435. 72. This category of morality is, of course, highly plastic. LDS defenders and critics have argued for decades about where the boundaries between proper and improper church political action lie. 73. For partially dueling perspectives on this political action, see Jan Shipps, ‘‘The Persistent Pattern of Establishment in Mormon Land,’’ and D. Michael Quinn, ‘‘Exporting Utah’s Theocracy Since 1975: Mormon Organizational Behavior and America’s Culture Wars,’’ both in God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005). I suspect that the next candidate for LDS scriptural canonization is the 1995 Proclamation on the Family, which, among much else, asserts that gender differences, not just the physical facts of sexual difference, and gender roles are God-given. 74. Shipps, Sojourner, 346–47. For a controversial argument that LDS theology is approaching conservative Christian ideals, see O. Kendall White, Mormon NeoOrthodoxy: A Crisis Theology (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987). 75. Richard Hughes does not quite make the argument that Mormonism thoroughly incorporated each of his six American myths at one point or another during

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its history, but I suspect he would endorse the claim (mythic elements of capitalism, plus myths of chosen nation, nature’s nation, Christian nation, millennial nation, and innocent nation). Hughes, Myths. See also his comments in ‘‘Worlds of Joseph Smith.’’ 76. For example, Philip Barlow, ‘‘Shifting Ground and the Third Transformation of Mormonism,’’ in Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Peter Williams (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 140–53; Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (New York: Free Press, 2003), 149–51; Terryl L. Givens, The Latter-day Saint Experience in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 260–69. 77. Though it is occurring for reasons that go beyond international growth, a more recent example of unexpected ideological results might be the gradual and ongoing de-emphasis in assigning Book of Mormon origins to Native Americans in the United States, while LDS native peoples elsewhere take on that lineage to a greater extent. Many scholars similarly argue that the removal of racial barriers in the LDS priesthood had much to do with LDS growth in Brazil and Africa. Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 78. Douglas J. Davies, The Mormon Culture of Salvation (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2000), 245. See also Davies’s comments in ‘‘Worlds of Joseph Smith.’’ 79. My membership analyses rely on figures published by the Deseret News Church Almanac series (Salt Lake City: Deseret News), as well as U.S. Census data. 80. Rodney Stark, ‘‘The Basis of Mormon Success: A Theoretical Application,’’ in Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion, ed. Eric A. Eliason (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 207–42. Current growth rates translate to a 2080 worldwide LDS population of closer to 75 million. Needless to say, forecasting growth for a church that does not yet proselytize in China or the Middle East and has barely begun the process in India, the former Soviet sphere, and Africa, is a tricky exercise. 81. One poll even indicates that the percentage of self-identified Mormons, as opposed to those reported by the church, may have fallen from 1.4 percent of the U.S. to 1.3 percent between 1990 and 2001. American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by the City University of New York, reported in ‘‘America Growing More Secular,’’ from Web page of Freedom from Religion Foundation, http://www.ffrf.org/timely/ARISsecular.php, accessed September 6, 2005. The current annual church-reported growth rate of Mormonism in the United States (just under 1.9 percent) would produce 7.6 million American Mormons by 2020. The 1990–2000 decade was the first decade since 1910–1920 in which the LDS growth rate in the United States has been less than double the U.S. population growth rate. 82. The Perpetual Education Fund is a program that provides such potential, even though it is not well known outside the church. By financing the education of many members outside the United States, much as Mormons financed immigration for Northern European converts in the nineteenth century, the recently instituted fund has the potential to greatly strengthen the LDS sense of community, as well as benefit individual members. It is much too soon to evaluate the PEF’s actual impact, however. Additionally, Douglas Davies, more than most commentators, finds potential for continued vitality in LDS teachings about salvation, overcoming death, and family life. However he finds as much possibility for such vitality to break down Mormonism’s American content as to accent it. Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 248–54.

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83. Even a new set of essays that argue against one another in various ways about Mormonism’s political project in Utah seems to at least share elements of this common conception: Sells, God and Country. A much more positive view, though one that focuses more directly on teaching sexual morality than on political movements, sees continuing vitality in the church’s moral stances: Wolfe, 143–45. 84. Thomas G. Alexander, ‘‘The Place of Joseph Smith in the Development of American Religion: A Historiographical Inquiry,’’ Journal of Mormon History 5 (1978): 3–17. 85. Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166. 86. See especially the first session of ‘‘Worlds of Joseph Smith.’’ In that conference Richard Bushman said that Mormonism is a globally significant movement with an ‘‘American accent.’’ To be fair, it must be admitted that individual Mormon scholars began this process decades ago. 87. I use the term postmodern in the broad sense to include poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, and some other types of recent critical social/ cultural theory. 88. For Richard Bushman, ‘‘histories are detachable.’’ Mormonism’s story will not apply in the future in the same way it has in the past. ‘‘Worlds of Joseph Smith.’’ 89. Among those who discerned this trend early, see Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 144–51. 90. On the need to find a ‘‘center’’ of the study of American religion, see also Barlow, 424.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Arrington, Leonard J., and Davis Bitton. The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Davies, Douglas J. An Introduction to Mormonism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Givens, Terryl L. The Latter-day Saint Experience in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Ostling, Richard N., and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1999. Shipps, Jan. Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Yorgason, Ethan R. Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 9

The Continuing Influence of Region on American Religious Life Randi Jones Walker

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nyone who has perused Phil Barlow and Edwin Gaustad’s New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (2001) will see that some characteristics of American religion need to be discussed in terms of geography and region. In any given period, the maps clearly show that religious groups tend to concentrate in particular regions. Those patterns of concentration are remarkably persistent over time. The establishment of generally Catholic majorities in the Spanish colonial areas of the Southern coast and the Southwest and in the French colonial areas around the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, and the Mississippi Valley, and of Protestantism in the English colonial areas, overlaying or overturning Native American traditions, provide patterns of religious demographics that changed little through the history of the United States. So, too, do the impact of African religious traditions and Africaninfluenced Christianity, notably in the South but also in the North. The Catholic Southwest, the Baptist South, the Methodist middle states, the Lutheran north central region, and the Reformed Protestant Northeast persist on the map of American religion despite the increasing religious diversity caused by large-scale movement of people from one region to another. Looking at the religious developments in each region over time, the cultural influence of distinctive regional forms of religious life on religious institutions will emerge. Thinking about the distinctive regional cultures discernable in American religion will illuminate other topics in these anthologies on faith in America: the erosion of mainline Protestant denominations; post–Vatican II Catholicism; sexual misconduct scandals in Roman Catholic and other churches; Judaism as religion, ethnic identity, and/or culture; the resurgence of fundamentalism and Pentecostalism; the impact of world religions such as

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Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam in America; the Hispanic presence in American religious life; the growth of the Latter-day Saints and their role as the quintessential American religion; megachurches and emerging churches that have changed congregational understanding; the story of African American religious institutions; as well as the ongoing role of new and alternative religions.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF REGIONAL CHARACTERISTICS: THE COLONIAL PERIOD The earliest layers of religion in North America were closely related to physical geography and the ways of life best suited to each particular climate and topography. For instance, the people living in the Pacific Northwest coastal areas recorded their religious stories by carving them into the trunks of the tall conifers abundant in the coastal forests. In addition, their religious symbols include the salmon, a major item in their diet, and the eagle. Since rain is abundant, it does not play the central role in the cycle of rituals as it does in the desert religions of the southwestern United States and northern part of Mexico. There, adobe is the material for building religious ritual sites. Various manifestations of rain as well as corn, their major staple food, play the central roles in belief and ceremony. Similarly, the rivers and lakes of the north central region of the continent, the Great Plains, the warm waters of the Gulf Coast and Caribbean, the arctic snow and tundra, and each of the other distinctive combinations of topography and weather shaped the religions of the people who lived in these areas before the Europeans. They often still do. Europeans contributed a complex set of traditions to the religious landscape of North America, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing to today. Here, too, geographical patterns emerged as religious developments reflected colonial settlement through the beginning and later waves of immigration. The Spanish colonies very early in this period pushed north from Mexico and the Caribbean into the southern part of what eventually became the United States. Spain was a Roman Catholic nation and imposed that form of Christianity on all inhabitants of its colonial empire. The French established their colonies along the major river systems of the central continent, along the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri valleys. France, too, was Roman Catholic, and so were its colonies. However, France did not foster the huge population growth of the Spanish colonial enterprise with its haciendas, ranches, and mines. French traders tended to establish economic empire without making large settlements or imposing great changes in the life of the subject peoples. All were encouraged, though, to be Roman Catholic. The English and Dutch colonies brought Protestant Christianity to the Atlantic coast. The Dutch, as the French, had a trading establishment, but not a substantial residential colonial population. The English sent their religious dissenters freely to their North American colonies. Several types of

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Protestant Christianity that formed tiny minorities in Europe found themselves flourishing in the English American colonies. Puritans, Baptists, and Quakers—who did not necessarily get along with each other—nonetheless found room in North America to pursue the growth of their religious points of view and ways of life. So, too, did Jews find uncommon toleration in the Dutch and English colonies in particular. In the eighteenth century, the Russians added Orthodox Christianity to the mix, creating a layer of Eastern Christianity along the West Coast from Alaska down to California. Spanish colonial policy included official state-supported efforts to proselytize the native peoples as well as to require Catholic religious practice from the Spanish themselves. At the beginning of Spanish imperial expansion, Jews and Muslims had just been driven out of Spain or forced to convert to Catholic Christianity. This compulsory Catholicism stamped any area influenced by the Spanish colonial enterprise with a Catholic religious character. Since the Spanish encouraged settlement of their colonial empire, this Spanish Catholicism grew. The area that eventually came to be the southwest part of the United States was the northern periphery of the Spanish empire, and the population of Spanish colonists and Native Americans was roughly balanced. The Spanish Catholic church had no means of enforcing its principles of uniformity of practice, and in this region native religious practice mixed freely with Roman Catholic practice, creating a distinctive kind of religion. In addition, the Spanish colonists themselves were isolated and developed strong lay-led folk practices based on Catholic doctrine, but independent of the hierarchy. The Penitentes of New Mexico are an example of such lay creativity. Jews and perhaps also Muslims continued to exist in Spanish colonial societies, but practiced their faith in secret. African slaves were less common in the northern parts of Spanish territory, but where they were present, they easily imported their African religions and adapted Native American practices into their own versions of Catholic beliefs and rituals. The French colonial enterprise was quite different, and therefore the religious character of their areas of influence in North America was also different. In areas where the French established colonial immigrant settlements, such as in the St. Lawrence River Valley, Quebec, Acadia, and New Orleans, French Roman Catholic parishes developed. When the British took over Canada in 1763 after the French and Indian Wars, many French Catholics were forced to migrate to New Orleans, augmenting the Catholic population in Louisiana. In addition to Roman Catholics, early French settlements included Huguenots or Reformed Protestants. Pierre du Gua, a wealthy Huguenot, in cooperation with Samuel de Champlain, had a trade monopoly in Canada and a guarantee of freedom for Huguenot immigrants from the persecution they experienced in France. Franciscans carried out the first French missionary efforts to convert the Native Americans. As in the Spanish colonies, they established mission settlements, primarily villages under the governance of France. Further west in the Great Lakes region, Native Americans such as the Huron resisted this approach. Jesuit missionaries undertook proselytizing ventures in the French-claimed

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territories around the Great Lakes and along the river valleys of the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi, and into nearby areas in central Canada, following the fur trade into the Native American Huron, Chippewa, Iroquois, Miami, and other communities of the region. As in places where the Spanish empire claimed hegemony over Native American people, a few converted to Catholicism and remain Catholic today. However, the French colonial enterprise did not go to the same lengths as the Spanish to enforce the conversion of the Native American peoples in their territories. The map of European-imported forms of Protestant Christianity in the English colonies shows that certain groups were already dominant in recognizable regions by 1790 when the first census of the new United States was conducted, officially marking the end of the British colonial period.1 New England had a Reformed Protestant and Congregational majority.2 Pennsylvania, parts of western Virginia, and both North and South Carolina had developed Reformed majorities—Presbyterian mainly from Scotland in western Pennsylvania and the Appalachian valleys; Dutch Reformed in the Hudson Valley; and German Reformed especially in central Pennsylvania and parts of the western Carolinas. Episcopalians or Anglicans of the Church of England prevailed along the Atlantic coast south of Pennsylvania. Baptists held Rhode Island, where they first established a colony in the seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, they were also growing rapidly in the western areas of the southern states. Lutherans, refugees from religious wars in Europe, settled early in the river valleys near to the Appalachians; the Quakers held majorities in small areas of southeastern Pennsylvania (a colony founded by the Quaker William Penn and noted as a refuge for any number of small Protestant groups facing persecution in Europe) and in parts of New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia; and by the end of the eighteenth century, the Methodists had a foothold in Delaware and were growing fast. Roman Catholics and Jews, though present in many places, were not in the majority anywhere. Maryland was established as a Roman Catholic colony in 1634 and retained a Roman Catholic majority for a short time. In New York and Pennsylvania, Catholics also enjoyed relative toleration, as did Jews in New York. Despite increasingly tolerant policies, especially in the eighteenth century, Roman Catholics continued to be singled out as a threat to English and afterwards American Protestant assumptions, values, and political structures.3 The Act of Toleration of 1691 opened the British colonies to all religious groups, thus beginning the context in which people of various Protestant religions were allowed to move and settle freely anywhere in the colonies. Roman Catholics continued to face restrictions in Great Britain, but in the colonies, especially Maryland, they could find a measure of freedom to organize their churches as they wished. The principal effect of the Act of Toleration was to allow several minority traditions to develop free from restriction. For instance, whereas in Europe under a state church system Baptists were nearly everywhere a suppressed minority, in the British colonies they began to flourish and finally became the dominant Protestant tradition in the United States.

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The Native American population in the British colonies, though still present, was completely obscured in terms of religious influence by European settlement by the end of the eighteenth century. The English showed comparatively little interest in converting the Native Americans to Christianity. Certainly it was not the policy of the English government to compel their conversion. Native communities, Christian and otherwise, persisted, and many survive to the present. In the area represented by the former British colonies, the marked decline of Native American population because of exposure to European diseases and outright warfare continues to show in sparse communities, in contrast to the higher and more concentrated population of Native Americans in the West, especially in the Spanish colonial areas where the Native American population has recovered in some measure from the initial onslaught of disease and violence, although it is still plagued by poverty and lack of social services. With the European colonial enterprises came also African slavery. The Spanish first and then the French and the English imported slaves from Africa to do hard labor, especially in the Caribbean and the southern English colonies. The slaves brought with them their African religions. Although the slave owners tried to suppress these traditions, they persisted and emerged to shape later African American Christianity. Wherever the French, English, and Spanish had colonies, African slaves and thus African religious traditions appear and persist. By the end of the colonial period in the eighteenth century, there were already several layers of religion: Native American religions, European Christianity—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, Judaism, and African religions. It is tempting to think that these can be neatly categorized and recognized in their respective regions. However, they were in a constant state of blurred boundaries. People from one tradition living beside people from another one borrowed freely from each other. In spite of attempts on the part of many religious leaders to keep their traditions pure and unaffected by the rapidly increasing pluralism, it is rarely possible to extricate one tradition from another simply without finding some exchange of belief or practice with another.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF REGIONAL CHARACTERISTICS: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The character and demographics of American religion changed rapidly in the nineteenth century.4 This century can be divided into periods based on a number of factors influencing the growth and change of religion. The first period, from about 1789 to 1830, marks the early national period and is characterized by the steady movement of people from the original colonial areas to the West. The second period, from about 1830 through the Civil War, is characterized by continuing movement West, but also by a large influx of immigrants from Europe, the annexation of the northern provinces of Mexico, and the division of the nation into North and South. The period from the end of the Civil War to 1893 is

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characterized by the still continuing movement to the West; immigration not only from Europe, but also from Asia, Mexico, and other areas of Latin America; the persistence of the division into North and South despite political reunification; and the impact of the building of the transcontinental railroad. The development of distinct religious regions in the United States still evident in the early twenty-first century began in this period. These regional distinctions were shaped by the complex history of territorial expansion in the United States, patterns of religious settlement and missionary activity, and the migration of people from one place to another. By 1830, the United States had reached the Mississippi River in its westward national expansion. Although the Native American religious traditions persisted wherever tribal populations remained, they were quickly overshadowed by forms of European Christianity. The pressure upon the Native Americans by the expansion of the United States was not of great concern to the churches in the new nation. Some of these European Christians attempted to convert the Native Americans to Christianity, but most concentrated on the conversion or reconversion of their own people because they showed a tendency to leave their religious practice behind as they moved West. Congregationalism was still the predominant tradition in New England, but the most characteristic developments of the period were the explosive expansion of the Methodist churches; the annexation of predominantly Catholic territories in the upper Great Lakes region, Louisiana, and areas along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers with the Louisiana Purchase; and the growth of the Baptists along the Appalachians, in the Ohio River Valley, in Maine, and in the newly opened trans-Mississippi West. In both the South, where slavery formed the backbone of the economy, and in the North, where Africans, both slave and free, were present, what became characteristically African American religious traditions began to take shape during this period. Regionally, they particularly gave the South a distinctive evangelical identity. To understand regional characteristics in religion in this period, it is also important to note that in 1790 in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, the African American population was predominant, sometimes accounting for more than 70 percent of the total. In North Carolina, Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee, African Americans constituted at least 20 and as much as 50 percent of the population. By 1830, the whole of the South was predominantly African American, although nearly all were slaves. While the recognized regions of the United States were still in development, already the religious characteristics of New England were clear in the 1830s. Maine and Rhode Island were strongholds of Baptist churches, but New England itself west to the Hudson River was Congregational. During this early period of the nation’s history, the founding mythology of the United States centered in New England stories about the Pilgrims’ fleeing religious persecution to found colonies in the name of liberty, about the first Thanksgiving, and about the Revolution, the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s ride, and the political exploits of Samuel and John Adams. The Congregational tradition in Christianity became so

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intertwined with this national mythology and the new industrial capitalism of New England’s economy that Congregational Christianity became virtually synonymous with Yankee. Congregationalists claimed that their democratic ecclesiology set the stage for the development of the republican ideals of the U.S. Constitution. Although the Presbyterian and Reformed Protestants probably have a better claim to have influenced the political fervor of the nation, New England Congregationalists shaped the popular images with which much of white America thought about its religious identity. New England religious culture expanded westward through New York into the Western Reserve, creating a Congregational majority in northeastern Ohio and in a few places in Illinois where a Congregational band of missionaries settled. In the Hudson Valley, in Pennsylvania, and in numerous scattered western areas, Reformed Protestants, Lutherans, and Presbyterians held sway. Together these churches from the European Reformation traditions joined the Congregationalists in shaping the civil religion of the United States. They had not yet suffered divisions over the issue of slavery and with the Methodists, to whom we next turn our attention; they forged the predominantly evangelical Protestant character of the westward migrations of people in the United States. By 1830, Methodists had largely replaced Episcopalians as the predominant religious group in the former British colonies where once the Church of England held sway or where the Baptists had not established hegemony. Although the Methodists no longer predominate in the United States except in a band of counties from the northern Ohio Valley westward to Nebraska, in the early national period, Methodism was also the most widespread religious tradition in the then western states. The Methodist system of itinerant clergy and lay-run congregations was ideal for starting new churches, supporting them, and keeping them connected to the larger denomination. Where the Congregationalists and Presbyterians claimed the mythology of national origins, the Methodists claimed the mythology of the frontier. The circuit rider carrying a saddlebag full of Bibles, books, and tracts, and unafraid to preach in a saloon, carry a gun, or travel miles to perform a wedding or funeral, became a stock character in the story of the settlement of the West. Methodism joined the more enthusiastically evangelical of the Reformed, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Presbyterians in the great revivals of the period. The most famous at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, and in what came to be known as the ‘‘burned-over district’’ in upstate New York created a religious ethos in what was then the West marked by emotional fervor, a sense of personal contact with the divine, a zeal for missions both foreign and domestic, and a strong expectation that the religious person was obligated to better society. An enormous outpouring of volunteer labor forming organized societies to address mission concerns or social reform issues resulted from this western revival passion. Where the Reformed, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists were often divided on the wisdom of the revivals, especially their emotional enthusiasm, the Methodists were generally supportive of them. Regionally, Methodists and revivalism occupied the same territory.

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African Americans, whether slave or free, were attracted to Methodism. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, formed in 1816 by free African Americans in Philadelphia, was the first of several such denominations founded because of the racial prejudice in the white Methodist churches. Some of these African Methodist churches were short-lived, but three remain strong: the African Methodist Episcopal Church; the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. An even greater number of African Americans were attracted to the Baptist churches. The radical congregationalism of the Baptist traditions allowed for the easy establishment of new churches and offered freedom to organize the local church as the people saw fit. Both the Baptist and Methodist churches in the African American community created an amalgamation of African religious ethos and Protestant institutional and cultural forms of religious life. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the infant United States incorporated lightly settled but strongly Roman Catholic, French-language territory that by 1830 gave birth to the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri. In addition, old French colonial territory in northern Michigan and the Wisconsin territory was already part of the United States. Some Native Americans in these regions had converted to Christianity under French Catholic missions, and some of these Roman Catholic native communities persisted. In addition, several Roman Catholic settlements along the Mississippi River, such as St. Louis, developed into major cities with Roman Catholic majorities. The Congregational presence in western Illinois by 1830 is in part a sign of East Coast Protestant anxiety about the annexation of Catholic territory and the early signs of increasing Catholic immigration from Europe. The region west of the Appalachians, in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, became a contested area between Roman Catholics and Protestants as the nineteenth century wore on, and Protestants encouraged in-migration to contain presumed Roman Catholic influence. As well, Catholic immigration allowed Roman Catholicism to become the largest single religious body in New England. The Baptists characteristic of the South and of the African American Protestant community were also beginning to spread elsewhere. Predominant as well in Maine, a frontier area at this time, and their historical stronghold in Rhode Island, they were the majority mostly in areas in the West where the Methodists or the Presbyterians were not already strong. Like the Methodists, they were able to spread rapidly, although for different structural reasons. Having a completely congregational form of organization, small churches could establish themselves quickly, independent from any larger denominational structure, and carry on their affairs without having to be in communication with others. Later they could associate with other Baptist congregations as the need arose. They shared several characteristics nonetheless, including the practice of adult baptism and the reliance on the Bible alone rather than on traditional creedal formulations for their theological positions. The concentrations of the major denominations are only one way to look at regional differences in this period. The patterns discussed above

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derive largely from studies of white Christian church membership. This view mutes the fact that African Americans were in the majority in many areas of the South and Gulf Coast regions. The African American majority in these areas, largely living in slavery, had not yet developed institutional forms of religious expression; the emerging separate African American denominations had not penetrated into slaveholding areas. Nonetheless the melding of Christianity and African and Native American religious thought and practice was already underway and contributed to the distinctive ethos of Southern religion.5 The presence of minority religious traditions, such as the Brethren, the Amish, or utopian communities of various kinds, as well as new American denominations such as the Christian churches, the Mormons, and those coming from the Holiness movement, began to emerge in the older western areas of New York and Pennsylvania and in the Ohio Valley. A few of them later gained enough prominence to become characteristic of an entire region. Finally, in the early national period the United States was almost wholly Christian, at least nominally. New York and the East Coast cities held a handful of synagogues, but the greater part of Jewish immigration was yet to come. Native American religions remained prominent where the United States had yet to expand. Immigration from Asia bringing Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Asian religions had not yet begun. Although the main cultural developments in American religion in this period were felt across regional lines, there were regional differences in the way religious institutions participated in these new movements. The experiment in disestablishment was resisted most strongly in the Northeast, where older forms of colonial establishment persisted. The freedom of expression, communal energy, and sense of individual agency characteristic of the revivals became more characteristic of the West than of the more established coastal areas of the old colonies. In all of the colonial areas—British, Spanish, French, and Russian—the sense of establishment, if not of a state church, persisted. The placement of churches in the civic center, the sense of access of those in political office, and the sense of entitlement to participate in public policy debates all derive from older colonial patterns of religious organization. The period from 1830 to the end of the Civil War, just a generation, saw three major regional developments in religion in the United States: the annexation of the Catholic Southwest, the Mormon establishment in Utah, and the division of much of American Protestantism into Northern and Southern bodies over the issue of slavery. In 1848, the United States annexed much of northern Mexico; Texas and California almost immediately became states; and the large territory of New Mexico (including Arizona), Colorado, Utah, and Nevada became a new region of the country characterized by Spanish language, Mexican culture, and well-established Roman Catholicism. In spite of efforts on the part of mainline Protestant missionaries, few of the new citizens converted from Catholicism. The Southwest region to this day is largely Roman Catholic, and Spanish persists as a common language. Within American Roman Catholicism, this area remained a distinctive region. Mexican Catholicism, developed for

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four hundred years in contact with strong indigenous native religions, was a very different Catholicism from the Irish, German, and French Catholicism common in the rest of the United States. This period also embraces the beginnings and early growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Saints, following the teachings of their prophet Joseph Smith, began to move West, settling first in the Ohio Valley and then in Illinois and Missouri. They began to experience opposition and persecution, and finally in the mid-1840s most moved to Utah to establish the political state called Deseret. From their center in Salt Lake City, the Mormon Saints spread north into Idaho and south into the Arizona Territory and established a chain of towns leading toward the coast in California. For the Mormons, the area around the Great Salt Lake was their Palestine.6 The Great Salt Lake was the Dead Sea, Utah Lake was the Sea of Galilee, and the river running between them was the Jordan. Salt Lake City was located in a site analogous to the site of Jerusalem in Palestine. In 1850 the area became a U.S. territory. The Mormon character of the region was already established and persists to this day.7 At the same time, immigration and in-migration created Catholic majorities in the major cities of the Midwest. By 1890, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, and other urban areas were solidly Catholic. In the northern Midwest, Catholics and Lutherans (many from Germany, Ireland, and countries of Scandinavia) vied for predominance. The older French Catholic presence from the colonial era was subsumed by the later arrivals, although it may still be detected in the place names. Catholics continued to predominate in other territories acquired from Mexico, especially along the Gulf coast of Louisiana and Texas, forming a ring around Mormon Utah and outlying Mormon corridors in Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada. The north central region of the country remained predominantly Methodist and the South about evenly divided between Baptists and Methodists. The African American majorities in the former slave states meant that much of the Baptist and Methodist South was actually predominantly African American Baptist and Methodist. These five denominations—Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, and Latter-day Saints—remain the predominant five religious groups in these areas to the present. One or two of them together account for the majority of religious adherents in most states both in 1890 and in 1990. Their geographical distribution into the Roman Catholic regions of the Northeast and West, the Lutheran upper Midwest, the Methodist middle, Mormon Utah, and the Baptist South creates persistent religious cultures in those regions, although the Roman Catholics have never participated to the degree the Protestants have in influencing the public or civil religious ethos of the nation. That ethos remained Protestant in flavor even in areas where the Catholics were in the majority in part because of the concentration of Catholic immigrants among the working class, but also in part because of strong earlier and still persistent anti-Catholic sentiment among Yankee Protestants. Although most immigration during this period was from Europe and therefore mostly Christian—whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox— European Jews arrived in large numbers in both the East Coast cities and

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in San Francisco and Los Angeles on the West Coast. By the 1890s, San Francisco came to rival New York as a center of Jewish life and influence in American culture. The West Coast was also home to adherents of an increasing variety of other religious traditions, such as Buddhists, Sikhs, and Taoists, while Hindus came to the West Coast to participate in the economic booms that followed the Gold Rush and the building of the railroads. During this period also the West Coast became increasingly diverse in its religious character, thanks to the complex nature of migrants from the eastern states who brought their religious traditions with them. These many traditions became rivals with each other in the new western territories. Where large numbers migrated from the same areas, they developed small cultural pockets in their new homelands, such as the Church of the Brethren colony in La Verne, California, or the Quaker community in northwestern Oregon. Usually many small competing congregations grew up in the same town. But just as characteristically, people moving to the far West left their religious adherence behind, joining a growing number of religiously unattached people in the region. Regional understandings of religious dominance persisted. The churches in the older states still understood their religious culture as a higher, more developed form, and through the agency of home missions spent countless resources to shape the West to the models of New England or the old South. In the former Mexican provinces of the Southwest, the onceestablished Roman Catholic Church waged a culture war with the AngloProtestants over the control of public schools, where the culture of the next generations would be shaped. In a larger frontier pattern, Protestant church schools and colleges dotted the West long before public education was well established. Roman Catholic parish schools sprang up everywhere to contest Protestant hegemony. The World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 provides a convenient symbol to close discussion of the nineteenth century. This meeting of world religious leaders and teachers was organized by American Christians largely for the purposes of showing the superiority of Christianity to other religions and of educating Christian church members about other religions in order to devise strategies for missionary appeal. The effect was more complex. The parliament served as well to introduce Americans to a number of religious options they had never considered. After 1893, increasing numbers of Americans were attracted to Buddhism, particularly the Zen variety, and to Hinduism, and many converted. For those already disenchanted with the divisions of Christianity, the parliament merely underlined the inability of any religion to enforce its claim of unique authority. The effects of the parliament are not immediately apparent in religious population statistics, but the gathering does serve to mark the end of the possibility of understanding the United States as a solidly Christian nation. The 1890s also mark the end of the United States’ wars against the Native Americans, although not an end to efforts to control or eliminate them. In this decade, the Native American population hit its low point. In religious terms, almost none of the native peoples was able to practice their

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religions without interference in some form from white society. Nonetheless, regionally Native American traditions remained alive and part of the religious life characteristic of the area in Oklahoma, where a number of tribes were concentrated together; in the Southwest, where most tribes still inhabited traditional lands, however truncated by U.S. appropriation; in the Dakotas; and on many other local reservations throughout the West. In addition, Native American communities persisted in the East, although in much smaller numbers. The presence of Native Americans and their religious traditions, the concentration of immigrants from Asia bringing their religious traditions with them, and the mixture of migrants from the distinctively Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, and Catholic regions of the Eastern United States created the diverse religious landscape of the American West. During the twentieth century, this Western diversity played an important role in shaping all of American religion.

INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY As noted, in 1893 the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition or World’s Fair introduced a large number of people to the religions of Asia. The parliament ushered in a century of growing interest in traditions outside of the European Judeo-Christian mainline American religious groups. From 1893 to the end of World War II in 1945, the religious characteristics of the major regions of the country became more complex. Especially in the West and in the larger cities, religious demographics shifted as religions of new immigrants and also new religious movements such as Pentecostalism appeared on the scene. The final period from the end of the Second World War to the present represents a definite shift in religious demographics, carrying forward the growing religious diversity, but also revealing a fault line between those who are more religious than ever and those who are increasingly secular in their outlook. The decline of mainline Protestant churches and the rise of nondenominational megachurches represent a particularly significant trend in this latter period. Nonetheless, during the twentieth century the religious regions that developed in the United States during the nineteenth century remained the template for what was new. The main trends came in increasing diversity within the regions, especially in urban areas, and in the thinning out of religious adherence, especially in the West. In 1910, 1920, and 1930, the United States collected religious data in its regular census, publishing the results in 1916, 1926, and 1936. After the government stopped gathering such data, first the National Council of Churches (1952) and more recently the Glenmary Research Institute (1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000), the National Atlas of Religion in America (an online database), and various opinion poll research projects continued the endeavor. The quality of the data has steadily improved. In the early years, the researchers categorized religion only in terms of the familiar Christian denominations and Judaism. Even more recent data, although acknowledging many new kinds of Christianity (Pentecostal churches,

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nondenominational evangelical congregations, and independent megachurches), exhibit categories only for the recognized world religions, tending to dismiss tribal religions, New Age groups, and small religious communities. In addition, little of the data about racial and ethnic minority religions is completely reliable. In earlier studies, researchers did not think to differentiate white Methodist denominations from the African American Methodist churches, for instance. In later studies, researchers did not count those groups that did not respond to their forms of inquiry. Numbers of adherents reported by religious institutions can be difficult to compare, since different religious bodies count members and adherents by different criteria. In addition, some of the later data is derived from opinion polls. Individuals’ self-identification may differ from the institutional identification of a person as a member. Increasingly, individuals may identify with more than one religious tradition. Until after 1990, the denominational character of the various regions changed very little from the patterns formed in the nineteenth century. The South remained solidly Baptist; in fact, the number of counties with a Baptist predominance increased over the course of the twentieth century. New England remained predominantly Roman Catholic, as did the Gulf Coast, Southwest, and the area of the West surrounding the predominantly Mormon area centered in Utah. The upper Midwest remained predominantly Lutheran; the band separating the Catholic and Lutheran North from the Baptist South retained its Methodist predominance. By 1990, two new denominational trends became clear. First, an increasing number of counties reported a Pentecostal predominance. Second, an increasing number of counties reported the predominant group as having less than 50 percent of the religious adherents in the county. This latter trend signifies either that the county had become increasingly unaffiliated— in other words, that 50 percent or more of the population is not affiliated with any religious group—or that the county has become more diverse, with several groups vying for predominance and none having more than 50 percent of the population in its ranks. In institutional terms, the influence of the movement of people to the West and the diversity of religion that characterized the Western region were both factors in the weakening of church life. Not only churches but other civic organizations suffered. People who think of themselves as sojourners, as temporary residents planning to move on, rarely put much energy into the establishment of civic institutions. In addition, where there are small populations of diverse religious adherence, there are simply not enough people to sustain individual religious institutions over a long time. The weakened character of religious institutions in the West contributed to the disinclination of people to join what seemed to be a lost cause. Churches from the old established denominations situated in the West found themselves isolated from the centers of denominational life and became both more independent in their thinking and at the same time more dependent on the resources of the larger organization. The weakness of established religious organizations also contributed to the flourishing of new religious movements in the West. It is no accident that Pentecostalism

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got its start on the West Coast. The enormous diversity of the population and the lack of religious establishment created a good environment for a new movement that helped people find a way to be at home in a rapidly changing society.

THE ROLE OF REGION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY By 1990, one could frame the religious regions of the United States in a completely different way. Looking at the percentage of the population that claims church membership or which churches claim as members, a new regional configuration emerges.8 A broad band of highly affiliated population extends from the Dakotas down through Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma to west Texas and eastern New Mexico. There it meets another band of dense religious affiliation running from Georgia west to Texas. This more-or-less L-shaped region is characterized by the presence of a strongly evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Within this region, much of the religious adherence follows racial and ethnic lines. Thus several subregions exist within it. African Americans in the South particularly have a high level of church affiliation and a historical sense of the church as an institution providing both identity and community and as a vehicle for promoting a common voice in the public arena. The Roman Catholic and Lutheran church members of the upper Midwest also have a strong sense of the connection of church affiliation and ethnic identity. Some of these churches still preserve the original language of the immigrant communities that started them. Finally, the persistence of the oldest Roman Catholic communities in the country in New Mexico, along the Rio Grande, and in Louisiana, is also tied to a strong ethnic tradition with deep roots. The particularly strong level of church affiliation in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and west Texas reflects the predominantly evangelical piety introduced into the area in the nineteenth century by denominational home missionary societies. The character of this ‘‘evangelical’’ religious culture was delineated by one historian of the home mission movement, Colin B. Goodykoontz: ‘‘It was practical rather than mystical; it put emphasis on individual righteousness and personal salvation after death rather than on social righteousness and community salvation now; it did not entirely escape the unchristian notion that men [and women] may attain goodness by the observance of rules rather than by a change of heart; it was strongly orthodox in its theology, which meant more specifically that it was Trinitarian, that it believed in the literal interpretation and the verbal inerrancy of the Bible, and that it visualized heaven as a city of gold and hell as a place of eternal torment.’’9 Two generations later, another student of American evangelicalism, George Marsden, included much the same characteristics in his definition of this religious culture, still central to the Midwest and South, and growing rapidly at the dawn of the twenty-first century. However, Marsden looked at evangelicalism from several points of view, resulting in a more

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complex definition. Conceptually, Marsden notes that evangelicals emphasize the ‘‘Reformation doctrine of final authority of scripture, the real, historical character of God’s saving work recorded in scripture, eternal salvation only through personal trust in Christ . . . the importance of evangelism and missions, and the importance of a spiritually transformed life.’’10 Marsden also observed that in addition to a conceptual definition, we must also understand that evangelicalism is a dynamic movement rooted in the sixteenth-century Reformation, a perennial effort to return to the pure Word of God in scripture as the ultimate authority. It is also a common cultural experience growing out of a democratic society in which personal choice is significant, and whether persons in the culture are completely committed believers or not, they share a common hymnody, styles of prayer and worship, and behavioral mores. These customs and mores may be organized in institutional forms, churches, voluntary societies, publications, mission and educational institutions, and charitable and social reform societies.11 Finally, Marsden is careful to claim that one cannot equate evangelicalism with fundamentalism, dispensationalism, premillennialism, anti-modernism, or Pentecostalism, but that evangelicals often hold to one or more of those positions or practices as well. In addition to this L-shaped region in the center and South, a few other well-affiliated areas occurred in the United States at the close of the twentieth century. The area surrounding Utah forms one of the solidly affiliated regions; in this case, more than 75 percent of the population in some areas are Latter-day Saints. New England and New York City form another such relatively well-affiliated area. Roman Catholics are a solid majority of the population in every county. In addition, mainline Protestants maintain a solid presence, along with newer Pentecostal and nondenominational evangelical groups. Fewer scholars have attempted to define the cultural characteristics of mainline Protestantism, primarily because for so long it was assumed to be synonymous with American religious culture in general. Although in the nineteenth century the mainline tradition was solidly evangelical, in the twentieth century the mainline churches often took a liberal or modernist direction. For this reason, by the end of the twentieth century, we can understand the mainline tradition as distinct from the evangelical cluster in some senses. Leonard Sweet characterized mainline Protestantism as modernist, that is, as willing to embrace modernity. In addition to trying to take the findings of science into account in formulating its theology, modernist Protestantism also embraced the culture and values of modern business, concern for quantity and increased efficiency (including creating flexible public spaces), a consumer orientation, and the use of market analysis and advertising. Mainline religion in America looked forward rather than to tradition for its cues.12 Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney point out that the mainline influence in American culture reflects traditions rooted in the Protestant Reformation and the colonial experience, a positive engagement with modernity, an ecumenical vision, often but not always staying within a broad understanding of orthodox Christian confession, a strong social conscience, and a tendency to emphasize nurture rather than conversion.13

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Unlike the regions of solid religious adherence, the predominantly Catholic, doughnut-shaped region surrounding Mormon Utah is actually thinly populated with religious adherents, fewer than 50 percent in all cases and in some areas much less than that. Its Catholicism is thinned out, existing in religiously diverse contexts where nonaffiliation is the norm. Although Catholics may show up as predominant when using the denominational lens, it would be difficult to call them predominant when they are simply the largest group within a minority of church members. The Northeast, outside the region mentioned above, also is an unaffiliated region, with Catholics usually being the largest group within a minority of adherents. Florida is a similarly unaffiliated region, perhaps taking its character from the large number of residents who hail from the unaffiliated Northeast region. Alaska and Hawaii have generally a minority of church members. Hawaii’s large percentage of immigrants from Asia and the Pacific Islands bring their own Asian religions with them and do not necessarily convert to Christianity. Data from Alaska are difficult to interpret because the population is so thinly spread and the Native American traditions are not well represented in the counts. The Pacific Northwest is so strongly unaffiliated that Patricia Killen has dubbed it the ‘‘none zone,’’ meaning that when people respond to researchers’ inquiries about their religious affiliation, they respond, ‘‘none.’’14 These several trends underway by the end of the twentieth century seem likely to shape the immediate future of religious regionalism in the United States. Given the regional persistence of the five predominant Christian denominations over more than a century, it would seem likely that their predominance will continue at least for a time—Catholics in the Northeast and in the West surrounding Utah, Baptists in the South, Latter-day Saints in Utah, Lutherans in the northern Midwest, and Methodists in the central band between the South and North. However, if the trend of the last thirty years holds, the continuing phenomenon of nonaffiliation will thin out the religious population overall, so that although denominational patterns of predominance may persist, their thinning overall numbers in relation to the population as a whole will pose changes in the religious ethos and political strength of many of these groups. Increasing religious diversity is also a trend likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Both as people move around the country, taking their religious cultures with them into new areas, and as immigrants continue to bring to the United States new forms of religious practice, areas particularly affected by these kinds of migration—notably the coasts and the larger metropolitan areas—will also exhibit increasing religious diversity. Already religious demographers are more aware of and better able to count religious traditions outside the older Christian and Jewish denominations recognized by nineteenth-century students of American religion. For instance, as the Buddhist population grows, the various denominations of Buddhism will find increased recognition. A Buddhist American will not simply be lumped with other Buddhists, but have her or his own kind of Buddhism recognized. Buddhist regionalism in the United States will then be more

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apparent. Proximity to alternative religious options in these areas of increased diversity will also most probably show increased dual affiliation or mixing of traditions. For example, a hypothetical Buddhist American, such as mentioned above, may be a convert from Judaism and have a personal sense of adherence to both traditions, whether or not those traditions recognize such double adherence. As well, the myriad of new religious movements in the United States, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Scientology, do not currently appear in studies of religious demography. Whether they shape the ethos of any region of the country will become evident in time. If religious demographers continue to use denominational and world religions categories, these new populations of mixed religious practice and commitment will not show up, although they may come to characterize regions of significant population growth. Finally, increasing influence of standardization will also create new categories and hence reshape the picture of religious regionalism. The 2000 surveys of religious preference began to provide data on evangelical and mainline Protestantism, for instance, rather than the previous denominational categories alone. Most mainline Protestant churches, however, have a mixture of self-consciously evangelical congregations, self-consciously nonevangelical (or perhaps self-categorized as liberal or progressive) congregations, and congregations somewhere along that spectrum. The religious map looked at in this way bears some similarity to the ‘‘red state, blue state’’ map of recent national elections. Regions that are strongly evangelical in religious culture tended also to vote strongly Republican, whereas regions that are religiously diverse or where the percentage of nonadherence is high tended to vote Democratic.15 The kind of process Marsden and other scholars have noted that characterizes evangelical culture (worship forms, behavior, common reading, common television preferences) make evangelical congregations of whatever denomination more similar to each other than they are to more mainline congregations that may be in the same denomination. The marketing of religious identity, whether evangelical, progressive, or some other category, will serve to blunt older regional cultures, just as the marketing of national brand products has blunted regional product identity. The fast-growing Pentecostal churches are only now becoming visible in the studies of demography and region. In many former Roman Catholic strongholds, particularly in the borderlands with Mexico, Pentecostal numbers are overtaking Catholics. Similarly, in the Baptist South, Pentecostalism is a growing presence and may change the religious character of the region before long, and Pentecostalism is also appearing as a dominant tradition in some parts of the ‘‘none zone’’ in areas previously thin to religious adherence. How Pentecostalism will shape the culture over time remains to be seen. The influence of region on the character of American religious life stems from the way land shapes basic economies, from the collection of immigrants who have moved into an area over time, and from the interaction of older religious traditions with a new environment. Much of the shape of religious regions in the United States stems from older European

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colonial church establishments. However, distinctive American factors, such as the separation of church and state, have led to the flourishing of religious traditions that were suppressed in Europe, the Baptists being an outstanding example. Anyone wanting to understand a particular instance of religious life in the United States will do well to study the underlying layers of regional religious history. The life of a Jewish community in New York will be quite different from one in Atlanta or in Lawrence, Kansas. A Methodist may feel comfortable in the mainline of American religion in Ohio, but be an outsider in Utah. Religious institutions of the same denomination in Pennsylvania face a different level of acceptance in society than they do in Washington. Although the long-term trends may suggest that regional differences in religious culture will become less obvious as the twenty-first century wears on, for now region is important for understanding the variety of American religious experience.

NOTES 1. In this essay I refer primarily to the maps in Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip Barlow, A New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). In this case, I am using Fig. 1.42, p. 50, ‘‘Roman Catholic Missions in the West 1776,’’ and Fig. C.1, p. 357, ‘‘Regional Denominational Predominance 1790.’’ As in all the data used for this atlas, the reliability can be questioned, and the findings should be used only for broad generalization. In making use of any particular piece of data for more in-depth study, the researcher would want to look closely at the collection methods and limitations of the original sources of any of the figures. 2. Reformed Protestant refers to those Protestants closely related to the sixteenth-century reforms in the Swiss city states. Particularly influential was John Calvin in Geneva. Early in the history of the Reformation, these Protestants became distinguished from Luther’s Reformation in Germany and later from the more radical reformers on the one hand and the growing Catholic reform movements on the other. In England, after Elizabeth I’s Anglican reform, the Reformed-influenced Puritans became increasingly vocal in their opinion that she had not gone far enough in the reformation of the English church. During periods when the English church and state actively tried to suppress the Puritans, they migrated to the American colonies, establishing locations of Reformed presence in New England. The majority of these Puritans organized their churches according to a congregational style of polity, different from the presbyterian polity developed in Calvin’s Geneva. Congregational polity locates the main authority for making decisions about belief and practice in the congregation, although these congregations most often affirmed the need for fellowship, cooperation, and mutual recognition. Presbyterian polity, on the other hand, locates authority in the presbytery, the gathering of pastors and elders from the congregations. In this polity, the congregations are subject to the authority of the presbytery. These Congregationalists were for two centuries the dominant religious group in New England. Later Reformed Protestants from other places in Europe—namely Scotland, France, and Germany—joined earlier Dutch Reformed Protestants in establishing what became the Presbyterian and Reformed churches in Pennsylvania and New York. 3. In part this reflects the ongoing national conflict between Spain and England and also the polarization of Roman Catholics and Protestants in Europe.

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4. The sources of information regarding religious adherence in the nineteenth century are limited, as are the means of comparing data from one religious tradition to another. In general, scholars rely on two common sources of information. The first is the self-reported membership numbers contained in denominational records, and the second is data collected by the United States in its census every ten years until after 1930, when the government stopped including questions about religious affiliation in the census surveys. This limits our understanding of religious demography in this period somewhat, but for the purposes of this overview, we can use the figures that have informed the makers of atlases of American religion. Any deeper study would require more care. 5. A useful summary of this situation can be found in Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, ‘‘African-American and Native-American Folk Religion: Down But Not Out,’’ in Religion and Public Life in the Southern Crossroads: Showdown States, ed. William Lindsey and Mark Silk (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2005), 127–60. Longer classic works on the subject include Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘‘Invisible Institution’’ in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 6. An illustration of this geographical interpretation can be found in Gaustad and Barlow, Fig. 3.16. 7. Kathleen Flake, ‘‘The Mormon Corridor: Utah and Idaho,’’ in Religion and Public Life in the Mountain West: Sacred Landscapes in Transition, ed. Jan Shipps and Mark Silk (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004), 91–114. See also Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 8. See Gaustad and Barlow, ‘‘Church Membership as a Percentage of Total Population: 1990,’’ Fig. 4.17, p. 352. 9. Colin B. Goodykoontz, Home Missions on the American Frontier (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1939), 425. 10. George Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), ix–xvii. 11. Ibid., xvi–xvii. 12. Leonard Sweet, ‘‘The Modernization of Protestant Religion in America,’’ in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David W. Lotz, Donald W. Shriver, Jr., and John F. Wilson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 19–41. 13. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 14. Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004). 15. The maps showing religious affiliation for 2000 can be found on at least two Web sites: www.thearda.com (the American Religion Data Archive) and www.religionatlas.com (the National Atlas of Religion in America NARA run by the Polis Center). Maps showing the results of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections can be found in a number of places; I used ones at www.interventionmag. com.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Carroll, Brett A. The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America. New York: Routledge, 2000. Gaustad, Edwin, and Philip Barlow. A New Historical Atlas of Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Silk, Mark, and Andrew Walsh, series eds. Religion by Region. Published in cooperation with the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, the series is in process. When finished, it will include nine volumes covering the following regions: Pacific Northwest, Mountain West, New England, Midwest, Southern Crossroads, the South, the Middle Atlantic, and the Pacific Region, along with a volume on religion and public life in the United States. At the time of this writing, the following had appeared: Killen, Patricia O’Connell, and Mark Silk, eds. Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004. Lindsey, William, and Mark Silk, eds. Religion and Public Life in the Southern Crossroads: Showdown States. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2005. Shipps, Jan, and Mark Silk, eds. Religion and Public Life in the Mountain West: Sacred Landscapes in Transition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004. Walsh, Andrew, and Mark Silk, eds. Religion and Public Life in New England: Steady Habits, Changing Slowly. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004.

CHAPTER 10

The Shape of Things to Come: Megachurches, Emerging Churches, and Other New Religious Structures Scott L. Thumma

‘‘H

ere is the church. Here is the steeple. Open the door, and see all the people.’’ Most of us fondly remember this childhood game we learned in Sunday school. The realism of that game, however, is slowly losing its footing. Not only are most churches seldom filled with people, but also fewer new congregations are being built with steeples and most of what passes for ‘‘church’’ seldom resembles the congregations in which many of us grew up. In fact, the rhyme of the future might well be more like ‘‘Is this a church? Where is the steeple? Open the door and, where are all the people?’’ Or in the case of the megachurches, ‘‘Here are no symbols. Here is no steeple. Yet open the door and see 10,000 people!’’ Although organized religion in the United States hasn’t changed quite that dramatically yet, the structures are in flux both for local congregations and for national denominations. It is still true that the vast majority of churches in the country are imbedded in a traditional model and tied to a denominational organization that has shifted very little in the past fifty years. In recent years, however, newer congregational forms have offered substantial challenges to this landscape. These forms include the popularity of the house church movement in the 1970s and a recent resurgence of interest in these; the growth of niche, cell, and emergent churches; and the proliferation of megachurches (congregations with two thousand or more attenders each week) in the past few decades. Each of these offers new models for the organizational structuring of religious expression. Likewise, the quasi-denominational networks of congregations that have evolved around these megachurches and a multitude of parachurch organizations present new forms of national cooperation that were once provided only by traditional denominational forms.

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It should not be surprising that new forms of religious life are developing; organizational structures adapt and change over time in response to societal and cultural shifts. Nor should these new forms be considered entirely unique and original; variations on megachurches, house and independent churches, and networks or ‘‘fellowships’’ of congregations have existed for centuries. Nevertheless, what seems distinctive about these organizational forms is that they have a particular fit or ‘‘elective affinity’’ with the shifts taking place in the religious identity of individuals. Many scholarly writings in the past few decades have indicated that religious identity for an individual is presently less tied to tradition, history, and organizational forms such as a denomination, local church, religious camp, or parochial school.1 A vast majority of Americans report that the content of religious faith can be constructed apart from or independent of a church or other traditional religious authority.2 Religious identity is seen as something an individual can pick and choose. It makes sense that in this evolving context, new religious structures that fit with the flexible, individualist beliefs of self-created religious consumers would arise or become more prominent in the religious marketplace. Yet even within a situation of radical personal spiritual negotiation, there is still a sociological need for physical structures to contain this ‘‘individualized’’ religious identity. The ‘‘spirit’’ is not sustained without some organizational form. A spiritual treasure requires some earthen vessel in which to contain it, even if this vessel looks very little like the vases and ceramics of past decades. It isn’t necessary that these vessels are completely unique and avant-garde for them to work; they just have to be customized to fulfill the purpose. Many congregations have adapted to the new context by a shift in function and a reorientation in their approach and understanding of what they offer ‘‘the spiritual consumer.’’ Together, however, all these structural alterations amount to the beginnings of a reshaping of the religious organizational landscape. This is not to argue that contemporary consumers necessarily are making conscious decisions on the choice of religious alternatives. Often, such decisions are anything but rational selections. However, this chapter argues that the new structural forms available allow for different ways of engagement with religious communities based on the interests of the individual. It will provide a glimpse into the characteristics of these new forms and then assess their implications for the future direction of religion in America.

WHAT HAS CHANGED? What counts as a legitimate congregation? Recently in Rockaway Township, New Jersey, lawyers representing the township argued that a growing megachurch, Christ Church, was in fact ‘‘not a church.’’ This counterintuitive argument was proposed when the megachurch wanted to move into the area. Township commissioners balked at the idea and hindered its efforts. The case eventually went before the courts. In a limited sense the assertion was true, Christ Church wasn’t ‘‘a church’’ according to the definition of ‘‘church’’ in the minds of the town’s nineteenth-century

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founding fathers. Likewise, most people who might walk into a contemporary house church or visit the Web site of an emergent church gathering would be hard-pressed to call what they see a ‘‘congregation.’’ Then again, does a group of Wiccans who gather in a chat room or on a discussion board to discuss sacred texts and exchange methods of ritual practices constitute a religious community? What of hundreds of gay men routinely coming to a drag show in a gay bar to sing gospel hymns and praise God? And do the Willow Creek Association, the Fellowship of Christian Assemblies, the Apostolic World Christian Fellowship, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, or Potter’s House Network count as denominations? At the very least, the definitions of these religious structures are being stretched and pulled. Over the past forty years there has been considerable experimentation with the structure of religious expression to fit and undergird a highly individualized approach to religion. Major shifts in an individual’s perspective of religion in the 1960s and onward have created many ‘‘Sheilas,’’ or persons constructing a religion of their own.3 In a sense, religious belief has become customizable to an individual’s tastes, experiences, and interests. Religious identity is less one that is ascribed or inherited and is instead more one that the individual creates. But the changes go even beyond just the achievement of an identity. The decades since the 1960s are characterized by cultural unsettledness and mark, as Wuthnow describes, a shift from a spirituality of habitation and dwelling to one of seeking: In the newer view, status [and, I would add, both identity and spirituality] is attained through negotiation. A person does not have an ascribed identity or attain an achieved identity but creates an identity by negotiating among a wide range of materials. Each person’s identity is thus understandable only through biography. The search that differentiates each individual is itself part of the distinct identity that person creates. A spirituality of seeking is closely connected to the fact that people increasingly create a sense of personal identity through an active sequence of searching and selecting.4

The changes, sparked by major shifts in our society, have also begun to reconfigure our structured religious forms. The freedom that has enabled Americans to experiment and take control of their own individual belief systems, to wrestle the control of their faith from the gods and the forefathers, has also allowed them collectively to create religious organizational forms that fit this reality. The structures that have arisen likewise support this ‘‘a la carte’’ approach to belief in several different ways evident in major trends in American religion. One major shift of adaptation in this spiritual consumer reality is the ‘‘niche approach,’’ an organizational reduction in scale with a specificity of focus. This approach fractures traditional religious structures into narrowly focused niche congregations with specific and well-defined particular religious interests or subcultural characteristics. In economic language, it is essentially a ‘‘specialty store’’ approach to a particular slice of the American religious market.

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This effort is evident in a number of developments from the 1960s onward, beginning with efforts to express a distinctive religious perspective. Small informal charismatic fellowships, gatherings of new religious organizations, discipleship groups, and house churches all fit this model. Other manifestations of this trend focus on quasi-political aims. They include intentional peace and justice communities, social activist and worker house communities, traditional mainline congregations that emphasize ancient rites and rituals of their tradition (such as Rite One Episcopal churches or Latin mass Catholic congregations), and Base Communities, modeled on a Latin American example. More recently this niche approach is seen in the emergent church movement. This approach segments the market into individual interest enclaves whereby religious persons can select specific groups to suit their needs and then travel between them as their interests change. Intimacy, integrity, and an intentionally narrow focus are key spiritual values in this organizational form. A second counterintuitive adaptation to personal religious customization is the ‘‘megachurch approach,’’ an organizational increase in scale in which multiple choices are offered within a large all-encompassing entity. This approach follows the ‘‘mall mentality’’ of offering countless boutiques and specialty stores, large anchor stores, and kiosks all under one large organizational reality. The megachurch offers a choice of individualized spiritual customization within small interest groups, while also embracing a larger mass worship experience in a highly professionalized, bureaucratic, and publicly prominent religious organization. Many of these megachurches are pushing the bounds of customization by creating multiple, simultaneous ‘‘venue worship services’’ and tailored branch campuses to appeal to the distinctive tastes of cultural subgroups within the larger membership. Likewise, it could be argued that the networks of likeminded churches centered around these megachurches are reforming larger national religious collectives as well as the local congregational reality. The values of this organizational expression are personal choice on a number of levels, a quality religious experience, and involvement in a prominent, successful endeavor. Although this chapter will not focus on it, the Internet constitutes a third major adaptive structure to this customizable religious reality. The virtual structures of countless Web sites, chat rooms, blogs, listservs, and discussion boards allow users both to engage in online shopping for religious beliefs and also to discover communities of support and even create places to practice their rituals. There are a large number of Internet-based efforts by individuals and social collectives to support virtual religious quests. This approach is especially critical for individuals when no physical faith community of their liking exists in geographic proximity to them. The Internet is seldom recognized as a legitimate religious structure, but for many individuals of faiths on the fringe, it may provide their only tangible community. Persons within Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist traditions who are gay and lesbian may know others of similar faith perspectives only through their Internet connections, especially if they are located in rural or small town settings away from major urban centers.

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Persons interested in Wicca or Santeria, Hinduism or Rosicrucianism, or any combinations of the thousands of established religious beliefs can much more readily find virtual structures of communication, knowledge, writings, and fellowship to support such beliefs in the world of Internet technologies than in the physical realm. Even though it is very difficult to state conclusively that denominational loyalty is nonexistent, according to many indicators, the salience of the denominational identity is waning. The prevalence of denominational switching and success of nondenominational congregations attest to the fact that many consider involvement in a particular denominational tradition a secondary value in choosing a local congregation. American religion is now less institutionally bound. Persons can craft faith systems that fit them, as well as construct unique forms that fit these systems. Spiritual persons are able to customize not only their beliefs, but also their encounters with religious structures. This may not necessarily be a conscious decision. We are not purely rational customers of religious products or ideas. We do not search the spiritual marketplace with a ‘‘consumer guide’’ in one hand and our list of personal desires in the other. Nevertheless, contemporary Americans have the institutional freedom to shape their religious beliefs, worship experiences, and organizational forms to their personal tastes and cultural norms and values. They don’t need to worship at the altars of their ancestors or adopt the ‘‘faith of our fathers.’’ The words of the gospel hymn are not entirely true anymore; what was good enough for mama and good enough for papa is no longer good enough for me.

SPECIALIZED BOUTIQUE RELIGION: NICHE-BASED STRUCTURES The approach of niche-based religious organizations is to focus narrowly upon a specific and well-defined religious interest or subcultural identity. Niche religion, then, attempts to attract persons to fit that distinct focus. As such, these congregations are small, intentional, and often sectarian in their flavor. In recent decades several major movements of congregations within this model can be identified, including the house church movement, cell groups, cell church, intentional activist communities, and more recently, the emergent church movement. Each of these distinctive groups has its own reality; however, taken as a whole, they exemplify a niche model that allows individuals to select among multiple lifestyle options, picking the group that most meets momentary personal tastes and needs for music, fellowship, and involvement in the larger Christian community. In 1970, I worshipped in a small charismatic fellowship in central Pennsylvania. This group of fifteen to twenty teens and young adults met in a small storefront Christian bookstore. We sat on the floor on cushions and sang scriptural praise songs to music provided by an acoustic guitarist. We didn’t have a leader per se. Each person took turns offering a lesson that ‘‘God laid on our hearts.’’ We celebrated the Lord’s Supper when we met,

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using a chunk of bread and any kind of juice we could find. We often did community service projects, such as picking up trash along the streets, helping the elderly shop for groceries, and donating food and money for the homeless in our town. We always spent hours each week witnessing to strangers and our friends, trying to convert them to our way of seeing the truth of the Bible. Everyone in the group knew of the larger charismatic movement, since most of our songs, evangelistic tracts, and reading material came from these national sources. We didn’t, however, have any contact with other groups, except for the occasional regional mass spiritual rallies that were common in the early 1970s. All we knew was that we were worshipping God in a way that seemed correct to us, and most of us moved on to other religious groups when the charismatic fellowship group no longer filled our spiritual needs. This was my first introduction to the house church movement. Later I came to understand that those of us who participated in the charismatic movement were not the only group to assert a return to an anti-institutional form of church based on what was seen as an authentic recapturing of New Testament worship. In fact, my own ancestors in the Mennonite tradition worshipped in much the same way for many of the same reasons, as had many other traditions throughout the centuries since the founding of the Christian church.5 In our charismatic fellowship group we were able to worship in a way that our ‘‘home’’ congregations wouldn’t allow. We wanted intimacy, lay leadership, a distinctive style of music that expressed a unique understanding of spirituality, and the freedom to praise God as we saw fit. The larger charismatic movement drove this house church movement of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Ideas of spiritual baptism and expression of the gifts of the Spirit were forbidden in many congregations. If Spirit-filled Christians wanted to gather and worship God, they often had to do it in homes or small fellowships outside the established traditional churches. These house churches were formed around a distinctive theology or worldview. They were characterized also as a distinct organizational form and had a different cultural style, as described by Hadaway, Dubose, and Wright: House churches are more inclusive, more dynamic, and more engaging of members’ time, energies, and resources than other types of house groups. Persons who join such groups seek to involve their whole lives in church and community. The compartmentalization of religious and secular activities tends to dissipate. Commitment and identification with the group is pervasive.6

Often house churches looked to national leaders, such as Christian Growth Ministries, to help them structure their fellowships, organize their participants, disciple them in Christian truth, and connect with other similar groups. A number of these house churches formed into communal groups such as the one that Stephen Warner described as Antioch ranch.7 The vast majority, however, were mostly autonomous entities that gathered for worship and fellowship as small groups for several years.

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Eventually, some of these fellowships were accused of excessive discipleship, labeled as cults, and then disbanded. It is evident from the history of these small gatherings that leadership weaknesses both in terms of exercising undue authority and also maintaining an acceptable religious orthodoxy were continual difficulties. More often, house church fellowships eventually folded when participation dwindled because more established churches began to adopt many of the charismatic practices into their worship. Other members drifted away when their spiritual needs were no longer being met by the charismatic fellowship. Another weakness this form of religious organization has is fragility as a structure. House churches are prone to instability and a short life span. Occasionally, some of these house church groups attracted larger numbers. If it grew, the group would begin to institutionalize, often becoming an established congregation. A few such congregations have even grown to megachurch status. Several of the larger congregations and networks of churches that came out of the Jesus People and charismatic movements (such as the Vineyard Fellowship and Calvary Chapel) began as small house church gatherings. However, by the mid-1980s, whether owing to some widely publicized scandals or to assimilation and institutionalization, the movement had waned considerably. Several other types of house church congregations existed throughout these decades. These are supportive of small but vibrant movements on the part of more liberal Protestant and Catholic Christians with quasipolitical aims. Some create small house-based intentional peace and justice communities, social activist missions, or, following a Latin American model, local base communities. The conservative Protestant house church movement has not disappeared completely. Countless small fellowships continue, and new congregations have started since the waning of the charismatic movement. Many persons remained convinced that the most authentic model of church is the independent, intimate gathering in homes rather than in ‘‘institutional churches.’’ The Internet has in many ways been a boon to this movement. The potential to create virtual networks of these congregations in an effort to publicize their existence, proclaim their understanding of the house church model as the most genuine religious structure, and share resources among groups has been greatly enhanced by the Internet. A number of Web sites, discussion boards, blogs, and listservs support the contemporary house church movement. Sites such as www.housechurch.org/ (with a discussion board, worldwide registry, email lists, and a newsgroup) and www. hccentral.com (with a directory of over 1,400 house churches), www. house2house.tv/, and www.house-church.org/ provide structures of support to individual house churches and persons wanting to form new ones. In fact, these rich Internet resources have sparked a resurgence of interest in and acceptance of the house church model. Additionally, the recognition of the power of the house church to spread the Christian gospel in places such as China and Russia has prompted the model to be seen as a potent evangelistic strategy.

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A similar but distinctive movement was developing in the 1970s through the influence of one of the largest churches in the world, Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea. Its pastor, Paul Yonggi Cho, created a structure of small home cell groups within his massive congregation. These cell groups, meeting throughout the week in different homes, allowed trained lay deacons and elders to teach and minister to large numbers of people in small intimate gatherings on a more personal level, while also sustaining mass worship gatherings in the tens of thousands. This structure is qualitatively different from the anti-institution house church movement. These small groups are seen as having a supportive role within a larger congregation. Cell groups were intended for meeting personal needs, individual spiritual development, and intimate fellowship with the ultimate goal for the church to grow larger. This model became very popular in the United States in the 1980s, with many very large congregations adopting it. Many congregations of all sizes have begun adopting small group fellowships to encourage interaction among members as well as to deepen individual spiritual practices. A number of congregations have made this cell approach integral to their character. They have shaped their ‘‘traditional church’’ around the cell idea. The congregation’s focus is on the life of the cell group, rather than on the weekly worship of the gathered community. The cells may come together each week for worship but the center of the congregation is seen as the cell groups. Individuals in these cells conduct worship, do ministry, evangelize unbelievers, provide pastoral care, and mentor each other spiritually. Often the cells within a given church have evangelism strategies to target specific social groups such as nurses, lawyers, or the police. When cell groups function this way, the model borders on being a network of house churches. As such, it has often been called a ‘‘cell church.’’ The newest entry into the niche model market is not only intentionally small and anti-institutional but also includes a radical embrace of the contemporary youth culture. The emerging/emergent church movement, as it has come to be labeled, often builds on a house church organizational form and claims a distinctive theological perspective, but is also very much about expressing the faith in diverse Gen X styles and using postmodern cultural idioms. This approach appeals to a segment of the religious market in which young religious persons can select new enclave groups to suit their personal spiritual needs. As noted earlier, intimacy, integrity, and an intentionally narrow focus are key values. The ideals expressed by the lead figures within the emerging church movement are sophisticated and well-reasoned analyses of contemporary society and the role of both God and the church in a changing reality. The approach is the opposite of a consumer-driven, style-sensitive commercialization of the Gospel. As the emerging church movement’s foremost spokesperson, Brian McLaren, claims, ‘‘It’s not about the church meeting your needs, it’s about you joining the mission of God’s people to meet the world’s needs.’’8 Another emerging church leader and pastor of a very successful church, Rob Bell, further emphasized the distinctiveness

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of the approach. ‘‘People don’t get it . . . they think it’s about style. But the real question is: What is the gospel?’’9 From the perspective of the congregation, however, the various emerging church forms seem radically open to individualistic interpretation and focused on a distinct cultural niche. Although there are a wide variety of types of worship, emerging church services are often held in nontraditional spaces, such as recreational halls and warehouse space. Instead of pews, couches, recliners, lounge chairs, or even pillows scattered on the floors of the worship space provide seating. The service is technological, multisensory, and participatory. Images flash on video screens, constantly changing in rapid succession. Music plays, as a DJ uses a computer and turntable to mix and control the sound. Attendees are invited to express themselves spiritually through poetry, art, or other creative acts. The expressed spiritual practices blend together elements from diverse religious traditions, including Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Celtic practices. ‘‘Some are discovering medieval mystical practices such as walking the labyrinth, but adding decidedly modern twists. It’s a pick-your-own-mix approach that also stresses community and social justice.’’10 The congregations are comprised mostly of middle class whites in their twenties and thirties. The pastors, if there are pastors at all, or leadership teams are almost all educated white males. The theology tends to be evangelical Protestant in nature but often with a progressive perspective regarding social issues. However, even this theological stance is somewhat open to negotiation. As one young woman in an emerging congregation told a Religion and Ethics Newsweekly reporter, ‘‘There is no set doctrine; there is no set theology. There are things we question and things we believe.’’ Another claimed the emerging church is ‘‘a place where individuals can express their understanding of who God is either in new ways or in artistic ways or even reaching back and reclaiming some ancient ways of expressing their relationship with God, their love for God and connecting with him.’’11 More than anything else, this form of religious organization is seen as a culturally relevant expression of faith. It takes its cues from contemporary youth culture, much as the Jesus People movement of the 1960s did, and attempts to create forms and practices that conform to the needs of that specific generation. ‘‘Emerging church with a mission heart is different. It does not start with a pre-determined mould and expect nonchurchgoers to compress in. It begins with the people church is seeking to reach, and asks ÔWhat might be an appropriate expression of church for them?Õ ’’12 Many of the key leaders deny that the emerging church phenomenon is a definable movement. As McLaren comments, ‘‘Right now Emergent is a conversation, not a movement. We don’t have a program. We don’t have a model. I think we must begin as a conversation, then grow as a friendship, and see if a movement comes of it.’’13 There is no doubt that with leaders, literature, Web sites, conferences, and a directory of congregations worldwide it certainly looks like a distinct religious movement. Some of these emerging churches are likewise no longer small, but have grown to a thousand or more members. The questions are how the movement will routinize,

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exactly what larger organizational forms it will take, and whether it will remain responsive to contemporary cultural ideals, especially as its members grow beyond their current musical tastes and cultural values.

MEGACHURCHES: GENERALIZED MALL RELIGION There is great appeal to the small intimate gathering. It offers rootedness in a highly mobile society and a safe place among ‘‘people just like us’’ in which to do spiritual work. This small-scale approach, however, lacks a resonance to the lives many Americans lead. Our lives are replete with large institutional forms, media images, and interest-driven choices from major office complexes, malls, and food warehouses, to Disney, Las Vegas casinos, and multiplex theaters. In certain ways, the megachurch is the complete opposite of the house church, but with hundreds of ministries, programs, and fellowship groups, it offers intimacy and choice in one package. Megachurches have come to dominate the religious landscape in modern American society. Their profound influence is less the result of the numbers of these large congregations than it is of their public prominence and of their being an exemplary model for the new ways churches are restructuring themselves and implementing new forms of religious life. This religious organizational form represents a strategy that is the complete opposite of that of the niche. It is all things to all people, every religious necessity under one roof, within one structure. Think Wal-Mart Super Store or a regional mall rather than upscale center-city boutique. Imagine driving through downtown Houston, Texas, just west of the Galleria on a Sunday morning, when you come upon a traffic jam. You sit in a long line of late model cars waiting to turn into a vast parking area under a huge sign announcing the presence of Second Baptist Church and eventually decide to follow them. Actually you are at the church’s Woodway Campus, one of three that constitute the 18,000-attender church. Mostly what you see sitting on a 25-acre plot of land is beautiful landscaping, hundreds of cars, parking lot attendants directing traffic, and a distant dome atop a cream-colored sandstone building that resembles an office building. After being directed to a parking space, you follow the steady stream of people, couples and families mostly, toward large inviting doors held open by several smiling greeters in green vests. Passing through the doors, you enter an amazing four-story atrium complete with marble and polished wood floors, fountains, and huge potted plants all combined into a distinctly mall-like feel. Immediately, another clean-cut young adult, also wearing a green vest, pleasantly greets you, offers a packet of information, and directs you to a massive visitor kiosk of dark rich wood with video screens; more pleasant attendants hover nearby. You notice signs for the bookstore, for Jane’s Grill, and for dozens of classes, ministries, children and adult educational groups, and the family life center offering a weight-training program. After getting your packet of welcome materials, which includes a tasteful cloth lapel sticker indicating you are a visitor, various brochures, a magazine, and a CD of messages and screen savers from the attendant, you follow the hundreds of others into the sanctuary. This is no ordinary

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church sanctuary. The cavernous building has seating for several thousand in many rows of pews on the main floor with additional seating on two floors of balconies, for a total seating capacity of more than 5,500. But what catches your eyes immediately are the massive stained glass walls of windows to the left and right of the front of the sanctuary and the spectacular dome glass artwork in the ceiling. Behind the pulpit area, organ pipes rise to the ceiling. Between these sits a 300-person choir, and above the choir is a baptismal that is flanked by two immense video projection screens. After a number of upbeat songs and an occasional traditional Baptist hymn, Ed Young, Sr. takes the pulpit and mesmerizes the congregation with a down-to-earth, biblically-based sermon, complete with audio and video clips on the screens for emphasis. Welcome to the megachurch model of church. No verbal description of walking into a megachurch can ever capture the experience sufficiently. Fortunately, Second Baptist’s Web site provides a virtual tour of their buildings so interested readers can experience it for themselves at www. second.org/global/virtual_tour.aspx. The megachurch is more than just an ordinary church on steroids. The size of the organization has altered the features and characteristics of these congregations that make them distinctive; they bear little resemblance to smaller traditional congregations. The characteristics described below are shared by many, but not all, of the nation’s megachurches. Although these congregations are quite similar in approach and appearance, there is also considerable variety among them. A megachurch is defined as a Protestant church with an average weekly attendance of 2,000 or more. Although large congregations have existed throughout Christian history, there has been a rapid proliferation of churches with massive attendance since the 1970s. Some researchers suggest therefore that this church form is a unique collective response to distinctive cultural shifts and changes in societal patterns throughout the industrialized urban and suburban areas of the world. Prior to 1970 there were less than a few dozen very large churches, while in the 1970s that number increased to around fifty. By 1990 the total number has increased to roughly 350 and to over 600 by 2000. Five years later it was estimated that there were at least 1,200 megachurches in the United States. As such, these congregations combined represent less than one-half of 1 percent of all the congregations in the country, but possibly account for as many as 4 million weekly attenders, equal to 7 or more percent of all weekly attenders. Not only have the numbers of churches increased but the size of the largest ones has as well. In 1990, the ten largest megachurches ranged from 7,000 to 12,000 in weekly attendance. Fifteen years later, the largest church, Lakewood Church located in Houston, Texas, claimed an attendance of over 30,000. Dozens more hover near the 20,000 mark. Together these massive congregations collectively generate annual revenue of approximately $6 billion and routinely expend nearly that much. Megachurch pastors dominate religious television and cable channels as well; their books occasionally sell hundreds of thousands of copies (with Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life an unbelievable more than 26 million

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copies), and they are looked upon as major religious celebrities. Most religious persons in the country, regardless of denomination, could name several of these larger-than-life pastors, and many other pastors have sat at their feet in teaching sessions and conferences or have devoured their program materials and sermon tapes. There is no doubt that these mammoth congregations and their leaders have an impact on the American religious landscape in an unmistakable way and their efforts have reformed the shape of religious organizations. Size is the most immediately apparent characteristic of these congregations; however, the Protestant megachurches in the United States generally share many other traits, ones that are increasingly trickling down to smaller churches. The majority of megachurches (over 60 percent) are located in the southern Sunbelt of the United States, with California, Texas, Georgia, and Florida having the highest concentrations. Most megachurches are located in suburban areas of rapidly growing sprawl cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Orlando, Phoenix, and Seattle. These large churches often occupy prominent land tracts of fifty to one hundred acres near major traffic thoroughfares. Virtually all these megachurches have a conservative theology, even those within mainline denominations. Not surprisingly, the majority of Protestant megachurches are affiliated with either the Southern Baptist Convention or the Assemblies of God or else are nondenominational. When asked to select a theological label that best fit their congregation, 88 percent of those megachurches surveyed chose a conservative theological identifier. Forty-eight percent claimed to be evangelical, 11 percent chose Pentecostal, another 14 percent selected the label of charismatic, 8 percent simply claimed ‘‘traditional,’’ 3 percent said they were seeker, 2 percent said fundamentalist, and 3 percent chose ‘‘other.’’ Only 12 percent of those surveyed described their church’s theological identity as ‘‘moderate,’’ and none claimed to be ‘‘liberal.’’14 Megachurches tend to grow to their great size within a very short period of time, usually in less than ten years, and during the tenure of a single senior pastor. One of the largest African American congregations in the country exemplifies this rapid and tremendous growth. In Atlanta, Georgia, World Changers Ministries, under the leadership of Creflo Dollar, began in 1986 with eight members and in ten years time had nearly 8,000 attenders and by 2005 claimed more than 20,000 attenders. In a northern suburb of the same city, Andy Stanley, son of the famous Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Charles Stanley, began a ministry in 1999, and within four years it grew to 5,000. In 2005 this church had over 15,000 attenders. Two other instances include New Hope Christian Fellowship O’ahu led by Wayne Cordeiro, which grew to 10,000 in its first nine years, and Mars Hill Bible Church with Rob Bell as pastor, which began in 1999 and five years later had over 10,000 in attendance. In 1996, T.D. Jakes, one of the most sought-after megachurch pastors, founded the Potter’s House as a nondenominational church in the southern sector of Dallas, Texas, with just fifty families. Less than ten years later it had more than 18,000 attenders and well over 30,000 members.

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Nearly all megachurch pastors are male and are viewed as having considerable personal charisma. The senior minister often has an authoritative style of preaching and administration and is nearly always the singular dominant leader of the church. Approximately 20 percent of megachurches have been exceptionally large for longer than the tenure of their current minister. Evidence suggests that although these churches often suffer some decrease in attendance with the change of senior ministers, this decline is likely to be reversed within a year. Megachurches can remain vital following a shift in leadership from the founder to his successor. Supporting these senior pastors are teams of five to twenty-five associate ministers, and often hundreds of full-time staff. Of the 153 megachurches surveyed in the Megachurches Today report, the average workforce included thirteen full-time paid ministerial staff persons, and twenty-five full-time paid program staff persons. The average number of volunteers who gave five or more hours a week to the church was 297.15 Worship is one of the central drawing cards that anchor the church. The worship service in a megachurch is a high-quality, entertaining, and well-planned production. Given the congregation’s size, this service cannot be left to ‘‘the flow of the Spirit,’’ especially if there are multiple services on a Sunday morning. As a megachurch grows, worship becomes more professional and polished, but also more planned and structured. The vast majority of these worship experiences, even if they include extensive congregational singing, are focused around the preaching. Megachurch sermons are often inspirational, motivational, and well delivered. The message empowers members with the challenge that everyone has choices, but also that they are responsible for what they choose. The listener is instructed, ‘‘You can do it, make a change, and make a difference.’’ Sermons are almost always powerful, practical, down to earth, and relevant. The leadership of megachurches throughout the country is experimenting with several modes of worship service configuration. Many congregations have gone to multiple services throughout the week. Whether this is owing to space considerations or to an intentional strategy, it has allowed churches to offer a variety of formats and worship styles within one location and to address a diverse set of musical and cultural tastes of their members. It is quite common for a megachurch to have a Friday evening young adults’ service with rock music and a laid-back format; likewise, an early Sunday service for older adults might include traditional organ music with hymns and a formal liturgy. Megachurches hold prayer services, Bible studies, singing services, and perhaps healing or charismatic praise services. The diversity offered at a megachurch extends even to the choice of the style, form, and time of a worship event that best fits one’s needs and tastes. Some congregations have modeled their efforts after multi-screen movie theaters and now offer distinctive worship venues at the same time in the central church campus. For example, the main sanctuary of a megachurch might have worship marked by contemporary praise music, with a worship team and a traditional order of worship. Concurrently in the fellowship hall there may be a parallel service for those who prefer a very expressive

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praise service with guitars for music, a healing time, and a younger set of leaders. In the youth wing, a group of teens might be drinking soda and eating doughnuts while rock or grunge music, lights, and video accompany free-form worship. When it is time for the sermon, however, people in each of the venues simultaneously see the senior minister deliver the sermon on video screen. This characteristic of choice underlies the efforts of all megachurches. A congregation of thousands encompasses many diverse tastes and interests that must be addressed. Not only does this diversity influence the multiple styles of worship, preaching, and music offered, but it also affects the array of ministries available within a megachurch. In many ways, the megachurch functions like the mall owner providing stability and a common roof under which diverse ministries, seen as specialized boutiques, can operate. In addition, several core ministries, like anchor stores, offer a continuous draw to this spiritual shopping center.16 This organizational arrangement allows the larger church programmatic ministry structure to remain unchanged, while the lay-driven specialized offerings rise or fall, depending on changing needs. This system provides the entire membership with a continuous supply of appealing choices that fit their tastes. It also offers highly committed members a choice of places to serve. Finally, it ensures that the church as a whole appears relevant and vibrantly active at a minimum of cost both structurally and financially. This mall-like approach enables the megachurch’s leadership to maintain a stable worship environment, yet exhibit flexibility in serving a changing clientele by continuously altering their ministry choices. Nowhere is the characteristic of programmatic choice more evident, however, than in the range of internal ministries and the diversity of groups offered by megachurches. Some of these ministries are oriented specifically to religious and spiritual issues, such as age-graded Bible studies, prayer groups, new member sessions, and religious education classes. Other ministries focus more on enhancing interpersonal ties and strengthening fellowship and social interaction through home groups, covenant communities, recreational activities, sports events, and organized celebrations. There are always groups that train church volunteers both to assist in the functioning of the church and in the performance of its ministries. Often programs address the physical and psychological well-being of members with health fairs, preventative health clinics, employment support, vocational training, job fairs, various twelve-step-type recovery groups, and individual counseling services. In addition, there are any number of interest groups and activities, from music lessons and choir rehearsals to political action committees and auto repair clinics. Over 40 percent of megachurches support elementary and secondary private schools, with a much larger percentage hosting daycare centers, scout troops, HeadStart programs, and countless teen and young adult activities.17 These large churches may even provide roller rinks, pools, gymnasiums, racquetball courts, and weight rooms. Megachurch leadership realizes that given the size of the congregations, members must be strenuously encouraged to become involved in ministries

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and programs. Hence, 96 percent of congregations surveyed strongly pressure all their participants to volunteer in church ministries. Over threequarters of churches required new members to take an informational class prior to or after joining. A third of those megachurches surveyed assign a pastor or lay leader to mentor new members as a way to incorporate them into the life of the church. These intentional efforts pay off, given that nearly three-quarters of surveyed megachurches thought that new members were very or quite easily incorporated into the life of their church.18 Somewhat surprising for these massive congregations, nearly 50 percent of the Megachurches Today respondents said the statement ‘‘their church feels like a close-knit family’’ described them very or quite well. This results in part from the extensive use of small group fellowship in megachurches. Half the surveyed churches say their use of small groups is central to their strategy for Christian nurture and spiritual formation. Another 44 percent have such groups but say these are not central to the church’s program. These groups may be formal and highly structured prayer or fellowship cells, or they may be informal and activity driven such as small groupings of parking attendants, police officers, lawyers, or business persons. However, they reflect how members are able to customize their interactions with the church to fit their needs and interests. Over 80 percent say they have an organized program to keep up with members’ needs and provide ministry at the neighborhood level.19 There is no doubt that these organizational forms enhance community and build social networks even as they allow for a tailored spiritual experience based on an individual’s needs and desires. Most megachurches are either newly established churches or older congregations that moved into new buildings prior to their explosive growth. Brand-new congregations clearly have an edge over older churches; they have no existing patterns to revamp. In essence new congregations can choose to adopt whatever organizational model, or for that matter building structure, that works best with the size they anticipate becoming. It is a dynamic evolutionary strategy of growth versus a revisionist effort to expand. This lesson is not lost on many national denominational leaders who have recently engaged in concerted efforts at planting new churches. Given this advantage, it is not surprising that one finds numerous accounts in the early history of many megachurches when they were housed in ‘‘temporary structures’’—school auditoriums, abandoned shopping centers, and even circus tents, before they considered building their ‘‘own’’ sanctuary. Perhaps the best-known example of maintaining a fluid congregational form during its most rapid growth period is Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church. This congregation met in a high school, then in countless satellite locations around the Mission Viejo, California, area, before it built its current sanctuary. However, there are many other examples of this from both the earliest megachurches to the more recent. Many of these churches report that every move to a new structure generated a rapid influx of persons to fill the building to capacity.20 Megachurches describe this as ‘‘living at the limits of capacity.’’ Those surveyed in the Megachurches Today report had an average seating of over 2,000, with

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40 percent of them claiming to have moved into their building since 1980, and 85 percent of them describing the physical condition of their building as excellent or good. Nevertheless, over half the congregational leaders described their structures as inadequate for their current needs.21 A large number of megachurches are beginning to realize that having multiple campuses within one organization has strategic advantages. Churches needing to grow are becoming more intentional about establishing satellite locations at a distance from but still a part of the main congregation. In the 2001 Megachurches Today survey over 20 percent of churches said they had branch campuses or satellites of their home church elsewhere in their city.22 Interest in this strategy has increased dramatically in recent years, with several major megachurches, including Willow Creek, creating multiple campuses. Megachurches draw from an extensive area of any city, with members often driving from forty-five minutes to an hour to attend. This brings many diverse cultural and social groups together under one roof. The challenge facing any megachurch is how to address this diversity of cultural styles or worship tastes. By creating satellite congregations in other parts of the city, the leadership is able to customize the worship style and format and tailor the message to each unique constituency within the congregation. This approach also allows a church to diminish the travel time of a portion of its membership, while also circumventing the need to construct ever larger and more expensive buildings and simultaneously deal with the shortage of land, inadequate parking, and restrictive zoning laws and yet continue to address diverse ministry situations. These efforts have introduced innovations of structure not only into megachurches but also smaller congregations are learning from these distinctive ways of being church.

NEW NETWORKS OF INTERCONNECTION Given the rapid growth of many megachurches, there is a continual need to consider expansion. Creating multiple sites within one larger organizational entity is one solution to the need for expansion. A second is to emphasize planting new independent congregations that duplicate the mother church’s model of ministry, essentially creating a franchise. Creating daughter churches as independent congregations is a way of continuing to build God’s kingdom. The leadership of most megachurches also reaps many other benefits from this strategy. This planting strategy is another effective way to customize the message to a much broader audience. It spreads the reputation and market for a distinct style of ministry, as well as expanding the influence of the mother church. In the Megachurches Today survey, nearly 70 percent of churches reported they had planted other congregations, with nearly a third having founded six or more churches. Eighty percent of these megachurches stated that their ancillary congregations had distinctive styles or missions compared to the mother church.23 Such a strategy also has the added benefit of providing new positions in church leadership for promising young members who otherwise might become disgruntled at the mother church because of the limited number of leadership roles.

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Another consequence of planting new congregations is that it creates an informal network of like-minded churches that look to the mother church for inspiration and resources. This ‘‘familial network’’ often shares the tasks of training pastors, developing resources, organizing conferences, and reinforcing a common identity. This model, found most prominently in the Calvary and Vineyard Networks, produces unique relational ties and accountability as if to a parent, with an emphasis on the independence of the offspring. A Calvary Chapel pastor claimed in an interview: ‘‘Each church is autonomous and each church is self-governing. It is, however, an association of churches. . . . It is an association of like-minded fellowships that associate with each other because they have the same philosophy.’’24 These familial ties within the informal association are fertile grounds for the recruitment and training of new clergy. Often, promising lay leaders are nurtured into official leadership positions, mentored by existing clergy, and then encouraged to ‘‘plant a daughter church,’’ occasionally with the financial support of the ‘‘sending’’ congregation. Many large megachurches have expanded these ‘‘familial networks’’ to create networks open to all like-minded congregations. This connectional arrangement has been popularized by and heavily employed by megachurches over the past three decades. Certain researchers have interpreted these associations to be proto-denominations, implying that they will eventually organize into forms similar to contemporary national denominations.25 However, these efforts at creating structures of interconnection are quite disparate from those found in traditional denominations. Unlike traditional denominations, megachurch networks are loosely structured, de-centralized, nonhierarchical, and lacking bureaucratic structures. They are based on relationships, personal ties, and an affinity of interests and mission purpose. The network offers a skill or a strategy, an expertise or an identity, that other congregations or pastors find helpful. Many networks provide the opportunity to ‘‘belong to something bigger,’’ while offering fellowship events, resources, and training as well as some minimal pastoral oversight, accountability, and identification with a successful ministry. A pastor in the Potter’s House Network described the relationship this way: The Potter’s House is more defined as a fellowship—not the denominational or legal ties, but strong relational ties are what binds us, with a common vision or goal. And so, while we as pastors are in essence independent . . . yet we’re not entirely independent—because of relationship. And so we link together and we keep the contact through laboring together and through area-wide conferences. It’s the relationship that brings, if you will, the pressure point of things—I don’t mean manipulation. . . . But as a denomination you have the guidelines and rules that you function under. In the fellowship, it’s the relationship—so there are standards, guidelines, principles, ethics. . . . There are some very distinct relational connections. Typically it’s kind of like a family.26

The networked relationship is so informal that a church may not know its pastor is associated with one or several networks. These networks are often loose affiliations of like-minded ministers who may or may not formally

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represent their congregations. The church membership might not even overtly recognize the influence of these networks. Often these connectional influences slip into the congregation unobtrusively through the music, teaching resources, and educational events offered by the network. Unlike denominations, these networks are not exclusive. They are not restricted only to independent congregations or those churches a megachurch has planted. Any congregation can join one of these networks, even if they are part of an official national denomination. Likewise, networks do not demand singular loyalty. Any congregation may belong to multiple networks at the same time. They can just as easily dissolve a relationship with a network, as the church’s needs change. There are few formal ties, with minimal obligations to join and even less sacrifices to disaffiliate. The proliferation of these networks or associations of churches is almost as significant a change in religious structure and organization as are the megachurches and niche congregations over the past forty years. Twenty percent of megachurches in the 2001 study reported they were part of a network, fellowship, or association of churches. These networks ranged anywhere from fifteen members to several thousand. The median network size was six hundred churches.27 The majority of networks that have arisen in recent years center on the megachurches but include primarily churches of much smaller size. But megachurches are not the hubs of all networks. Quite a few networks exist that interconnect and support groups of house churches, cell churches, and emerging churches. These connectional structures are developing across multiple forms of religious organizations. There is no official count of such networks (although some such as the Association of Vineyard Churches, the Association of Calvary Chapels, or the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship occasionally get catalogued in official handbooks of denominations). Nevertheless, hundreds of these information structures exist and include well-known organizations such as the Willow Creek Association and the network of Purpose Driven Churches. A list of networks includes the Fellowship of Christian Assemblies, Morning Star Ministries, Potter’s House Fellowship, Victory Outreach Network, International Communion of Charismatic Congregations, the Full Gospel Baptist Fellowship, and countless others.28 If these new networks and associations function as quasi-denominations at all, it is certainly with different characterizations of authority and agency than traditional denominations. The dominant basis of authority functioning in these networks is relational—grounded in a unity of vision and purpose—rather than charismatic, bureaucratic, or traditional. If a network member’s direction of ministry changes, then, as a Vineyard Association judicatory pastor hypothetically counseled in an interview, ‘‘we are not walking together down the same path. I still love you as a brother in Christ, but perhaps you should think about finding a different group as your primary fellowship.’’29 Likewise, the agency structure of these networks appears to be relatively informal in organization and minimal in the scope of functions performed. Finally, in nearly every case, the network does not function as the sole source of either religious authority or agency for the associated clergy member or the affiliated local church.

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To some extent, these network structures expand the customization of religious identity at the congregational level. The networks allow individual congregations to choose their affiliational ties based on their momentary interests and needs rather than having it be denominationally-fixed, or permanently committed. These churches are able to select with whom they want to associate and to whom they choose to submit and be accountable. It is the same identity pattern, just written at the congregational level.

THE RELIGIOUS MARKETPLACE OF THE FUTURE The various religious organizational forms addressed in this chapter represent a very small percentage of congregations and active participants in organized American religion. However, this number is continually growing, fueled both by the popularity of these alternatives and by the disillusionment of persons with traditional religious structures. Nevertheless, the likelihood of the religious landscape being filled with megachurches, emerging congregations, and house churches anytime in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is highly unlikely. Much of the impact of religious organizational forms described here is more likely to be felt by a vastly larger percentage of congregations of all theological persuasions in more indirect and subtle ways. The changes to these congregations are effected more slowly over time, as these distinctive organizational practices and habits become integrated into more traditional congregational forms, gradually altering them beyond recognition. A reflection on the changes that have already diffused into contemporary religious culture and organizational reality is instructive. Changes in casual dress, music style, and worship formats wrought by the charismatic, the Vineyard, and Calvary Chapel movements prove the power of these glacier-like alterations to the religious landscape. One has to wonder what influence the Willow Creek Community Church’s network and conferences have had in disseminating the gospel of seeker-sensitive worship to tens of thousands of churches, or how Rick Warren’s hugely successful ‘‘purpose-driven’’ campaigns have reconceptualized church organization at the congregational, pastoral, and individual levels. In addition to these influences, many smaller churches have already adopted structural characteristics of megachurches learned at the countless pastors’ conferences offered by nearly 50 percent of megachurches.30 Careful ethnographic investigations in all sorts of congregations have begun to show that many individuals no longer relate to traditional religious communities as they once did. Melissa Wilcox found this to be the case in her study of lesbians in the Los Angeles area.31 The persons she interviewed and observed were attenders in a church but not necessarily shaped by the church; rather, their spirituality was rooted in their own quest, in their own exploration of the sacred. A similar dynamic can be seen in broad national studies of U.S. Catholics and their beliefs. Based on their lack of acceptance of papal teachings, these Catholics are in the church but do not embrace the church’s pronouncements, traditions, and doctrines.32 Many studies of members within specific denominations show considerable variation of attitudes,

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practices, beliefs, morality, and theology. The questions of what counts as a ‘‘good’’ Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Jew and who decides this are up for grabs. To complicate this dynamic further, numerous other venues for spiritual development outside of traditional religious organizations abound. These parachurch realities offer ways for persons to structure their personal quest for the Spirit without necessarily subscribing to a larger religious tradition. Groups as diverse as the Women’s Leadership Institute at Hartford Seminary and the ‘‘Gospel Hour’’ drag show in a gay bar in Atlanta, Sunday morning Gospel brunches in the suburbs of several Southern cities, or retreat centers, labyrinths, and Tai Chi exercises in public parks, spiritual weight loss clinics, even twelve-step programs grounded in a spirituality based on one’s own understanding of a higher power all contribute to a radical reworking of religious organizational life beyond just those discussed in this chapter. It could be argued that the large percentage of persons who claim a spiritual faith, even a religious tradition, and yet very seldom attend an organized faith community are essentially the masters of their own vessels. They implicitly follow their horoscope, learn ‘‘truth’’ from The Da Vinci Code, hold to a ‘‘prosperity gospel’’ taught by television preachers, practice yoga, explore Native American spirituality at Borders, burn incense, wear crystals, and chat in the interfaith rooms on Beliefnet. These same folks might even be found visiting a local megachurch or dropping in on a service at an emerging congregation. It is more likely, however, they are among the millions of anonymous believers who spend most Sundays worshipping at flea markets and malls, at youth soccer and baseball games, or in a local running and hiking trail communing with nature. Societal and cultural changes took place in the decades of the 1950s through the 1970s that set in motion radical alterations to our understanding of spirituality and religion. These shifts began to separate personal beliefs and attitudes about faith from customary organizational forms, historic traditions, and established religious authorities. Over time religious organizations evolved or were created that embody an approach to the spiritual life, either niche- or mall-like in reality, that caters to the individual as captain of his or her own spiritual ship. Some of the more obvious organizational forms have been discussed in this chapter, but these house churches, emerging congregations, and megachurches with cell groups and multiple venue worship services only scratch the surface of the diversity. Internet virtual communities are an example of this variety but other forms of spiritual organizations hinted at above abound and remain to be researched fully. To identify and explore this spirituality variety we must broaden our conceptual definition of what constitutes a religious organization. Traditional congregational organizations will continue to exist as a path for pursuing spirituality but, as Robert Wuthnow suggests, ‘‘the congregation is less aptly characterized as a safe haven; rather, it functions as a supplier of spiritual goods and services.’’33 However, all of this entails reversing our approach to understanding a life of faith. Religion is no longer only that which is being disseminated from ‘‘on high,’’ coming down the mountain

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or through a denominational chain of command, to dwell among the people. Spiritually in the United States, individuals are now scaling the mountain on their own quest for the gods. At times they are following wellworn organizational paths, but more often they are forging their own trails with their own unique goals in mind.

NOTES 1. See various descriptions of the changes in religious identity and the corresponding cultural shifts in the works of Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Dean Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994); and Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993); and idem, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 57, indicate that as many as 80 percent of those asked responded in this manner. 3. The religious faith of one interviewee, Sheila, in Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, Ann Swidler, and Stephen M. Tipton, eds., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), named her religion after herself, claiming it was her own private faith. 4. Wuthnow, 9–10. 5. The historical use of house church gatherings is traced by C. Kirk Hadaway, Francis M. Dubose, and Stuart A. Wright, Home Cell Groups and House Churches (Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1987). 6. Ibid., 109. 7. See Stephen Warner, New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church (Berkeley: University of California, 1988). 8. See the interview with Brian McLaren in Andy Crouch, ‘‘The Emergent Mystique,’’ Christianity Today (November 2004), at www.christianitytoday.com/ ct/2004/011/12.36.html, accessed October 15, 2005. 9. This quote is part of an interview with Rob Bell in ibid. This Christianity Today article offers an excellent overview of the emerging church movement, as does Brian McLaren’s commentary on this article at http://www.anewkindofchristian. com/archives/000271.html, accessed October 15, 2005. 10. Kim Lawton, ‘‘The Emerging Church,’’ Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (July 8 and 15, 2005), episodes 845–46, available at www.pbs.org/wnet/ religionandethics/week845/cover.html, accessed October 25, 2005. Interviews with several emerging church participants done by this reporter shed light into why these churches are so popular. 11. Ibid. An interesting summary of characteristics based on how one person within the emerging church envisions the movement to be can be found at www. emergingchurch.info/reflection/stevetaylor/index.htm, accessed October 25, 2005. Also see the many works of Brian McLaren. Another place to uncover information about the movement is, not surprisingly, on the Internet at sites such as www. emergingchurch.info, www.emergentvillage.com, www.anewkindofchristian.com, and www.theooze.com.

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12. Michael Moynagh, ‘‘How Is Emerging Church Different?’’ (November 2004), at www.emergingchurch.info/reflection/michaelmoynagh/index.htm, accessed November 7, 2005. 13. Crouch, ‘‘Emergent Mystique.’’ 14. Scott Thumma, Megachurches Today: Summary of Data from the Faith Communities Today Project, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/org/faith_megachurches_ FACTsummary.html, accessed October 20, 2005. 15. Ibid. 16. Nancy Eiesland, A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 17. Thumma, Megachurches Today. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 168. 21. Thumma, Megachurches Today. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Scott Thumma, ‘‘What God Makes Free is Free Indeed: Nondenominational Church Identity and its Networks of Support,’’ http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ bookshelf/thumma_article5.html, accessed October 15, 2005. 25. Les Parrott and Dale Robin Perrin, ‘‘The New Denominations?’’ Christianity Today 34 (March 11): 29–33. 26. Thumma, ‘‘What God Makes Free.’’ 27. Thumma, Megachurches Today. 28. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism, begins to explore the nature of the Calvary Chapel, Hope Chapel, and Vineyard Associations. Les Parrott and Dale Robin Perrin, ‘‘The New Denominations?’’ is still the best overview of these quasi-denominational structures. 29. Thumma, ‘‘What God Makes Free.’’ 30. Thumma, Megachurches Today. 31. Melissa M. Wilcox, Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 32. William V. D’Antonio, James D. Davidson, Dean R. Hoge, and Katherine Meyer, American Catholics: Gender, Generation, and Commitment (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2001). 33. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 15.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Bass, Diana Butler. The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church. Washington, DC: Alban Institute, 2004. Loveland, Anne C., and Otis B. Wheeler. From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Miller, Donald E. Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sargeant, Kimon. Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Sweet, Leonard, ed. The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003.

CHAPTER 11

In Search of the Promised Land: Post–Civil Rights Trends in African American Religion Stephen C. Finley and Torin D. Alexander

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everal significant institutional and noninstitutional trends have presented themselves in African American religion as of the post–civil rights era. Africentrism, for example, can be seen in the black church and the Nation of Islam, two religious movements that distinguished themselves as dominant African American religious expressions during and after the civil rights movement. As a result, both of these movements command significant attention in order to elucidate their changing dynamics. On the one hand, the black church, for instance, has experienced an increase in the numbers of megachurches and a proliferation of evangelical movements, which tend to be politically conservative and socially conservative with regard to issues of sexuality, cultural/racial identity, and gender. Another important trend in the black church is the growing proportion of female members, though women still face sexism and discrimination when it comes to positions of power and leadership. On the other hand, the Nation of Islam has undergone considerable changes in this era regarding its identity, since many organizations now claim the name ‘‘Nation of Islam.’’ Then, too, the Nation of Islam has evolved into various groups with differing theological and social agendas. In addition to the Nation of Islam, however, there have been numerous other movements, many of which resulted in the emergence of black religions that have more recently gained visibility. Many of these groups have long existed in black communities and reflect religious ideas and sentiments that have long existed in America, rather than ‘‘new’’ religious movements literally. At the same time, we want to be careful not to privilege one movement over another by implying that one development exists only in relation to another. Because of this, this chapter will discuss numerous traditions.

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Finally, this chapter will offer an overview of academic developments in the study of black religion and explore the ways in which black intellectual trends are impacted and challenged by developments in African American religion and changing historical and cultural realities. This chapter will understand ‘‘black or African American religion’’ as orientation, or the ways in which African Americans make sense of their world. This orientation is characterized by a quest or a push for more fullness in life, to be known and find meaning over a variety of life factors and indicators. Anthony Pinn suggests that this push and search for meaning comprise the core characteristic of African American religion.1 This central feature is the impetus for black religion, in its various forms including the form most studied, namely the black church.

THE BLACK CHURCH: NATURE AND DEVELOPMENTS For the most part, the study of religion and religious experience in African American communities has revolved around the study of the black church, but what is meant by the term ‘‘black church’’? Narrowly construed, the nomenclature ‘‘black church’’ refers to such historic black denominations as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Colored (Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church, the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and the Church of God in Christ. However, as noted by C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya in their monumental work, The Black Church in the African American Experience, the black church is also a kind of sociological and theological shorthand for the pluralism of black Christian churches in the United States.2 Put in a slightly different fashion, the black church might be conceived of as a heuristic category that assists in discussing African American churches as a whole, while in reality they defy phenomenological objectification. In many respects, that the black church garners so much attention is not that odd, for without question the black church has been the dominant and most significant historical, cultural, and social expression of the religious consciousness of African American people. Thus, it is often assumed, in the words of Joseph R. Washington, Jr.: In the beginning was the black church, and the black church was the black community. The black church was in the beginning with the black people; all things were made through the black church, and without the black church was not anything made that was made. In the church was life, and the life was the light of black people. The black church still shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.3

Yet, as a historical, cultural, and social representation of African Americans, the black church has undergone substantive and in some instances radical changes and transformation in the post–civil rights era as has the African American community. Some of the most significant of these developments

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would include the rise of the black megachurch; the influence of white evangelicalism and conservative Christianity on African American churches and their resultant changes with respect to issues of sexuality, gender, cultural/racial identity, and politics; and finally the position of women in the black churches. We shall examine each. Probably the most definitive study of the megachurch phenomenon has been done by Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Thumma and the institute define a megachurch as a non-Roman Catholic congregation that has two thousand or more attenders per week, with such attendance being reached over a relatively short period of time. This last characteristic is significant, notes Thumma, for historically there have always been large churches. The megachurch, however, constitutes a new social, cultural, and ‘‘spiritual’’ organization that has developed only in the last thirty years. Moreover, these congregations share a number of significant characteristics. First, they tend to be geographically situated in the southern and western regions of the United States. In part, this results from the availability of resources necessary for such churches, like large tracts of land for their substantial campuses. Second, these churches are likely to be theologically conservative, adhering strictly and rigidly to defined sets of dogma such as biblical inerrancy and Christian exceptionalism. Third, the dominant model of leadership is highly authoritarian and charisma driven. Fourth, they offer a diverse array of ministries to meet the needs of a broad range of potential attenders. Finally, these churches, though in many instances retaining some form of denominational connection, are essentially autonomous entities, that in many respects are organized along the lines of modern corporations with respect to their technological sophistication and structural diversification in order to effect with marketing, promotion, publishing, and recording efficiently. This trend has manifested itself in several African American congregations. As stated above, while there have been African American churches with memberships in the thousands historically, particularly in metropolitan areas with large African American populations, there has been an eruption of mega-congregations of rather recent vintage. Though the Hartford Institute data are not broken down by race, the names of the pastors and their congregations are quite well known to many in the African American community. A few of those included in the Hartford database with average weekly attendance of more than ten thousand include T.D. Jakes’s Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas; Creflo Dollar’s World Changers Ministries in College Park, Georgia; Eddie L. Long’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia; and Fred Price’s Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles, California. In the wake of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, many came to view the black church as a liberal, even progressive, institution. In reality, however, only a minority of black clergy and black congregations were energetically engaged in the civil rights movement. One need only recall that the Progressive National Baptist Convention came into existence when the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. rejected the civil rights agenda, as well as clergy associated with it such as Gardner C. Taylor and Martin

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Luther King, Jr. As Gayraud S. Wilmore notes in Black Religion and Black Radicalism, the black church had for the most part lost its radical orientation during the early portion of the twentieth century.4 The civil rights movement saw radicalism resurrected only partially, and only for a limited period of time. A majority of the black church would embrace a social posture with an emphasis on self-preservation, often through assimilation of what was deemed socially acceptable and normative (read: ‘‘white norms’’). This was manifest as a kind of social conservatism. In the decades immediately following the 1960s, some African Americans would experience previously unknown social and professional success. This is not to imply that racism was eradicated. It persisted, often in more subtle, although perhaps no less detrimental, forms. Yet, there would develop a new black middle-class who often found greater commonalities with their white peers than poorer members of the African American community. Many of these African Americans, desiring perhaps to be recognized for their accomplishments, began to promote the American myths of meritocracy and rugged individualism. Representatives of such an orientation (e.g., Walter E. Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Glen Loury) would in fact begin to call into question the effectiveness of various policies such as affirmative action and programs such as welfare. It is important to note, however, that such transitions did not take place in a vacuum. Indeed, the late 1970s and 1980s would see a national turn to the political right, and the visibility of individuals such as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Alan Keyes marked the inclusion of African Americans in the conservative movement. This period would also see a significant transformation for the American religious landscape. The once prominent mainline (liberal) Protestant denominations (American Baptist Churches, USA; Presbyterian Church, USA; United Methodist Church; United Church of Christ; Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; and the Episcopal Church) would experience significant decline in their memberships while denominations that are more conservative were experiencing increases.5 With growth in numbers and growth in influence, these new style conservative and evangelical Christians, unlike their early twentieth century predecessors, articulated a vision of national reform and redemption. In such a context, they began to reach out to the black church as allies in their mission. As mentioned earlier, there was a strong tradition of social conservatism within the black church. Further, in keeping with the changing worldview and life situation of their congregants, many black churches had come to emphasize issues of personal piety and responsibility over expressions of faith associated with social justice. White conservative Christians, perhaps for the first time, identified shared values with African American Christians. The 1990s would see movements such as the Promise Keepers and the Christian Coalition express commitments to racial reconciliation and denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention publicly repent for slavery and ‘‘past racism.’’ Hence, by the early twenty-first century, many black churches and white conservative congregations find common cause in matters of faith and politics.

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As noted by various African American scholars, the black church, as most churches in America, has historically had a rather parochial view with respect to sexuality. Although there have always been gay and lesbian members within these institutions, even in positions of leadership, they were often tolerated as part of de facto ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policies. This peace, however, would be disrupted with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. While elements of American youth culture embraced ‘‘free love,’’ thanks to the introduction of the pill, other marginalized communities and constituencies, taking inspiration from the black civil rights movement, also began to seek redress for their omission with respect to equality under the law. Thus was born the modern women’s movement that included the campaign for women’s reproductive rights, and the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movement. As with the rest of the country, many in the black community felt that such groups were indicative of moral decay. Compounding and potentially exacerbating this impression in the African American community was a perceived growth in single-parent homes headed by females, given credence in part by the now famous Moynihan report, ‘‘The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.’’ Although there were those who offered etiological analyses based on social and structural factors such as economic and educational opportunities, drugs, and the growing number of black males being incarcerated, many simply saw this as a breakdown of values. Though mainline denominations have taken steps toward greater inclusion and affirmation with respect to sexuality within Christian churches as well as the body politic, many African American clergy have joined their conservative white counterparts in opposition to such trends. In March 2004, for example, several dozen black clergy in Atlanta, Georgia, publicly voiced their opposition to gay marriage and pressed the legislature for a constitutional ban on the practice.6 As previously mentioned, the identification of middle-class African Americans with their white peers as opposed to members of their racial ethnic group has led to new issues with respect to identity and loyalties. Many persons of color, not only African Americans, have expressed a desire to be viewed simply as Americans, taking literally Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous words admonishing that people be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. This has resulted in a tendency by some African Americans to shun notions of identity predicated on concepts of race or ethnicity, preferring rather to be identified with the larger common culture and nation. Also, as noted, many of these positions have led to greater cooperation among conservative white politicos and members of the black community. For example, several high-profile African American clergy were visible participants in support of Republican congressional and presidential candidacies in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 campaigns. In addition to so-called issues of morality, such as same-sex marriage, abortion, or the president’s faith-based initiatives funding, prominent black clergy have taken stands in favor of tax cuts, the ending of affirmative action, and appointment of conservative nominees to the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

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Walk into almost any predominantly African American church in recent years and one will find the majority of the attenders are female. Indeed, women have always had a significant presence within the black church. Often referred to as the backbone, the heart, or the foundation of the institution, not until fairly recently have significant numbers of them acquired access to ecclesiastical positions of power. The first black denomination to ordain a woman to the ministry officially was the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME). As noted by Lincoln and Mamiya, Bishop James Walker Hood ordained Julia A. Foote a ‘‘deacon’’ in 1894. A year later, Mary J. Small was ordained a deacon by Bishop Alexander Walters. Small would be the first woman ordained an elder in 1898, to be followed by Foote in 1900. The AME church would not bestow this status on women again until 1948, followed by the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) church in 1954.7 One might expect, given the polity of Baptist churches—namely the autonomy of the local church—that there would be more opportunities for formal leadership by women. Unfortunately, although women fulfilled certain functions and offices, such as deaconesses and heads of Christian education and mission boards, to a large extent the road to the pastorate has remained closed. Of the three major black Baptist denominations, women have fared only marginally better in this regard among Progressive National Baptists than others. With respect to the black Pentecostal tradition, however, one finds a great variety of orientations with respect to women and the church. By far the largest denomination associated with this tradition, the Church of God in Christ, maintains a firm stance opposed to the ordination of women. Unlike Baptist and Methodist conventions, however, many women have founded their own Pentecostal and Holiness congregations. Following the examples of such charismatic women pastors of the 1930s and 1940s such as Elder Lucy Smith, initiator of the All Nations Pentecostal Church in Chicago, and Bishop Ida Robinson, founder of Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, Inc. in Philadelphia,8 are women such as Rev. Dr. Barbara L. King of Hillside International Truth Center in Atlanta and Rev. Johnnie Colemon of the Christ Universal Temple in Chicago. The result of this state of affairs with respect to the historic black denominations has been that in 1990 females constituted only an estimated 5 percent of black clergy. Further, the vast majority of these likely served small storefront, independent, and Pentecostal/Holiness churches. Lincoln and Mamiya did note, nevertheless, a 240 percent increase in the number of women entering the professional ministry between 1930 and 1980.9 Even more interesting is the set of data collected by Delores Carpenter that documents an increase in the number of black females graduating from accredited theological programs increasing some 676 percent between 1972 and 1984.10 As Lincoln and Mamiya note from Carpenter’s study, such numbers have led to black women seeking ordination and leadership positions among the white mainline Protestant churches. More than 50 percent of the African American women in Carpenter’s sample made just such a

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choice because of greater receptivity. Those seeking confirmation of such openness would no doubt point to the consecration of an African American woman, Leontine Kelly, in 1984 as a bishop of the United Methodist Church, a scant four years after the denomination ordained Marjorie Swank Matthews as the first female bishop. In 1988, an African American woman, Barbara Harris, was ordained a bishop in the Episcopal Church. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, there were indications of greater receptivity to women in authority within historically black denominations and religious associations. In July 2000, the AME church elected Vashti McKenzie as its first female bishop. Four years later, AME called as presiding prelates Carolyn Tyler Guidry for the Sixteenth Episcopal District and Sarah Frances Davis for the Eighteenth Episcopal District. In addition, 2002 witnessed the election of Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook as the first female president of the Hampton Ministers’ Conference, a national clergy conference held annually at Hampton University in Virginia.

THE NATION OF ISLAM In addition to the black church, the Nation of Islam (NOI), which had established itself as a major black religious institution prior to the civil rights movement under the leadership of its founder, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, became more well known to the American public. Those who study history in America or who are familiar with black popular culture would have surely heard of the iconic Malcolm X, the most famous member of the Nation during his time. They may also be familiar with other famous members of the NOI such as the former heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali, or the current leader of the NOI, Louis Farrakhan. Even Michael Jackson claimed to have converted to the NOI during his child molestation case of 1994. Nonetheless, prior to the civil rights movement it is appropriate to speak of the Nation of Islam as a single organization. Afterwards, in particular after the death of its founder the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, one has to speak properly of the ‘‘Nations’’ of Islam. Perhaps a brief historical sketch will contextualize and further elucidate this discussion. Discussion of the founding of the NOI requires a look beyond Elijah Muhammad to engage the antecedents of the movement. A good place to begin is with Noble Drew Ali, the founder of the Moorish Holy Temple of Science, later changed to Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), since ‘‘it was the first mass religious movement in the history of Islam in America,’’ according to Richard Brent Turner.11 Born Timothy Drew in North Carolina in 1886, Noble Drew Ali founded the MSTA in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913. Once a Baptist minister, Drew had attempted to build a militant black Baptist movement, but it was short lived. Turning his attention to ‘‘Islam,’’ he established the MSTA based on the authority that he derived from several alleged experiences. One claim, for example, maintains that he made a pilgrimage to Morocco where he received a mission from the king of Morocco to teach Islam to ‘‘Negroes’’

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in the United States. Accordingly, the king bestowed upon him the name ‘‘Ali,’’ an Arabic word that means ‘‘above’’ or ‘‘over’’ as in rank. Another legend claims that Drew had to pass a test to prove that he was a prophet. The test required him to find his way out of a labyrinth in the pyramids of Egypt, a test which he apparently passed. Drew Ali died in 1929, either from police brutality or by the hands of those who were loyal to his rival within the MSTA. The next major figure in NOI history is Master Fard Muhammad, also known as W.D. Fard. Fard claimed to be a reincarnation of Noble Drew Ali, as did John Givens-El. Whether or not Master Fard was a member of the MSTA is a disputed point. Notwithstanding, those who followed him would become the NOI in 1930, and those who followed Givens-El became the present-day MSTA. Master Fard’s race or ethnicity was ambiguous. Some thought he was Arab, since he claimed to have been born in Mecca on February 26, 1877. He also claimed to be of royal ancestry as a descendent of the tribe of ‘‘Kareish,’’ the same tribe as the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. He reportedly sold silks and performed magic tricks in Detroit, Michigan, teaching African Americans there about their true identity. Reportedly, one such magical feat was when he told several of his followers to take strands of their hair and place them in a pile. Master Fard then pulled a single strand of hair from his head and with it lifted the entire pile of hair belonging to his followers. Master Fard continued to build a following, and in 1931 the burgeoning movement apparently attracted Elijah Muhammad, then Elijah (or Eli) Poole, to one of his religious services. Elijah Muhammad was born in Sanderville, Georgia, in October 1897. Like Timothy Drew, he was formerly a Baptist minister. He became one of Fard’s star disciples. In 1932, however, he left Master Fard in Detroit in order to begin NOI Temple #2 in Chicago, Illinois, the location of the present international headquarters of the NOI. In 1933, Fard was ordered out of Detroit by the authorities and migrated to Temple #2 in Chicago, where he was again arrested by authorities there. Fard subsequently withdrew from the movement and eventually disappeared. Muhammad began to teach his followers that Master Fard was God in person and that his disappearance was due to his ascension to the mother ship, literally a space ship, from which he would exact judgment and retribution on the devil (whites). Henceforth, Muhammad assumed absolute authority in the NOI. The NOI favored well under Muhammad’s leadership from 1933 through 1975. The NOI started temples and study groups all over the country. They also built a sizable economic empire, including property, publications, bakeries, grocery stores, and restaurants. Yet, the group was largely unknown to the American public until the 1960s. It was then that they became known primarily through the public image of Malcolm X and his responses to the civil rights movement and to Martin Luther King, Jr., and by the very public schism between Malcolm and Mr. Muhammad in 1964. On the surface, the schism erupted over Muhammad’s alleged sexual improprieties with several of his secretaries, while at the same time demanding sexual purity and marital fidelity of NOI members.

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The reality may have been, however, that Malcolm X was becoming increasingly popular, both in the NOI and in the American media, and the NOI was flourishing as a result. Although Malcolm was totally loyal to Muhammad by most accounts, others in the NOI were perhaps jealous of his standing and his relationship with Muhammad. Many of them seemingly instigated the division between the two of them, causing Mr. Muhammad to be suspicious of Malcolm, who was the most likely NOI minister to succeed Muhammad as the leader of the group. Instead, Louis Abdul Farrakhan would succeed Malcolm X as the national minister of the NOI but not as leader of the NOI initially. Malcolm’s expulsion and secession from the NOI and his later assassination would pave the way for an intense struggle for power as Elijah Muhammad grew in age. This struggle for power would culminate in 1975 when Muhammad died, at which time the most crucial post–civil rights developments within the NOI occurred. Initially, Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammed, would take over as the leader of the NOI, but almost immediately he sought to move the NOI toward the global community of ‘‘orthodox’’ Islam. Born Wallace D. Muhammad, Imam Warith D. Muhammed changed the name of the NOI to the World Community of Al-Islam in the West, signifying a movement away from the separatist and black nationalist program of the NOI. Imam Muhammed’s loyalty to the NOI was suspect earlier, which resulted in his excommunication for philosophical, theological, and ideological reasons.12 He had returned to the NOI perhaps because of the threat of violence and retribution against prominent members who apostatized. Now, given the opportunity to lead the group, he wasted no time disbanding significant NOI organizations and rituals. For example, he dissolved the Fruit of Islam, the security auxiliary, and he discontinued prominent rituals like the dress codes in which the men of the NOI wore bowties.

‘‘NATIONS’’ OF ISLAM In 1977, tension from conflicting perspectives came to a boil, tension that had existed between Elijah Muhammad and his son Warith concerning the ‘‘true’’ nature of Islam. Previously, Warith had secretly confided in Malcolm X about his misgivings, but he had no power to institute any of his convictions. Now that his father was dead, he had the freedom to move on his divergences and to deconstruct the ideological foundations of the Nation. Factions that had existed in the NOI prior to the death of Muhammad erupted, claiming that Imam Warith Deen Muhammed had strayed from the true teachings of his father, Elijah Muhammad. The result was the splintering of the movement in 1977 into three distinct and separate entities, each claiming the legacy of Elijah Muhammad. The three Nations of Islam would be led by Silias Muhammad, John Muhammad (son of Elijah Muhammad), and Louis Farrakhan. Clifton E. Marsh intimates that Farrakhan was excommunicated from Warith Deen Muhammed’s group in 1977.13 The NOI group led by Farrakhan would be the movement that most would associate with the NOI, since it seemed to be

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the largest and most well known, although scholars have been unable to quantify its membership. Then, too, Farrakhan continued to teach the racial consciousness and black economic uplift that had characterized Elijah Muhammad’s movement. Farrakhan’s NOI is one that has itself undergone an evolution. First, Farrakhan reinstituted the Fruit of Islam and the dress codes and continued to build the NOI economically. Second, since the 1990s, the NOI has engaged in active conversation with Arabs and others of the world Sunni community. In fact, Mohammar Khadafi, the Libyan president, reportedly offered as much as a billion dollars to Louis Farrakhan and the NOI to start an independent bank for African Americans, which outraged the U.S. government. Furthermore, Farrakhan has traveled the world, meeting with such Arab leaders as Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Likewise, trends since the 1980s have brought the NOI in conversation with other Muslim leaders globally. Perhaps more than anything else, the Million Man March of 1995 solidified Farrakhan’s place as a global figure and leader as he spoke of an ideal world community made up of people of all colors. But such movement toward the ideals of a world community and Sunni Islam has had other consequences. For instance, Farrakhan has had to downplay very skillfully the doctrines of Elijah Muhammad and Master Fard Muhammad, whose legacy he claims. He has had to reinterpret or eschew the notion that white people are the devil collectively or the idea that Elijah Muhammad and Fard Muhammad are in the mother ship, literally a UFO, preparing to judge the world in a cataclysmic and violent intervention that is meant to punish the devil for its treatment of African Americans. Moreover, women’s role in the NOI has become much more significant, evidenced by the fact that women are allowed to be temple ministers and members of the national leadership. While Farrakhan and the NOI have become more liberal and more global in perspective, this has not guaranteed that the movement would gain mainstream or mass appeal. Sensing Farrakhan’s liberal turn, the NOI under the leadership of Silis Muhammad and the United NOI of Kansas City, Missouri, led by Royall E. Jenkins, for instance, have taken a critical stance against Farrakhan, maintaining that he has distorted the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and that their movements represent a more pure adherence to his doctrine. To our understanding, Royall of the United NOI is said to be the re-embodiment of Master Fard Muhammad, and he and his followers consider him to be ‘‘Allah in Person,’’ a title that Elijah Muhammad bestowed upon Fard Muhammad after Fard’s ‘‘disappearance.’’ In other words, Royall is to the United NOI what Master Fard was to the NOI under Elijah Muhammad. Likewise, one of the more interesting groups is a small group of individuals who meet around the Coalition for the Remembrance of Elijah (C.R.O.E.) in Chicago. All of these Muslims continue to consider themselves disciples of Elijah Muhammad but have no allegiance to Farrakhan or any other NOI mosque. Led by Munir Muhammad, they hold periodic religious meetings at C.R.O.E. headquarters and perpetuate the legacy of

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Elijah Muhammad through television programs, videos, publications, and public education sessions, all of which they produce. C.R.O.E., Silis Muhammad’s NOI, and the United NOI are all offshoots of Elijah Muhammad’s NOI; however, they are separate entities from the NOI led by Farrakhan. On the other hand, at least two distinct movements broke away directly from Farrakhan’s NOI, namely, the Five Percent NOI, lead by Clarence 13X and the NOI of Baltimore, Maryland, headed by Emmanuel A. Muhammad. The direction the NOI will take under Louis Farrakhan seems uncertain. Nevertheless, four patterns seem apparent. First, the NOI is on the decline in terms of its membership. Second, the movement is acquiring features of ‘‘orthodox’’ Islam in terms of its rituals, like the practice of observing Ramadan and its shift toward the centrality and importance of the Five Pillars of Islam as a defining factor in what makes it ‘‘Islamic.’’ The Five Pillars of Islam are the core practices of Islam, namely, the shahada, or the confession of faith in Allah as the only God; the Salat, or the obligatory daily prayers; the Zakat, or monetary offerings to the poor; observing Ramadan, or the month of fasting that celebrates the ‘‘revelation’’ of the Qur’an; and the Hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca that every able-bodied Muslim is required to make once. The NOI has evidenced each of these apparently except the Hajj. Third, Farrakhan has somewhat relaxed the strongly moralistic interdictions of Elijah Muhammad, and, fourth, women continue to be more prominent in the movement. The last results perhaps from changes in the composition of NOI membership; it has proportionately more female and middle-class members than it did under Muhammad. Other factions of the NOI continue to exist, but with limited success in terms of membership and public recognition. It should be noted, however, that although this chapter describes developments in African American religion, many of the religious traditions of African Americans have been present in black culture for centuries. To that end, that numerous Africans sold into slavery in America were already Muslim has been well documented. The same has been argued regarding the Hebrews.

‘‘NEW’’ BLACK RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS As stated earlier, although the dominant religious institutions in the African American community are the black church and the Nation of Islam, African Americans have founded and been drawn to a host of sectarian movements. Many of these groups rely heavily on iconic use of biblical images and motifs such as Ethiopia, Egypt, Exodus, and the Promised Land.14 Surprising numbers of these groups would choose to build upon the African American identification with Israel by founding Jewish or Hebrew religions.15 Early expressions of this religious impulse would be associated with the likes of William Saunders Crowdy (1847–1908), founder of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, and Prophet (Rabbi) F.S. Cherry, founder of the Church of God in Philadelphia. Using the Exodus motif,

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Crowdy consolidated elements of Judaism and Christianity and then infused them with a black nationalism.16 Conversely, Cherry, relying solely on the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, taught that God and Christ were black, that African Americans were the descendants of Jacob, and that white Jews were the descendants of Esau.17 Contemporary ‘‘Jewish’’ groups include the Original Hebrew Nation, a sect that emerged in Chicago in the mid-1960s. Under the leadership of one of its elders, Ben Ammi Carter, several hundred members migrated to Liberia in 1968. After some two years, a remnant undertook a second migration to Israel. The group is now officially known as the Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem.18 In addition, the Nation of Yahweh, also called the Hebrew Israelites or the Followers of Yahweh, was founded in the 1970s by Yahweh ben Yahweh, who was born Hulon Mitchell, Jr. Yahweh ben Yahweh teaches that there is one God, whose name is Yahweh and who is black. As his adopted name would suggest, Yahweh ben Yahweh proclaims that he is the son of God, who has been sent to save and deliver the black people of America. Black people are considered to be the true lost tribe of Judah. Over the last several decades, there appears to be a move toward greater unity among African American Jewish and Hebrew communities in the form of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis. This organization has as its express mission the strengthening of relations among the rabbinic sects that bear the closest resemblance to conventional expressions of Judaism, the Karaites or ‘‘Torah Only’’ groups, and finally the Messianic communities, which believe that Jesus is the messiah and include the New Testament in their religious canon.19 Similar in genre to the Hebrew groups is the Pan-African Orthodox Church (PAOCC). The PAOCC in 1953 began as a socially and racially conscious, African American religious institution under the name, the Shrine of the Black Madonna. The first shrine, formally known as the Central Congregational Church, was founded in Detroit, Michigan, by the Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Jr. The second shrine was established in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1975. The Southwest region’s, and third shrine, was founded in Houston, Texas, in 1977. Finally, the fourth shrine, known as Beulah Land Farms in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, was founded in 1999. It was at their very first Pan-African Synod, that is, their national meeting, in Houston, Texas, in 1978 that the church adopted the name PanAfrican Orthodox Christian Churches after having been known for a short time as the Black Christian Nationalist Church. The name was taken from Marcus Garvey’s African Orthodox Church, affirming their belief that African peoples must have their own view of God. It was also at this gathering that Cleage was designated as the First Holy Patriarch and adopted the name Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman: Jaramogi meaning ‘‘leader of the people,’’ Abebe meaning ‘‘defender,’’ and Agyeman meaning ‘‘blessed man.’’ With the death of Agyeman in February 2000, the church called as its new Holy Patriarch Cardinal Demosthene Nelson, who adopted the name Jaramogi Menelik Kimathi.

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The principal tenets of the PAOCC revolve around black Christian nationalism that asserts that black people are the chosen people of God as revealed in the Old Testament in God’s dealing with the black nation Israel. Jesus, as the black messiah, was a revolutionary leader who came to free a black Israelite people from the oppression of white Gentiles. The PAOCC also claims that God continues to work with God’s people to help them find a way to freedom through building community and shunning individualism.

ADDITIONAL MOVEMENTS There are numerous other groups that could be mentioned that do not readily fit into any of the categories above. For example, there is the United Nation of Nuwaubian Moors. With roots in a drug-infested community in Brooklyn, this body has been led by the charismatic Dwight ‘‘Malachi’’ York for over three decades. His followers refer to him as Dr. York, Isa Muhammad, Baba, the Master Teacher, and the Savior. One of the more eclectic new black religious movements, York’s teachings integrate elements of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism with stories of extraterrestrial beings and ancient Egypt. In 1993, the group moved to a 476-acre farm near Eatonton in Putnam County, Georgia, where they constructed series of pyramids, obelisks, and statues. However, the last few years have been rough for Nuwaubians. On April 22, 2004, a federal judge sentenced York to 135 years in prison for racketeering and child molestation.20 Another group that defies neat categorization is the Ausar Auset Society. Founded in New York in 1973 by Ra Un Nefer Amen I (formerly Rogelio Straughn), it is an African-Kemetic-centered spiritual community with branches in twenty-four major cities in the United States, as well as in London, Toronto, Trinidad, and Bermuda. The members, initiates, students, and community participants study and implement spiritual practices ascribed to ancient Kemet (Egypt) and the Indus Kush (India), two ancient black civilizations. It is their belief that the Ausarian religious system is the world’s oldest, going back over five thousand years. The branches replicate the structural archetype established by Ra Un Nefer Amen I, Shekem Ur Shekem (‘‘king of kings’’) of the Ausar Auset Society in New York. There are kings (Ur Aua) and queen mothers (Ur-t Aua-t) who reign in other regions. The sacred text for the sect is the Metu Neter (divine word or God’s word), of which Ra Un Nefer Amen I is the author.21 The last several decades have seen a growth in Old and New World African religious traditions in the United States. With an increase of immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, African Americans had the opportunity to become familiar with a variety of nonindigenous religious traditions. Perhaps the most prominent of these are orisha-based traditions such as Vodun, Santeria, and Candomble, and Yoruba traditional religion/Ifa. This is not to say that there were no practitioners of these traditions earlier. As Anthony Pinn notes, persons from the Caribbean have been immigrating to the United States since the nineteenth century.

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Yet it was not until after 1950 that substantial numbers of immigrants began to arrive, some fifty thousand from Cuba alone prior to 1970, and Orisha worship became established in the United States.22 There are also those African Americans who exemplify a particularly modern religious posture and who identify themselves as religious humanists. Religious humanists reject theism and view religion as a human construct. This orientation has been given an intellectual presence through the work of scholars such as William R. Jones and Anthony B. Pinn, as well as symbolically with the election of William G. Sinkford as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association in 2001. In lieu of a transcendent imposition of norms, religious humanists emphasize human responsibility and creativity in the establishment of meaningful ways of being in the world as individuals and community. Additionally, the last several decades have seen a growth in African Americans who express an interest in Eastern spiritual traditions as well as traditions that have been characterized as New Age. More and more, African Americans are adopting traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, as well as practices such as meditation, astrology, numerology, and holistic medicine.

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF BLACK RELIGION First, contrary to the European roots of religious studies, African American religious studies has its most immediate roots in the history and development of African American studies based primarily in history and sociology. Second, those early studies were almost exclusively concerned with the black church. The classic texts include W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro Church (1903); Carter G. Woodson, The History of the Negro Church (1921); Benjamin Elijah Mays and Joseph William Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (1933); and E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (1963). Although Arthur Fauset’s work is not generally cited among the development of African American studies and the study of black religion, one should mention his Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (1944) at least parenthetically, since it was among the first anthropological studies of African American religion that sought to explicate religious movements beyond the black church. In the later twentieth century, however, the primary methodology shifted from sociological and historical to the theological, with the appearance of James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power (1969). Black theology received its classic expression in Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and many of his students continue to reiterate his basic theological formulations.23 The most obvious limitation of this approach is that black theology is not relevant to any African American religious movement other than those derived from the black church. Two additional critiques are noteworthy. The first comes from William R. Jones in his Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (1973).24 Jones maintains that the central doctrine in black theology, as in all theology, is theodicy, the apologetic attempt to justify the

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attributes of God, such as God’s beneficence and omnipotence, in the presence of evil and human suffering and to determine the causes of suffering. At the same time, Jones argues that black theology fails in its response to evil because in its response it basically ignores the most logical explanation, that of divine racism. In other words, the eschatological theodicy of black theology with its emphasis on the exaltation-liberation event known as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus in Christian theology is evidence of what God will do in the future of black people, that is to say, liberate them from suffering. Jones rejects this notion, suggesting that the only way to have a basis for determining what God will do in the future is based on what God has done in the past, and he argues that the events that have been interpreted as divine benevolence can just as easily be viewed as divine racism. One cannot demonstrate from history objective evidence that shows God’s benevolence and liberation from evil. One can find just as many, if not more, events that demonstrate the opposite. Anthony B. Pinn, in his book Why, Lord: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (1995), makes a similar critique of black theology, arguing that its responses to suffering in fact challenge the Christian God’s basic attributes, God’s goodness and omnipotence.25 Pinn suggests that the only way to avoid this pitfall is to be willing to bracket the existence of God. Only this method resolves the problems of theodicy for black theology. Even Jones, Pinn argues, tacitly maintains the goodness of God by attempting to develop a humanocentric theism that locates the cause of evil with human agency and so fails to resolve the problem. The second critique of black theology comes from womanist theology, which is in reality another form of black theology in which the subjects are African American women. In it, black women consider questions about God’s activity in their lives and the meaning of God for them. Womanist theology was inaugurated with the publication of Jacquelyn Grant’s White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989). The womanist critique argues that black theology is androcentric and sexist in its analysis of white theology and American culture. It focuses on the issue of racism and to a lesser extent on classism but fails to address sexism, including its own. Womanist theology claims to do theology from the ‘‘tridimensional experience’’ of racism, sexism, and classism.26 Moreover, womanist theology reports as a primary source the lives and voices of ordinary black women and thus offers a variation on black theology in its study of African American religion. On the other hand, some approaches to the study of black religion address critical and foundational issues. Some of the perennial questions addressed by African American religionists are concerned with the meaning of the term ‘‘African American or black religion.’’ They are interested in other crucial questions as well. For instance, what is the nature of black religion? Is there something unique or distinctive about black religion that distinguishes it from other expressions and manifestations of religion? The answers to such questions, however, are determined to a large extent by the theories and methodologies employed by the diverse domains of inquiry in

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the field. In addition to the black and womanist theologians and ethicists, scholars associated with other academic discourses have brought forward a myriad of perspectives in an effort to explain more fully, describe, interpret, and understand the phenomena of African American religion. The first theoretical and methodological approach to be considered is that associated with the field history of religions. In the decades following the civil rights era, the chief African American religionist associated with this field has been Charles H. Long. As a historian of religion, Long understands religion as orientation in the ultimate sense, particularly regarding one’s place in the world.27 Moreover, religion is understood as the fundamental element in the constitution of human consciousness and human community. Long maintains that African Americans, as people who have been oppressed, possess a religious consciousness that offers something unique with respect to what it means to be human. With such an understanding, Long is an advocate for the study of religion as essentially a hermeneutical or interpretative discipline. Second, as a subfield of religious studies, philosophy of religion can be broken down still further into divisions corresponding to the areas of philosophy on which they depend. Thus, continental philosophers of religion traditionally make use of methods such as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, Marxism, and structuralism. Today, this category is often associated with those approaches characterized as postmodern: poststructuralism, deconstruction, post-colonial theory, and critical theory. African American scholars associated with this tradition would include William R. Jones, whose work was noted above and who draws on the thought of Jean Paul Sartre to challenge black theology’s assumption of a benevolent deity, and Theophus Smith, whose interdisciplinary study of religion employs a hermeneutical analysis informed by Paul Ricoeur as well as an understanding of religion influenced by the work of Rene Girard.28 A third tradition that has seen much growth in the last several decades is philosophy of religion influenced by American pragmatism. Scholars such as Cornel West, Victor Anderson, and Eddie Glaude represent individuals whose study of religion is strongly informed by the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as neo-pragmatist philosophers such as Richard Rorty.29 As the name would suggest, these scholars approach the study of religion in terms of how it is used as opposed to strictly the conceptual content, or ideas to which persons profess allegiance. Pragmatist theories of religion tend to be functional instead of substantive in orientation. Fourth, in recent decades, a growing number of African American scholars have been influenced by the philosophical tradition of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne known as process philosophy or neoclassical metaphysics. Such scholars, including Theodore Walker, Jr., find the ideas of ultimate reality understood in terms of becoming, unfolding, and growth coherent with the African American experience of struggle in pursuit of liberation and freedom.30 Last, given the dominant presence of Christianity in the African American community, one would be derelict in omitting the work of African American

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intellectuals engaged in biblical studies. Such scholars have employed the tools of this discipline such as form, rhetorical, source, and historical criticism in their study of texts to uncover various relationships between the textual tradition and African peoples from antiquity to the modern context. Indeed, biblical scholarship into the early twenty-first century has called attention to the African presence in the Bible as well as exploring the use and function of the Bible by African Americans. Scholars of note in this area include Cain Hope Felder, Vincent Wimbush, Brian Blount, Clarice Martin, Randall Bailey, Stephen Breck Reid, and Renita Weems.31

FUTURE DIRECTIONS African American religion is broad and complex. It comprises multiple and diverse religious traditions, linked together by a search for meaning and more life fullness, made necessary by the terrors of slavery, a history of oppression that is characterized by attacks on black bodies, racism, classism, and sexism. Historically, African Americans have developed and chosen numerous religious expressions in order to organize and make sense of the resulting absurdities of life. As a result, the black religious terrain is comprised of Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Hebrews, Spiritualists, Humanists, Africentrists, and more. Although their truth claims often conflict, they have much in common. In a fabulous and wonderfully complicated way, they all make up the rich and yet under-explored fabric of black religious culture in America. It is true that the majority of the studies and discussions of black religion still focus on some aspect of the black church and more recently on the Nation of Islam and many of its related movements. And those expose´s, documentaries, essays, and reports are valuable in terms of the knowledge that they make available to us. Notwithstanding, it is our hope and push that the richness of diversity that is African American religion gains more recognition in American culture and the academy. Given that many of the religious traditions have roots in American and African cultures that are centuries old, it will be fascinating to explore what they might reveal about the history of America and the attempts of people to make sense out of changing historical, political, and cultural contexts. Appropriately, approaches to the study of African American religion in the post–civil rights era reflect the polyvocality that is inherent in black religion. As American colleges and universities continue to recognize the importance of African American religion, the study of religion will necessarily reflect the diversity and orientations of various departments and disciplines. Traditionally studied from sociology, history, and theology, it can benefit from the insights and methods of other forms of inquiry such as psychological, philosophical, and other creative and complex methods of interpretation. At the same time, the study of black religion can transcend the narrowness of parochial interests of area studies and find depth and richness in interdisciplinary approaches. Furthermore, black religion will need new conversation partners. Often omitted from the curricula of Africana studies and African American studies programs, despite its apparent

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centrality to African American life and culture, black religious studies must show its relevance to obvious partners and develop new and creative relationships with departments such as art and art history. This will keep black religious studies fresh and innovative. In the end, the study of black religion will have to keep in step with changes in African American religion, indeed with American culture and world cultures. As old identities are deconstructed and new identities are forged, religion will ask new questions or variations of existing ones. Therefore, since the world is becoming more global, the questions will be modified. The central question of African American religion regarding what it means to be black and religious may have to shift to accommodate changing historical realities like globalization. Instead, it may become ‘‘What does it mean to be black and religious in a global community?’’ African American religion may also have to be dichotomous, being able to speak to the pressing needs of American life and at the same time giving meaning to new global realities. Finally, African American religion will reflect the tension of managing the tendency in religion to resist change while simultaneously participating in a changing world. Reevaluations of evolving social locations will be critical. Critical, too, will be the responses to important questions that arise from these changing dynamics. For instance, what happens to movements that were started in response to poor or working-class challenges when many of their members move into the middle-classes? How does globalization change racism and questions of race? How will black religion respond to insights regarding sexuality and gender that might be gained from new developments in the sciences and humanities? How will developments in technology affect our understanding of what is ultimate? African American religion will have to wrestle with these and other issues if it is to remain viable in the lives of its constituents.

NOTES Stephen Finley wishes to acknowledge the help and support of his wife, Dr. Rachel Elisabeth Finley, advisors Elias K. Bongmba and Anthony B. Pinn, and members of the Theta Chi chapter of Omega Psi Phi. Torin Alexander wishes to acknowledge his wife, Charvonne Alexander, and Anthony B. Pinn. 1. Anthony B. Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002), 173. 2. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 1. 3. Joseph R. Washington, Jr., ‘‘How Black Is Black Religion,’’ in Quest for a Black Theology, ed. James J. Gardiner and J. Deotis Roberts, Sr. (Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1971), 28. 4. Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans, 3rd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 163–95.

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5. According to data from the National Council of Churches, such losses have been between 0.05 percent and 1.5 percent annually. See Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2004). 6. Mark Niesse, ‘‘Black Pastors Rally Against Gay Marriage,’’ Associated Press, March 23, 2004, available through Lexis Nexis. 7. Lincoln and Mamiya, 285, 286. 8. Ibid., 288. See also Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (1944; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), chap. 2. 9. Lincoln and Mamiya, 298. 10. Delores Causion Carpenter, ‘‘The Effects of Sect-Typeness Upon the Professionalization of Black Female Masters of Divinity Graduates, 1972–1984’’ (Ed.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1986), 136. See also Lincoln and Mamiya, 298. 11. Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 71–72. 12. Clifton E. Marsh, The Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000), 101. 13. Ibid., 107. 14. Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 130, and Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 153. 15. Use of the term ‘‘black’’ here is actually redundant, since the Hebrews believe that the biblical Hebrews were black and that they have a literal, physical relationship to them. They reserve the term ‘‘Jewish’’ for white European Jews, who are not the original people of Judaism, but instead are converts. We use the term ‘‘black’’ here only for clarification. We should note, however, that some African Americans do consider themselves Jewish. 16. As in the case of certain Old Testament prophets, Crowdy would attest to having a vision in which the angel of the Lord presented him with a Bible such that the Holy Scriptures were then a part of his very being. See Hans Baer, ‘‘The Role of the Bible and Other Sacred Texts in African American Denominations and Sects: Historical and Social Scientific Observations,’’ in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Text and Social Texture, ed. Vincent L. Winbush (New York: Continuum, 2000), 95. 17. Ibid., 96. 18. The group made headlines when singers Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown made a trip to the community’s center in Dimona, located in southern Israel’s Negev desert. The group got more media attention in the summer of 2005 when the Israeli government, after more than thirty years, agreed to grant permanent residency to members of the group. Residency, which carries the right to vote in municipal elections and volunteer for military service, is the first step to becoming an Israeli citizen. 19. For further information about these movements, see http://www.blackjews. org/. There is also a great deal more about this phenomenon in the African American community that is worthy of analysis and further study. 20. Bill Tropy, ‘‘Judge Throws Book at Cultist: 135 Years in Prison Ordered,’’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 23, 2004, Metro Edition. 21. Regina Jennings, ‘‘Ausar Auset Society,’’ in Encyclopedia of Black Studies, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 104–5.

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22. Anthony B. Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1998), 78. 23. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury, 1969), and idem, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1970). 24. William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1973). 25. Anthony B. Pinn, Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1999). 26. Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Critique and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 209. 27. See, for example, Long, Significations. 28. See the previously cited works for Jones, Is God a White Racist? and Smith, Conjuring Culture. 29. See, for example, Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982); idem, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blacknets (New York: Continuum, 1999); and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 30. See, for example, Theodore Walker, Jr., Mothering Connections: A Black Neoclassical Metaphysics and Black Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). 31. Cain Hope Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1991), includes essays from each of these biblical scholars.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Chireau, Yvonne, and Nathaniel Deutsch, eds. Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cleage, Albert B., Jr. Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Black Church. Detroit, MI: Luxor Publishers of the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, 1987. Fulop, Timothy E., and Albert J. Raboteau, eds. African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture. New York & London: Routledge, 1997. Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Pinn, Anthony B. The African American Religious Experience in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. Pinn, Anthony B. The Black Church in the Post–Civil Rights Era. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002. Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African-American Experience. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Wilmore, Gayraud S. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African American. 3rd ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998.

CHAPTER 12

New and Alternative American Religions: Changes, Issues, and Trends Sean McCloud

T

he chapters in this volume attest to dramatic transformations in American religion over the last several decades. New religions and alternative spiritualities in the United States have been part of these changes. At the same time, blanket generalizations about the subject are impossible. The period from the late 1970s to the present witnessed the tragedies of the Jonestown mass suicide, the Branch Davidian/ATF conflagration, and the Heaven’s Gate suicides. In part, the period from 1978–2005 could be narrated through a series of so-called ‘‘cult controversies’’ in which a loosely organized anti-cult movement charged certain new religions with brainwashing and fought to impose legal restrictions on them. But at the same time, the period saw the significant expansion and growing acceptance of new religions like Mormonism and Neopaganism, as well as a decline in anti-cult activities. The last quarter century or so also signaled a shift in the types of American new religions attracting members, moving from totalistic communal organizations to loosely organized movements with permeable group boundaries. This style of alternative religion, exemplified in the activities often subsumed under the vague category ‘‘New Age,’’ follows a larger trend of combinative, ‘‘pick-and-mix’’ spirituality seen across the contemporary American religious spectrum. In this chapter, I present an historical overview of new religious movements in American history, focus on developments in the last several decades, and discuss current issues and trends. I argue several claims. First, I suggest that new and alternative religions are a constant in American history and have been marked by several heightened periods of growth and public attention. Second, I argue that the last three decades have witnessed not only the explosion and cessation of public controversies concerning new religions, but also significant changes pertaining to what

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kinds of new religions are gaining members and acceptance in the United States.

MATTERS OF DEFINITION Definition must be the first task in any discussion of new and alternative religions. For the purposes of this chapter, a ‘‘new religious movement’’ is a group that has been founded in the last three hundred years and offers something new that differentiates it from pre-existing religious traditions. The new religion may—and historically often does—derive many of its beliefs and practices from an established movement. At the same time, it offers a new religious prophet, sacred text, or set of rituals and beliefs that causes it to depart significantly from other religions. For example, Mormonism, officially named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is based in Christianity and uses both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Many Mormon beliefs and practices resemble those of theologically conservative American Protestantism. At the same time, it is not a branch of Christianity but a new religion because it offers a new prophet (Joseph Smith, Jr.), new sacred texts (The Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, etc.), and various new beliefs and practices.1 Using this definition, all religions start as new religious movements. Christianity, for example, was once a new religion emerging from Judaism, Islam a new religion with Jewish and Christian sources, and Buddhism a new religion coming out of popular and elite Indian religious traditions. Unlike most new religions, however, these movements did not disappear, but grew to be the three largest world religions today. Historically, the phrase ‘‘new religious movement’’ has replaced ‘‘cult’’ as the preferred scholarly term for new religions. Stemming from the Latin term ‘‘cultus,’’ meaning an organized system of worship, the term cult is at once sociological, theological, and popular parlance. Sociologically, it refers to a small, unstable group often focused around one or a set of charismatic leaders. The organization is often weak and the group usually does not last long. The term is part of a church, sect, and cult classification system that focuses on institutional structures and tensions with the environing culture. An example of the sociological meaning of cult can be seen in the writings of J. Milton Yinger, particularly Religion, Society, and the Individual (1957).2 Theologically, cult has historically been a term twentieth- and twentyfirst-century evangelical Protestants used to distinguish ‘‘true’’ Christians from ‘‘false’’ ones. In his 1962 book, Cults and Isms, Russell Spittler gave the classic evangelical definition of the term when he wrote that a cult ‘‘is any group that claims to be Christian but falls short of an evangelical definition of Christianity.’’3 Perennial favorites in evangelical cult books included the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, but liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics also sometimes appeared. In terms of popular usage, cult has lost any original sociological meaning and now brings to mind charges of brainwashing, coercion, deception, and abuse. Beginning in the early 1970s and growing in the latter part of

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the decade and through the 1980s, the image of a cult as a volatile, dangerous group of fanatics dominated American media and popular culture. Elsewhere I have argued that for many Americans, these associations were and still are so taken for granted that they have become doxa, those socially constructed opinions, assumptions, and inclinations so ingrained they appear commonsense and natural.4 Because of the negative associations ‘‘cult’’ now holds for many Americans, scholars use ‘‘new religious movement’’ or ‘‘alternative religion’’ as value-free terms to describe particular new movements.5

NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY: A BRIEF OVERVIEW, 1800–1977 New religious movements have been a constant in U.S. history. At the same time, periods of particular interest and ferment have occurred. Historian Jon Butler has called the first period, stretching through the first half of the nineteenth century, the ‘‘Antebellum Spiritual Hothouse.’’6 Concurrent with the Second Great Awakening and respondent to the new nation’s free exercise and disestablishment policies concerning religion, these decades saw the birth and growth of a number of new religious movements, as well as the appearance of evangelical Protestantism. Much of the action in the period occurred in western New York State, which became known as the ‘‘Burned-Over District’’ because of its propensity to be set ablaze by the fires of revivalism. Mormonism, Spiritualism, and the Oneida Community were all born in the Burned-Over District. Other new religions such as the Shakers, officially the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, had been founded decades earlier, but gained members in the antebellum Burned-Over District. Even this early period reflects the diversity in styles of new religious movements that still exists today. Some groups, such as the Shakers and Oneidans, were communal and totalistic. Others, such as Spiritualism, were more loosely organized movements that occurred both within and without religious institutions. The second period, from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the end of the nineteenth century, saw a rise in a number of occult, new thought, and harmonial religious movements. In brief, ‘‘new thought’’ and the more general term ‘‘harmonial religions’’ are names given to belief systems that stress God’s immanence within individuals, coupled with the notion that bad things like illness, violence, poverty, and even death result from negative thinking that separates humans from the spark of divine within them.7 ‘‘Occult’’ refers generally to matters that are hidden in some way from everyday perception.8 In this respect, certain information and knowledge, powers, and groups can fall under the occult rubric. Starting in the 1860s, numerous groups that fell under either or both the new thought and occult framework formed, including American Rosicrucianism, Christian Science, Unity, Theosophy, and the Order of the Golden Dawn. In addition to these movements, December 1890 witnessed a tragic latenineteenth-century ‘‘cult controversy’’: the massacre of Wounded Knee. The Ghost Dance was a pan–Native American new religious movement that

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combined native and Christian rituals, symbols, and beliefs with an endtime prophecy. Participants believed that the world as known was about to end and that those taking up the Ghost Dance movement’s rituals and lifestyle would survive the apocalypse and see a new paradisiacal era ensue. In December 1890, federal soldiers who were attempting to stop the movement among the Lakota Sioux Ghost killed over two hundred Ghost Dancers. The period from the 1910s to the 1940s was marked by the birth of a number of predominantly African American new religions. These groups appeared in the context of the migration of African Americans out of the rural Jim Crow South and into urban industrial Northern cities. Flanked by World War I and World War II, the period of the Great Migration and Great Depression was marked by ‘‘tribalisms’’ that came in the form of heightened racial, class, ethnic, and religious conflicts. This was the period in which the religious, white supremacist Ku Klux Klan reached its numerical height, Henry Ford published anti-Semitic literature, and the Scopes trial popularly dramatized divisions between theologically liberal and conservative Protestants.9 Given the time period, many African American new religions were forced to address the issues of race and fell into one of two categories. The first, integrationist new religions, theologically downplayed the importance of race and welcomed all into the fold. Examples of such movements include Sweet Daddy Grace’s United House of Prayer for All People and Father Divine’s new thought-inspired Peace Mission Movement, which explicitly argued that race was a falsity produced by negative thinking. The second style of African American new religion was nationalistic, meaning that the religious messages of such movements were meant exclusively for people of color and encouraged racial separatism. While Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple, founded in 1913, is an early example, the most well-known group is the Nation of Islam, founded in 1930 in Detroit. The ‘‘Black Muslims,’’ as the media called them, preached a racialized theology of black divinity and white diabolicism. In practice and belief, the Nation combined elements of Islam and Christianity with the new teachings and practices of founder W.D. Fard and later leader Elijah Muhammad. Following World War II, the United States saw a religious revival that entailed increases in church affiliation, church construction, and religious tithing. Polling from the 1940s through the 1990s showed that belief in God or a universal spirit was at an all-time high in the mid-1950s at 99 percent.10 New religions of the 1950s included occult movements devoted to messages that founders had received from UFOs, such as the Aetherius Society and the Christ Brotherhood Incorporated. The decade also witnessed the early stirrings of groups that would later become wellknown, such as Scientology and the Unification Church. While the 1950s was a decade in which some new religions flourished, the period from 1965–1977 saw more public and media attention given to them for at least four reasons. First, in 1965 the Johnson administration lifted the Oriental Exclusion Act, an anti-immigration law from the 1920s that had severely curbed East

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and South Asians from entering the United States. Coinciding with this was the appearance and/or growth of Asian-based new religions such as the Hare Krishnas (officially known as ISKCON, standing for the International Society of Krishna Consciousness), Divine Light Mission, Transcendental Meditation, Nichiren Shoshu, and the aforementioned Unification Church. Second, the youthful Jesus Movement, sometimes referred to as ‘‘Jesus Freaks,’’ appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an evangelical Protestant version of the larger youth counterculture. One of the earliest Jesus movement groups, the Children of God, was a semi-nomadic, communal troupe founded by prophetic leader David ‘‘Moses’’ Berg. Early members traveled throughout America, criticizing institutional Christianity and American capitalism through street preaching and occasional church service disruptions. By the mid-1970s, the group became even more controversial with the introduction of free love and ‘‘flirty fishing,’’ a form of missionizing in which women in the group witnessed to unconverted men through sex. Along with free love among members, investigations and admissions later revealed that some in the group had even engaged in illegal sexual activities with minors in the commune. As the decade progressed, the Children of God, later renamed the Family, would be one of several movements viewed by some as a dangerous ‘‘cult.’’11 A third factor in the growing interest given to new religions from 1965– 1977 was the heightened commercial and media attention given to the occult and occult movements. Movies such as Rosemary’s Baby, television shows such as Dark Shadows, mass market books such as John Godwin’s Occult America, and even popular board games like Parker Brothers’ Ouija made the occult a visible part of American popular culture. In California, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan attracted celebrities like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Jayne Mansfield. It also received media attention from the reporters of Time, Newsweek, and other venues. Likewise, Neopagan witches appeared in the press at the same time as the new religion was becoming more prominent in the United States. Journalists depicted what they viewed as an ‘‘occult revival’’ with a contradictory mixture of exoticism, banality, and danger—at times with language hinting toward the ‘‘cult menace stories’’ that would appear frequently by the end of the 1970s.12 The fourth element, the one most crucial to the cult controversies of the late 1970s and beyond, was the development of grass roots organizations of parents, pastors, psychiatrists, and ‘‘deprogrammers’’ that opposed and lobbied against new religions. The first of these groups, founded by William Rambur in 1971, was FREECOG, short for ‘‘Parents Committee to Free Our Sons and Daughters from the Children of God.’’ It was this group, and others like it, that fomented the brainwashing accusations that came to be iconic in popular media coverage of new religions. By the mid1970s, charges of brainwashing, deception, fraud, and various other improprieties appeared in most stories about communal groups like the Unification Church, Children of God, and Hare Krishnas. By the late 1970s, the associations between such negative things and ‘‘cults’’ in general had become unquestioned truths for many Americans.13

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NEW AND ALTERNATIVE RELIGIONS, 1978–2005: CHANGES AND DEVELOPMENTS Two print media reports, one from 1978 and the other from 2004, represent the broad spectrum of events and attitudes concerning new and alternative religions in the last several years. On December 4, 1978, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report published nearly identical stories on the mass suicide of 918 members of the Peoples Temple, an American group living communally in the jungles of Guyana. Both Time and Newsweek featured now iconic images of the dead and titled their covers ‘‘Cult of Death.’’ Inside, all three magazines suggested that leader Jim Jones brainwashed his followers into committing suicide. U.S. News aptly summed up what one scholar has called the ‘‘cult menace’’ motif dominating late 1970s and 1980s mass media, writing that ‘‘in the end, only a cult’s bizarre regimen of fear, violence, and unthinking devotion’’ could explain the tragedy.14 The second report, appearing on the Religion Newswriters’ Association’s ‘‘Tips’’ Web page for journalists on October 11, 2004, was titled ‘‘Wicca Moves into the Mainstream.’’ The report described how Wicca, the largest branch of Neopaganism, had grown dramatically since the 1960s, and offered reporters a number of practitioners, academics, and other contacts.15 While the ‘‘mainstreaming’’ of Wicca and Neopaganism suggested in the article might have been uneven in different regions of the country, the story was certainly supported in the marketplace of American popular culture, where positive images of Wiccans were appearing on the shelves of chain bookstores, in movies, and in children’s shows such as Cartoon Network’s New Scooby Doo and Disney’s W.I.T.C.H. series. Together, these media stories suggest the highly varied and occasionally contradictory images of new and alternative religious movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Because the umbrella term ‘‘new religion’’ features radically different groups tied together only by their newness, this should not be surprising. Mormons, Neopagans, Peoples Temple members, Branch Davidians, and New Agers might all fall into the new religion classification, but this does not point to shared theology, practice, organization, or demographics. Nor does it suggest the size, growth, or decline of the movements. Simply put, some new religions have grown, while others have virtually disappeared since the 1970s. Many groups that gained popular attention in the 1970s, such as the Divine Light Mission, have declined markedly in active membership. On the other hand, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), once a new religion that the nineteenth-century U.S. government sent soldiers to fight against, is now the fourth largest religious body in the United States, with more than 5 million members.16 The period since 1978 witnessed several important changes and trends, two of which I will focus on. The first entails the explosion and decline of public and legal battles best described as ‘‘cult controversies.’’ The events fomenting this include the tragedies of Jonestown and Waco, the gradual decline of anti-cult movements, and organizational changes occurring within

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some of the new religions that received negative attention in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly ISKCON and the Unification Church. Second, there has been a shift in the kinds of new religions attracting Americans. Specifically, totalistic, communal, new religions have declined, while more loosely organized, theologically and ritually eclectic movements such as Neopaganism and the wealth of practices placed under the ‘‘New Age’’ umbrella have grown. Why this might be and how it coincides with larger trends in U.S. religion will be the focus of the last section of this chapter.

MAKING AND UN-MAKING THE CULT MENACE By the mid-1970s, communal new religions such as the Children of God, Unification Church, and ISKCON appeared in mass media reports as dangerous, brainwashing cultists. While the three groups were totalistic in orientation, similarities ended there. As noted above, the Children of God was a new religion formed out of the evangelical Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement veered from being a sect to being a new religion because of the new practices, prophecies, and revelations of its founder, David ‘‘Moses’’ Berg. The Unification Church was a new religion that combined Christianity with the revelations and biblical interpretations of founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon. First formed in Korea in 1954, the movement was known for aggressive proselytizing, regimented communal living, large group weddings, and a new sacred text, the Divine Principle. Many members came to believe Moon was the second coming of Christ, a speculation he confirmed by declaring himself the Messiah in 1992.17 The International Society of Krishna Consciousness, known popularly as Hare Krishnas because of their chanting, was founded in the United States by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada in 1966, but holds a theology and lineage stretching back to sixteenth-century Hindu devotionalism to the God Krishna. It must be noted, then, that its roots in Hinduism suggest that it is not a new religion, despite popular conceptions that it is. What was new was its appearance in the United States, where devotees lived communally in ashrams and missionized on city streets and other public places.18 These three movements, as well as others, gained the negative attention of anti-cult activists, cult ‘‘deprogrammers,’’ and popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest and McCall’s.19 But not until the mass suicide of 918 Peoples Temple members in the jungles of Guyana in 1978 did the new religions in general became synonymous with the ‘‘cult menace.’’ The Peoples Temple was founded by James Warren Jones in Indiana in 1956.20 In 1960 the racially diverse group formally affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination. Jones’s ministry featured interracial worship, civil rights, faith healing, and sharp criticism of American capitalism. A white Hoosier whose father was a Klansman, Jones began referring to himself as black, explicitly associating racial minority status with anyone oppressed by the American capitalist system. In the mid-1960s, Jones moved his congregation from Indiana to California, a place which he believed would be safer in the event of nuclear war. By the

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1970s, his church had between 5,000 and 7,000 members, and between 1975 and 1977, Jones won two humanitarian awards for his work on social justice and civil rights issues. During the mid-1970s Jones created a farming commune in the South American jungles of Guyana, a place where Peoples Temple members could practice Jones’s religio-political liberation theology, ‘‘Divine Socialism.’’ The first members of the church arrived in what would be called ‘‘Jonestown’’ in 1975. Jones moved there in 1977. While many commune members initially seemed happy, Jonestown became the cult menace story that confirmed the media’s and anti-cult movement’s worst stereotypes. Jones performed fake miracle healings, regularly slept with female members, and had dissidents to the cause of Divine Socialism confined and drugged.21 Pushed by concerns of some church members’ relatives, Congressman Leo Ryan conducted a fact-finding visit to Jonestown. After an apparently positive visit, on the way back to the airport Ryan and his entourage were ambushed and murdered by Peoples Temple assassins. Convinced that the American military would respond by attacking the commune, Jones and his assistants called for a ‘‘white night.’’ This was the name given to the commune’s recurring ‘‘revolutionary suicide’’ drills, in which members would gather and drink Kool-Aid potentially laced with poison. On the night of November 18, 1978, however, it wasn’t a drill. While Jones preached, most members killed themselves by drinking poison. A few shot themselves or their comrades with guns. The children were the first to die, with those too young to drink from a cup injected with syringes. As the 1980s progressed, numerous controversies involving new religions ensued, including Reverend Moon’s 1981 conviction on tax evasion; the mid-1980s controversies surrounding Bhagwan Shree Rajnessh’s Rajneeshpuram in Oregon; a steady stream of anti-cult literature, lobbying, and court cases; and late 1980s attention to an underground Satanic, child-sacrificing cult that, by all accounts, didn’t even exist.22 But it wasn’t until 1993 that a new religion and its violent demise garnered unprecedented national attention. For fifty-one days, from February 28 to April 19, Americans received television and print media coverage of a standoff between the Branch Davidians and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). The incident began when the ATF raided the group’s commune outside Waco, Texas, under suspicion that the Davidians were stockpiling illegal guns. The ATF’s dramatic armed assault on the large housing compound was met with gunfire. By the end of the first day casualties had been suffered on both sides and a large media contingent surrounded the scene. The standoff ended on April 19, when after multiple hours of an ATF tank gas assault on the commune, the large structure went up in flames with eighty-six men, women, and children dying inside. To this day, there is no conclusive evidence of how the fire started. The government and anti-cultists suggested that this was another Jonestownstyle mass suicide. The few survivors who made it out of the burning commune denied any such action on their part. Indeed, much mystery and

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ambiguity surrounded the Waco tragedy. The Branch Davidians were a millennialist movement that broke away from the Seventh-Day Adventists in 1929. By the time of the standoff, the movement was led by David Koresh, formerly Vernon Howell, who was seen by many members as a prophet. Specifically, many Davidians thought Koresh possessed a Godgiven ability allowing him to correctly interpret the Seven Seals referred to in the biblical book of Revelation. While millennialism is a belief held by a number of Christian groups, the Branch Davidians were a new religion that offered a new prophet in Koresh. They also enacted new practices, including polygamist spiritual marriages between Koresh and females in the commune that effectively voided all other marriages among members and included girls as young as fourteen. And Davidian theology, while similar to Seventh-Day Adventist and evangelical premillennialist interest in the end-times, was unique in envisioning the commune as God’s chosen people who would prevail against Satan’s minions in the battle of Armageddon. In the post-apocalyptic, Christ-triumphant world, the Branch Davidians would repopulate the earth with Koresh’s progeny.23 Similar to Jonestown, the Branch Davidian/ATF tragedy had the immediate effect of giving anti-cult groups such as the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) and its representatives like Rick Ross public voice through mass media outlets. But by mid-May, only a month later, the Waco incident had virtually disappeared from the airwaves and newsstands. When it returned in a few summer and fall follow-ups, the journalistic frame had changed. Instead of telling the all-too-familiar story of a maniacal cult leader who had brainwashed his followers and led them to death, the new stories suggested government culpability for the standoff’s violent ending. Instead of featuring anti-cultists telling readers what ‘‘cults’’ do, magazines such as Newsweek turned to religious studies scholars for commentary.24 At least in terms of media coverage, the Waco incident may be seen as the peak of what was after the gradually declining influence of the anticult movement. Although the tragic demise of the Waco Branch Davidians could not— despite popular misconceptions—be seen as another Jonestown mass suicide, the period since has witnessed a new religion’s self-imposed termination within U.S. borders. In the spring of 1997, members of Heaven’s Gate saw the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet as a sign to ‘‘exit’’ their physical bodies through group suicide. On March 28, founder Marshall Appelwhite and thirty-eight others—all dressed in black sweat suits and Nike sports shoes—used drugs and plastic bags to leave the material plane of existence with hopes of moving to a spiritual, nonphysical, state of being. The small movement had been around in various forms since the 1970s, mixing elements of Gnostic-style dualism, ufology, science fiction, and Appelwhite’s revelations and teachings. While the Branch Davidian/ ATF standoff was covered by twenty-four-hour news television stations, the medium featured in the Heaven’s Gate incident was the Internet. After initial television reports of the mass suicide, thousands of Americans flocked to the group’s elaborate Web site. In addition, the movement’s source of income came from designing Web sites for businesses.25

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Jonestown, Waco, and Heaven’s Gate represent tragedies that took peoples’ lives and offered fodder for anti-cultists who generalized from the negative activities and consequences of a handful of groups to condemn new religious movements in general. The popular image of the ‘‘cult menace’’ has declined in the last decade, however, for at least two primary reasons. First, groups that initially fomented and sustained anti-cult movements in the 1970s and 1980s made changes during the period that made them less controversial to some (but of course, in such a diverse society, not all) outsiders. New religions scholar Laurence Foster has argued that groups which depart significantly from a society’s predominant religious, social, and political values are more likely to be labeled dangerously deviant.26 Conversely, when groups with unusual living arrangements, sexual mores, political views, and religious beliefs change to conform more with their environing culture, negative attention may partly subside. ISKCON, for example, closed their ashram boarding schools in response to the well-documented cases of child abuse occurring within them in the 1970s and 1980s. Additionally, since the mid-1980s, the movement has changed from a communal, totalistic, monastic-style organization to one in which nuclear family structures dominate.27 The Children of God, renamed the Family, abolished flirty fishing in 1987, as well as making other changes. Likewise, the Unification Church, one-time poster child of the anti-cult movement, has also changed in recent decades, including moves to become a player in right-wing American politics. In the late 1980s the church stepped up interfaith dialogue and activities. They opened their mass weddings to people of any faith who wanted to participate. In addition to these changes, the Moon-owned News World Communications owns several prominent media outlets, including the Washington Times and the United Press International News Service. Through these media, Moon and the Unification Church have, like Rupert Murdoch, provided voice to right-of-center political interests. In March 2004, some politicians even unintentionally brought shortlived controversy back to Moon when journalists discovered that some members of Congress had held a coronation ceremony for Moon in a Senate office building.28 Perhaps more important to the waning of ‘‘cult controversies’’ than changes implemented by some new religions has been the marked decline in the influence of the American anti-cult movement (ACM). Two specific issues are crucial to this shift. First, the 1980s and 1990s saw the movement’s main charge against new religions—brainwashing—fail repeatedly in court cases, giving the ACM little hope of attacking new religions through the legal means. Second, in 1996 the ACM lost its primary organization, the Cult Awareness Network, when it was sued by a Pentecostal who had been forcibly deprogrammed by individuals affiliated with the organization. Jason Scott, an adult member of the Life Tabernacle Church, was legally represented in court by a Church of Scientology attorney. CAN lost the case, was bankrupted by the judgment, and had its assets taken away. At one point, CAN’s Web site was even maintained by a group it formerly attacked: Scientologists. The disappearance of CAN left the anti-cult movement without its primary media organ.29

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THE GROWTH OF NEOPAGANISM AND NEW AGE SPIRITUALITIES Concurrent with the peak and subsequent waning of cult controversies in recent years, there has been growing participation in and public prominence of certain new religions and alternative spiritualities. In addition to Mormonism, which has been expanding since its inception, Neopagan and New Age groups, activities, and beliefs have seen increased interest and attention. Different in some significant ways, both Neopaganism and the activities placed under the New Age classification are loosely organized, theologically and ritually eclectic movements that offer a contrast to the communal, totalistic new religions of the 1970s and 1980s and that can be seen as representative of larger trends in contemporary American religion.30 Neopaganism is an occult religious movement composed of many loosely connected groups and individuals who look to nature-oriented, often polytheistic religions for inspiration. In breaking this definition down into three components, it must first be noted that Neopaganism is occult in that it concerns itself with matters that are hidden in some way from ordinary, everyday understanding. Neopagans may have secret groups, teachings, and rituals that are kept from the uninitiated. Some practitioners may also believe in occult powers that individuals can tap into through ritual practice and magical training. Second, Neopaganism is not a single, hierarchical organization. There are few churches of Neopaganism, let alone any elaborate national institutional structure. Instead, there are groups and solitary practitioners across the United States who may or may not communicate with other practitioners through the Internet or at local, regional, or national festivals. Third, most Neopagans look to non-Christian, nature-oriented religions for inspiration. Many Neopagans celebrate natural events like moon stages, equinoxes, solstices, and other seasonal events. Many also see the earth and nature as a feminine divine, the Goddess. Some Neopagans also look to ancient Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, Norse, Native American, African, Asian, and other traditions for inspiration. Although adherent numbers are hard to come by for a new religion that eschews institutions, the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) conducted by Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar suggests that Neopaganism may be one of the fastest-growing new religions—most likely the fastest—in the United States today. Based on what individuals referred to themselves as, the ARIS reported that Wicca, the largest category of Neopaganism, grew from an estimated 8,000 to 134,000 from 1990 to 2001.31 Whether this is because of new participants or because individuals are more comfortable identifying themselves as Wiccan, this entails an over 1,500 percent increase.32 Adding Wicca together with two other categories listed in the ARIS survey (‘‘Druid’’ 33,000 and ‘‘Pagan’’ 140,000), one can estimate a minimum of 307,000 Neopagans in the United States in 2001, with some in branches of the movement possibly uncounted among the estimated 386,000 in groups listed as ‘‘unclassfied.’’33 This makes Neopaganism second only to the Latter-day Saints as the largest

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new religious movement in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But who are the people who make up the growing community of Neopagans? Demographically, Neopagans tend to be white, college-educated, middle- and working-class baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1962, and Generation Xers, born between 1962 and 1981. Between 1993 and 1995, sociologist Helen Berger and her colleagues conducted a ‘‘Neopagan census’’ of 2,089 individuals. They found that 90.8 percent were white, 64.8 percent female, and 59.8 percent were born between 1946– 1965.34 Also, 75.7 percent had a college degree, had studied at a professional or technical school, held post-graduate degrees, or worked in jobs requiring such training. Regionally, Berger and her colleagues found that the Pacific coast, South Atlantic coast, and Great Lakes region of the Midwest accounted for 54.1 percent of the respondents. Economically, Neopagans were in the middle and working classes, with annual median incomes of $30,000 to $40,000. While this approximated the national median income, Neopagan women on average earned less and Neopagan men more. In addition, 50.9 percent of the respondents listed themselves as ‘‘solitary practitioners,’’ meaning they did not regularly engage in Neopagan rituals with others, but rather worshipped by themselves.35 Historically, Neopaganism grew in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike many new religions, it is hard to single out one individual as founder. In terms of Wicca, many scholars point to the influence of retired British civil servant Gerald Gardner and later his American student Raymond Buckland. But other individuals, for example Tim Zell who founded the Church of All Worlds in 1961 and Z. Budapest who started the women-only Susan B. Anthony Wiccan coven in 1971, are also important figures in the early years of American Neopaganism.36 In the 1970s, American Neopaganism developed into a variety of groups and interests. Neopagan Reconstructionist groups that looked to revive certain aspects of ancient Greek, Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian religions appeared. Wicca branched into several varieties, ranging from the highly structured Gardnerians to feminist Dianic covens. Eclectic witches, who combined different traditions together to create new ritual syntheses, would eventually become the largest branch. The period since the 1980s has seen a major expansion of this new religious movement throughout the United States. Regional and national pan-Pagan festivals, such as ELFest in Indiana, began to dot the land. These events offered practitioners and the curious opportunities to meet and network with others who shared their interests. Neopagan organizations also cropped up, including the Pagan Federation International as well as the SpiralScouts International, a Neopagan version of the Boys and Girls Scouts. An especially interesting and growing organizational affiliation is CUUPS, the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. Essentially a new denomination within an established denomination, this Neopagan movement has chapters in more than thirty-five states. In addition to festivals and organizations, there has been a flourishing of print and Internet Neopagan publications. Originally confined to

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independent publishers such as Llwellyn Press and small alternative book and magic shops, Neopagan literature, especially Wiccan, now appears on most chain bookstore shelves and large publishing house lists. For many Neopagans, their initial entrance into the nonproselytizing movement was through reading. Practitioner and journalist Margot Adler suggests that Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, which sold 50,000 copies from 1979–1985, led to the creation of as many as 1,000 covens.37 Other works have also proved influential. One of them, Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, has consistently remained in the Amazon.com top 1,000 selling books for several years. The Internet has been even more fertile than print media for Neopaganism. Neopagans were among the first religious groups to use the Internet for discussion, networking, and online rituals.38 Web sites such as The Witches Voice (http://www.witchvox.com/) offer information and contacts for practitioners in ways that magazines like Green Egg did for Neopagans in previous decades. Neopagan practices and beliefs vary greatly depending on the specific groups and individuals involved. Most generally, Neopagans place primacy on ritual practices and experience over doctrine. They tend to see the magic they perform in circle casting and other ritual work as efficacious, though whether it works because it taps into real occult powers or because it acts only on a psychological, therapeutic level depends upon each individual practitioner’s beliefs. Though nondogmatic in eschewing formal creeds, most Neopagans hold to a code of ethics that suggests you may ‘‘do what you want, but harm none,’’ and that any good or ill one performs in the world will return to them three-fold. Many Neopagans—75.2 percent in the Neopagan Census—believe in reincarnation.39 Among Neopagans, the body, materiality, and the natural world are seen as good. The importance of nature and its identification with the feminine divine in many groups, particularly Wiccan, leads many practitioners to have interests in ecology and stewardship of resources. Although one can note these broad generalities about Neopagans, a key feature of the movement is its eclecticism. In the same ritual, Neopagans may use the names of Buddhist deities and Celtic goddesses, utilize Egyptian imagery, and engage in Yoruban possession trance drumming. The next ritual event may discard all of these things and instead feature a Lakota sweat lodge ceremony. Practitioners pick and mix, creating a bricolage of rituals, deities, beliefs, and religious material culture. In a personalization, or ‘‘subjectivization,’’ of religious faith, Neopagans seek out religious materials, trying and keeping elements that work for them, often ending up with new spiritual combinations. Another eclectic movement that has come to prominence since the late 1970s is the collection of practices, beliefs, and groups that have become categorized as ‘‘New Age.’’ Problems ensue when discussing the New Age movement. Religion scholar Steven Sutcliffe has suggested that the term itself is misleading, as neither ‘‘new’’ nor ‘‘movement’’ really seems to fit much of what is termed ‘‘New Age.’’ Sutcliffe argues that New Age is ‘‘best understood as a very diffuse milieu of popular practices and beliefs with unstable boundaries, goals, and personnel,’’ suggesting that it is not

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so much a movement as ‘‘a diffuse collectivity: a cluster of seekers affiliated by choice—if at all—to a particular term in a wider culture of alternative spiritual practice.’’40 In addition, things dubbed ‘‘New Age’’ are not always new, as they can be seen in nineteenth-century occult movements such as Spiritualism and Theosophy. While the number of people who selfidentify their religion as New Age has always been small (28,000 in 1991 and 68,000 in 2001), many of its elements are important to a much larger number of Americans.41 New Age philosophies and activities can be seen today in alternative medicine, modern psychology, education, business, and even other American religious groups. Historically, the New Age came out of the same 1960s and 1970s milieu as Neopaganism. The youth counterculture, the growth of Asian religions, and the emergence of transpersonal and humanistic psychologies— in addition to long-standing traditions of occult spirituality in American life—all influenced the New Age movement. The 1980s saw the growth and expansion of New Age activities, publications, and groups. Media reports of the decade focused on some of the more colorful aspects of the New Age, such as crystal healing, past life regression, and channeling. Books such as Shirley MacLaine’s 1983 bestseller, Out on a Limb, introduced New Age beliefs to the broader public. The term ‘‘New Age’’ refers to the belief that a new period in human consciousness and development lies on the horizon. In her 1980 book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Marilyn Ferguson predicted a worldwide ‘‘knowledge revolution’’ that would lead to more democratization, holistic learning and medicine, ethical and nonmaterialistic business practices, and human partnership with nature.42 Called by some the ‘‘New Age Bible,’’ Ferguson’s book reveals an optimistic view of humankind’s ascending an evolutionary ladder that will take it to progressively higher stages of consciousness and development. Although New Age practices and beliefs, like Neopagan ones, are eclectic and vary greatly, most are focused on personal transformation and healing. One example of a New Age practice is channeling. Channeling is the process of communicating with a nonphysical entity for the purpose of attaining wisdom and knowledge. While channels themselves benefit from the entity’s wisdom, they usually act as mediating consultants who impart counseling and knowledge to paying clients. Contemporary New Age channels resemble nineteenth-century Spiritualist mediums with one important difference: Whereas mediums were usually called upon to contact deceased human beings, channels enter into trances and take on the personas of divine and wise beings. The teachings given by channels in possession trances usually contain similar themes: Humans are good, they create their own realities, and they have the divine within them.43 Channeling became visible in the 1980s with the appearance of J.Z. Knight, who continues to channel the enlightened being ‘‘Ramtha’’ and has approximately 3,000 client devotees who pay for her services. The interested can participate in seminars and sessions at the Washington-state–based ‘‘Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.’’44 According to the center’s Web site, the ‘‘four cornerstones’’ of Ramtha’s teachings are ‘‘(1) the statement Ôyou

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are GodÕ; (2) the directive to make the unknown known; (3) the concept that consciousness and energy create the nature of reality; and (4) the challenge to conquer yourself.’’45 Recently Ramtha and his ideas, channeled by Knight, were the main impetus behind the 2004 Lord of the Wind Films release, What the Bleep Do We Know?, starring actress Marlee Matson. Probably the most well-known channeled teaching to appear in print is A Course in Miracles, published in 1976. Channeled by Helen Shucman starting in the 1960s, the divine being who authored the 1,200-page work is the Christian figure Jesus. An estimated 1.5 million copies of the work have been sold, along with a plethora of study guides and supplementary materials.46 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, A Course in Miracles study groups appeared in living rooms throughout the United States. Interest in the book increased in the mid-1990s when Detroit Unity minister Marianne Williamson appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show for a wellreceived discussion of the work and her best-selling guide to it, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles (1993). Channeling is just one example of a New Age practice that focuses on personal transformation and healing. This concern can also be seen in the work of writers and speakers such as Deepak Chopra. A prolific, bestselling author, Chopra represents the alternative medicine aspect of New Age activities. Chopra is a specialist in internal medicine who became unsatisfied with what he saw as the failures of ‘‘Western’’ medical philosophy. In 1991 he founded the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine and, in 1995, the Chopra Center for Well-Being. Through his organizations, books, and PBS television specials, Chopra promotes practices such as meditation, yoga, positive thinking, aromatherapy, herbal medicine, and other alternative healing practices.47 Even this cursory glance at a few of the items associated with the New Age reveals a diverse and highly variant mix of practices, beliefs, and groups that individuals utilize in their searches for transformative and healing experiences. Religion scholar Sarah Pike correctly suggests that, in addition to spiritual eclecticism, both ‘‘New Age and Neopagan beliefs and practices signify a trend in American religion at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries that resists institutionalization and gives value to personal experience.’’48

NEW RELIGIONS AND THE AMERICAN SPIRITUAL MARKETPLACE: ISSUES AND TRENDS The gradual shift from totalistic, communal new religions to those such as Neopaganism and the New Age, which are more eclectic, loosely bounded, and individually focused, must be put into the context of the tremendous changes taking place in American religion in recent decades. Since 1965, expanding diversity, the decline of denominationalism, increased religious switching, the rise of nonaffiliation, the explosive growth in conservative religions, the stark decline of the theologically moderate mainline, the blurred lines between religion and popular culture, and the increasingly improvisatory and combinative styles of religious

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practice are just some of the most visible changes.49 Sociologist of religion Wade Clark Roof has dubbed the contemporary American scene a ‘‘spiritual marketplace’’ in which many individuals seek, pick, and combine beliefs and practices in ways that fit their needs.50 New religions scholar Lorne Dawson likewise suggests that ‘‘religion is increasingly becoming a Ôcultural resourceÕ more than a social institution,’’ a comment supported by the growing propensity of many Americans to refer to themselves as ‘‘spiritual but not religious.’’51 He suggests that there are six features to what he calls ‘‘an emerging new religious consciousness.’’ These include an increasing focus on the individual, more attention and authority given to personal religious experience, a pragmatic attitude concerning religious authority and practices, a syncretistic and tolerant approach to other religious perspectives, an increasingly holistic worldview, and a preference for loose and open organizational structures.52 While Roof’s spiritual marketplace metaphor and Dawson’s six features fit Neopaganism and the New Age well, they are not exclusive to either. Indeed, many of the features present in these movements may best be viewed as more pronounced versions of trends occurring in American religion as a whole. Generally, openness to seeking, combining a variety of religious resources, and simultaneously distrusting religious institutions and having confidence in subjective experience are trends that sociologists Roof, Robert Wuthnow, Philip Hammond, and others have found across the religious spectrum.53 Even specific beliefs popular among Neopagans and New Agers—reincarnation, for example—find support in the larger culture. A 2003 Harris Poll showed that 27 percent of all Americans believed in reincarnation, including 40 percent of all 25–29 year-olds.54 Scholars argue that religion has increasingly become a resource for ‘‘projects of the self,’’ a tool with which individuals actively seek out and experiment with identities and communities.55 In addition, recent studies suggest that these activities and trends will continue beyond the generations of baby boomers and Generation Xers that they started with.56 In suggesting that new religious movements such as Neopaganism are part of larger shifts in American religion and culture that will continue into the near future, one must be careful to not assume the disappearance of strict communal new religions. Concomitant with the expansion of less institutional, individually focused spirituality has been the growth of theologically conservative, tightly bounded, high-demand groups. Pentecostalism and other evangelical varieties of Protestantism, Hasidic Judaism, and a conservative movement within the Roman Catholic Church are all examples of this. To use sociologist Joseph Tamney’s term, the ‘‘resilience’’ of conservative religions within the spiritual marketplace suggests that the era of totalistic new religions, if currently muted, is far from over.57 Finally, the intensification of religious activity between and beyond group boundaries provides a challenge for scholars who study new, alternative, and other religions today. The current religious milieu highlights the importance of studying ‘‘lived religion,’’ examining what people actually do and believe in their everyday religious lives—versus what the creeds and codes of groups they may identify with say they should. Through the careful study of religion

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as practiced we may begin to unravel the increasingly complex, eclectic, and subjective trends of contemporary American faith.

NOTES 1. For a discussion of Mormonism as a new religious movement, see Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 2. For Yinger, ‘‘cult’’ was one of six classification types. See J. Milton Yinger, Religion, Society, and the Individual (New York: MacMillan, 1957). For a discussion of some problems with the term ‘‘cult,’’ see Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988), 18–29; and James T. Richardson, ‘‘Definitions of Cult: From Sociological-Technical to Popular-Negative,’’ Review of Religious Research (June 1993): 348–56. 3. See Russell Spittler, Cults and Isms: Twenty Alternatives to Evangelical Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1962), 12. For an evangelical anti-cult bestseller, see Walter Martin, Kingdom of the Cults (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1965). 4. See Sean McCloud, Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–1993 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 5. The term ‘‘new religious movement,’’ though not negative like ‘‘cult,’’ is still an imprecise one that is given different meanings by different scholars. J. Gordon Melton, for example, has noted that ‘‘new religions are thus primarily defined not by any characteristic(s) that they share, but by the relationship to the other forms of religious life represented by the dominant churches, the ethnic religions, and the sects.’’ See J. Gordon Melton, ‘‘An Introduction to New Religions,’’ in Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, ed. James R. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 27. For an example of a scholar who prefers to use ‘‘alternative religion,’’ see Timothy Miller, ed., America’s Alternative Religions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 1–10. My strategy in defining ‘‘new religious movement’’ is to focus on the ‘‘new’’ aspect of the movement. While I think this is clearer and less problematic than deciding what is ‘‘alternative’’ to the wide variety of beliefs and practices found in so-called ‘‘dominant’’ religions, it is still ambiguous with regards to (1) just how old a religious movement can be and still be new, and (2) just how dramatically different the movement’s beliefs, practices, and texts must be from existing religions to be considered new. 6. See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 225–56. 7. Harmonial religion is a term used by Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 1019–36. New Thought refers to a movement that developed out of Christian Science. See Edward Queen II, Stephen Prothero, and Gardiner Shattuck, Jr., eds., The Encyclopedia of American Religious History (New York: Facts on File, 1996), 470–71. 8. For a more complete definition and discussion of occult, see Robert Galbreath, ‘‘Explaining Modern Occultism,’’ in The Occult in America, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 11–37. 9. For an historical overview of religion in the period, see Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 2: The Noise of Conflict, 1919–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

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10. See www.religioustolerance.org/chr_poll3.htm for a summary chart of polls. For the 1950s religious revival, see James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 33–38. 11. See David Van Zandt, ‘‘The Children of God,’’ in Miller, ed., 127–32. 12. For a fuller description of occult coverage in the period, see McCloud, 103–16. 13. For a history of the anti-cult movement, see Anson Shupe and David Bromley, ‘‘The Modern North American Anti-Cult Movement, 1971–1991: A Twenty-Year Retrospective,’’ in Anti-Cult Movements in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Anson Shupe and David Bromley (New York: Garland Press, 1994), 3–31. 14. For the term ‘‘cult menace,’’ see James Beckford, ‘‘The Mass Media and New Religious Movements,’’ in New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response, ed. Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell (New York: Routledge, 1999), 103–19. For the U.S. News quote, see ‘‘The Bizarre Tragedy in Guyana,’’ U.S. News and World Report (December 4, 1978), 25. 15. See www.religionwriters.com/public/tips/101104/101104a.shtml. 16. For Divine Light Mission estimates, see www.adherents.com/Na/Na_257. html#1345. For the LDS numbers, see www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html# bodies. 17. An excellent online resource on new religions is the Religious Movements Homepage Project at the University of Virginia. It can be accessed at http:// religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/. For discussion of Moon’s declaration to be the Messiah, see http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/unification2.html. 18. See David Bromley and Larry Shinn, eds., Krishna Consciousness in the West (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989). 19. For an overview of the period, see ‘‘Making the Cult Menace: Brainwashing, Deprogramming, Mass Suicide, and Other Heresies, 1973–1979,’’ in McCloud, 127–59. 20. The narrative appearing here comes from several excellent works on Peoples Temple, namely John Hall, Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987); David Chidester, Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and Mary McCormick Maaga, Hearing the Voices of Jonestown: Putting a Human Face on an American Tragedy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). 21. See Catherine Wessinger, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Maaga, xii. 22. For a volume that discusses these and other ‘‘cult controversies,’’ see James Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Peterson, eds., Controversial New Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For an overview of satanic cult rumors and scares of the late 1980s, see Jeffery Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (Chicago: Open Court, 1993). 23. For a study of the Branch Davidians and the Waco incident, see Stuart Wright, ed., Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 24. See, for example, ‘‘The Book of Koresh,’’ Newsweek (October 11, 1993): 27. 25. For one discussion of Heaven’s Gate, see Hugh Urban, ‘‘The Devil at Heaven’s Gate: Rethinking the Study of Religion in the Age of Cyber-Space,’’ Nova Religio 3 (2000): 268–302. 26. See Laurence Foster, ‘‘Cults in Conflict: New Religious Movements and the Mainstream Religious Tradition in America,’’ in Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America, ed. Robert Bellah and Frederick Greenspahn (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 185–204.

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27. See E. Burke Rochford, Jr., ‘‘Family Development and Change in the Hare Krishna Movement,’’ in Lewis and Peterson, eds., 101–17. 28. See John Gorenfeld, ‘‘Hail to the Moon King,’’ Salon.com News (June 21, 2004). 29. See Anson Shupe, David Bromley, and Susan Darnell, ‘‘The North American Anti-Cult Movement: Vicissitudes of Success and Failure,’’ in Lewis, ed., 184–205. 30. For a comparative study of the Neopagan and New Age Movements, see Sarah Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 31. See Barry Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keysar, American Religion Identification Survey 2001 (New York: Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2001), 13. 32. For the percentage, see Cathy Lynn Grossman and Anthony DeBarros, ‘‘A Measure of Faith,’’ USA Today (December 24, 2001), 4D. 33. See Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar, 13. 34. See Helen Berger, Evan Leach, and Leigh Shaffer, Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neopagans in the United States (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 30, 27. 35. Ibid., 30–32, 12. 36. For a history and overview of Wicca, see Aidan Kelly, ‘‘An Update on Neopagan Witchcraft in America,’’ in Perspectives on the New Age, ed. James Lewis and J. Gordon Melton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 136–51. For an older, broader examination of American Neopaganism, see Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). 37. See Adler, 418–19, 227–28. 38. For one story about Neopagans and the Internet, see Yonat Shimron, ‘‘Computerized Faith: Techno-Pagans thrive in the Triangle, worshipping at the altar of the keyboard.’’ The Raleigh News and Observer, September 6, 1996, 1E, 4E. 39. See Berger, Leach, and Shaffer, 47. 40. See Steven Sutcliffe, ‘‘The Dynamics of Alternative Spirituality: Seekers, Networks, and ÔNew Age,Õ ’’ in Lewis, ed., 467. Also see Steven Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (New York: Routledge, 2003). 41. For the 1991 number, see Richard Kyle, The New Age Movement in American Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 5. For the 2001 number, see Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar, 13. 42. See Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal Transformation in the 1980s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980). 43. For a study of New Age channeling, see Michael Brown, The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 44. See ‘‘Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment: The American Gnostic School’’ on the University of Virginia Religious Movements Web page, http://religiousmovements. lib.virginia.edu/nrms/Ramtha.html. 45. See http://ramtha.com/html/aboutus/aboutus.stm. 46. For discussions of A Course in Miracles, see Arnold Weiss, ‘‘A New Religious Movement and Spiritual Healing Psychology Based on A Course in Miracles,’’ in Religion and the Social Order, ed. Arthur Greil and Thomas Robbins (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1994), 197–215. Also see http://religiousmovements. lib.virginia.edu/nrms/course.html. 47. See http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/Chopra.html.

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48. See Pike, 26, 171. 49. A number of studies note these changes. See Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993); Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas, eds., Religion in Modern Times: An Interpretive Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For an article that charts denominational shifts and mainline decline, see Richard Ostling, ‘‘The Church Search,’’ Time (April 5, 1993): 44. See also Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar, 12–13. For a recent study on similar, yet perhaps more dramatic, trends in the United Kingdom, see Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2005). 50. See Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 51. See Lorne Dawson, ‘‘The Socio-Cultural Significance of Modern New Religious Movements,’’ in Lewis, ed., 92. 52. See Lorne Dawson, ‘‘The Cultural Significance of New Religious Movements: The Case of Soka Gakkai,’’ Sociology of Religion 62:3 (2001): 355–56. 53. See Roof, Spiritual Marketplace; Wuthnow, After Heaven; and Philip Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment in America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992). 54. Harris Poll, ‘‘The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans 2003,’’ Harris Interactive (February 26, 2003), http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/ index.asp?PID=359. 55. The ‘‘project of the self’’ concept comes from Anthony Giddens, especially Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Some scholars have suggested that his theories concerning late modernity and projects of the self may be useful in interpreting the trends in contemporary religion. See Lorne Dawson, ‘‘The Socio-Cultural Significance of New Religious Movements,’’ in Lewis, ed., 68–98; and Sean McCloud, ‘‘Popular Culture Fandoms, the Boundaries of Religious Studies, and the Project of the Self,’’ Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4:2 (2003): 187–206. 56. See Lynn Schofield Clark, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 57. See Joseph Tamney, The Resilience of Conservative Religion: The Case of Popular, Conservative Protestant Congregations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Chidester, David. Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Dawson, Lorne L., ed. Cults and New Religious Movements: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Jenkins, Philip. Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Lewis, James R., ed. Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. McCloud, Sean. Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–1993. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Miller, Timothy, ed. America’s Alternative Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Pike, Sarah. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Roof, Wade Clark. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Index

Abhidharma Pitaka, 111 abortion(s), 30, 38 Abrams, Elliot, 80 abusive behavior, 46 ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). See American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ACM (American anti-cult movement), 236 Act of Toleration (1691), 168 Adler, Margot, 239 aether, 141 African Americans: Baptist churches and, 172; Christianity shaped by African religions, 169; clergy’s support of Republican candidates, 211; female clergy, 212; Methodism and, 172; middle-class after 1960s, 210; new religions and, 230; post–civil rights era religion and, 207; religion as orientation, 208; religious consciousness of, 222; religious studies, 220; religious traditions, 170; in slave states, 170, 173, 174; study of religion and religious experience, 208; women, 212–13, 221

African Methodist churches, 172 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 172, 208 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 172, 208, 212 African slavery, 169, 173, 210 Africentrism, 207 age: cohorts in mainline Protestant denominations, 15; of nuns, 27; of United Church of Christ members, 16 age-related change, 15 aging ministry of fundamentalists and Pentecostals, 101 agribusiness, 132 Agyeman, Jaramogi Abebe, 218 ‘‘a la carte’’ approach to belief, 187 Alaska as an unaffiliated region, 180 Alemany, Bishop, 132 Ali, Noble Drew, 115, 213–14 All Nations Pentecostal Church, 212 alternative religions, 181. See also new religious movements American anti-cult movement (ACM), 235, 236 American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine, 241

250 American Catholic bishops, 32–36, 52, 53, 54 American Catholic church. See Roman Catholic Church in America American Catholics: beliefs and practices, 41–42; and Mexican Catholic traditions, 133; Mexican participation in services, 133; as respecting but not always following, 38–39; and universal character of church, 40. See also Catholics American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 89 American Conference of Catholic Bishops, 53 American Council of Christian Churches, 95 American culture: Jewish spirituality in, 67; shaping fundamentalism, 87 American frontier. See frontier American Hinduism. See Hinduism American history: new religious movements in (1800–1977), 229–31; in 1960s, 26 Americanization: Catholic church campaigns and Mexican-origin peoples, 134; of immigrants, 119; Mormonism as quintessential through, 143–45 American Judaism: background developments, 63–64; formal institutions of, 68–69; growth of spirituality in, 72–76; and root causes of personal religiosity, 70; and spiritual journey, 66–72 American Mainline Religions (Roof and McKinney), 10 American origins of Mormonism, 142–43 American religion, transformations, 210, 227 American Religion Data Archive, 183 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), 126, 162, 237 American religious life. See religious life Americans of Mexican origin, 132

INDEX American values: embraced by Latterday Saints, 144; Jewish lack of confidence in, 70 Anderson, Victor, 222 Angels in America (Kushner), 158 Anglican churches, 1 Anglo-Protestantism, 130 Antebellum Spiritual Hothouse period, 229 anti-Catholicism, 130 anticult movement, 235, 236 anti-institutional form of church, 190 Antioch ranch, 190 anti-Semitism, 63 Apostolic Faith Mission, 91 Appelwhite, Marshall, 235 The Aquarian Conspiracy (Ferguson), 240 Arab leaders, Nation of Islam contacts, 216 Aranyakas, 113 Archdiocese of Boston, 37, 49 Ariel, David, 66, 69, 70, 73 ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey), 126, 162, 237 Ashcroft, John, 97 Asian Americans: Catholic populations among, 39; compared to Mormons, 152 Asian Barred Zone Act of 1917, 111 Asian-based new religions, 231 Asian immigrants, 107–8, 110 Asiatic Barred Zone, 108 Assemblies of God, 103–4 associate ministers of megachurches, 197 associational Jewishness, 68 Association of Vineyard Churches, 93 Ausar Auset Society, 219 authenticity, 120 Azusa Street revival, 90–91 Ba’alei Tshuva (BT), 75–76 baby boom, 9, 15–16 baptismal priesthood, 59

INDEX baptism of Holy Spirit, 89 baptisms of adults in 1950s, 8 Baptist churches: African American community and, 172; pastorate and women, 212 Baptists: in English American colonies, 167; growth of, 170; Pentecostalism and, 97; rapid spread of, 172 Baptist South, 174 Barred Zone Act (1917), 108 Barrett, David B., 93 barrios (Mexican neighborhoods), 131 Beecher, Lyman, 131 Bell, Rob, 192–93, 196 Benedict XVI (pope), 26–27 Bennett, Dennis, 91 Berg, David ‘‘Moses,’’ 231 Berger, Helen, 238 Bernardin, Cardinal Joseph, 33 Beulah Land Farms, 218 Bhagavad Gita, 113 Biblical Evangelist, 96 biblical studies of African American intellectuals, 223 birth control and Catholics, 38 birth rates: decline of, 20; mainline Protestant constituency and, 11–12; in U.S., 8 bishops, 213. See also American Catholic bishops black Americans. See African Americans Black Christian Nationalist Church, 218 black church: megachurches and, 207; nature of and developments in, 208–13; and ordination of women, 212; post–civil rights era and, 208–9; sexuality and, 211 The Black Church in the African American Experience (Lincoln and Mamiya), 208 black clergy, female percentage of, 212 Black Muslims. See Nation of Islam (NOI) black Pentecostal tradition, women and, 212

251 black religion, study of, 220–23 Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Wilmore), 210 black religious movements, 217–19 black theology, 221 Black Theology and Black Power (Cone), 220 A Black Theology of Liberation (Cone), 220 Block, Walter, 35 Bloom, Harold, 147, 150, 154 Blumhofer, Edith L., 90, 103 BMNA (Buddhist Mission of North America), 111–12 Bob Jones University, 96 Book of Mormon, 141, 160 Boston Globe, 51 boutique religion, 189–94 Bracero program, 134 Brahmanas, 113 brainwashing, 231, 236 Branch Davidians, 234, 235 Brown, Bishop Tod, 37 Brown, Bobby, 225 Bryan, William Jennings, 88 Buber, Martin, 72 Buckland, Raymond, 238 Budapest, Z., 238 Buddha, 110, 111 Buddhism, 109, 110–12 Buddhist Churches of America, 111–12 Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA), 111–12 Buddhists: challenges of social disadvantage faced by, 123; nationalities of American, 109; number of, 109; panethnic nature of, 121; population, 180; underrepresented in interfaith conversations, 125 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), 234 Burned-Over District, 229 Butler, John Washington, 89 Butler, Jon, 229

252 cable and satellite networks, 94 California Gold Rush, precipitating immigration, 131 Call to Action, 28 Calvary Chapel Ministries, 92–93 Calvin, John, 182 Campbell, Alexander, 160 campuses, 200 CAN. See Cult Awareness Network (CAN) Cannon, George Q., 149 cantors, women as, 77 Carlebach, Shlomo, 63 Carter, Ben Ammi, 218 Catholic bishops. See American Catholic bishops Catholic church. See Roman Catholic Church Catholic clergy. See clergy Catholic Conference of Bishops, 31 Catholic Hispanic population, 39–40, 42 Catholic laity. See laity Catholic priests. See priests Catholics: charismatic renewal among, 92; in the colonies, 168; divided over major issues, 60; forming a ring around Mormon Utah, 174; instructing how to vote, 31; lack of acceptance of papal teachings, 203 Catholics United for Faith, 28 celibacy, 39, 55, 59 cell church, 192 cell groups, 192 Census of Religious Bodies, 126 Central Congregational Church, 218 Chabad Lubavitch, 64 ‘‘The Challenge of Peace’’ (1983), 32, 33 channeling, 240 charismatic fellowships, 189–90 charismatic movement, 91, 190 charismatics, 92 Charter for the Protection of Young People, 51 Cha´vez, Ce´sar, 135

INDEX Chen, Chiung Hwang, 152 Cherry, Prophet (Rabbi) F.S., 217 Chester, Steven, 78 Chicano nationalist iconography, 136 Children of God, 231, 233, 236 children of one Jewish parent, 79 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 108, 111 Chinese New Year, 121 Cho, Paul Yonggi, 192 Chopra, Deepak, 241 Chopra Center for Well-Being, 241 Christ, Carl, 35 Christian Beacon (McIntire), 95 Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), 2, 4–5 Christian church movement, 1 Christian Coalition, 210 Christian denominations. See denominations Christianity, melding with African and Native American practices, 173 Christianity Today (magazine), 94 Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, 172 Christian society, Jews functioning within, 63 Christ Universal Temple, 212 churches, definition of, 186–87 churchgoers, increases after 1900, 3 church life, weakening of, 177 Church of All Worlds, 238 Church of God, 96–97, 101, 217 Church of God and Saints of Christ, 217 Church of God in Christ, 208, 212 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 141, 228, 232; beginnings and early growth of, 174; reducing American aspects of, 154; teachings on United States, 142. See also Mormonism Church of Satan, 231 circuit riders, 171

INDEX civil rights movement: black clergy and congregations and, 209; Mexican Americans encouraged by, 134–35 Clarence 13X, 217 classical Pentecostalism, 90, 96, 102–3 classrooms, excluding religion from, 125 Cleage, Albert B., Jr., 218 Clemmons, Bishop Ithiel, 102 clergy: number of Catholic, 39; power of, 36; scapegoating of gay, 56; sexual abuse by, 45–46, 48; trustworthiness and Catholics, 56. See also priests clericalism, 50, 54, 55 Coalition for the Remembrance of Elijah (CROE), 216–17 Colemon, Johnnie, 212 colonial period, regional characteristics during, 166–69 Colored (Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church, 208 ‘‘come as you are’’ style, 101 common ground religion, 121 communal joining ethic, 17 communal new religions, 233 communion, 31. See also Eucharist Compaq Center, 85, 99 Cone, James, 220 Congregationalists, 171 congregational organization: of Baptist churches, 172; during rapid growth, 199 congregational polity, 182 congregations: of emerging churches, 193; legitimacy of, 186–87; planting of new independent, 200; spectrum of, 181 conservatism of Mormonism, 153 conservative denominations: growth pattern for, 6, 7; higher fertility of, 11 Conservative Judaism, 64, 79–80 conservative membership resurgence, 10 conservative movement and African Americans, 210

253 conservative objectors to spirituality, 80 conservative Protestants: growth of, 12; and house church movement, 191; from mainline denominations, 13; Mormonism and, 153 conservative religions as resilient, 242 conservative theology of megachurches, 196, 209 Cook, Suzan Johnson, 213 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, 96 Cordeiro, Wayne, 196 Corpus, 28 council, Catholic church meeting in, 25 A Course in Miracles (Shucman), 241 Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, 238 Crenshaw Christian Center, 209 Cristero revolt, 137 Crowdy, William Saunders, 217, 218 Cruz, Ricardo, 129 cult(s): controversies over, 227, 232–33, 236; definition of, 228; as menace, 232, 233–36; Mormonism as, 143. See also new religious movements Cult Awareness Network (CAN), 235, 236 Cults and Isms (Spittler), 228 cultural changes, of 1960s and 1970s, 10 culture: birth rate and, 17; of death, 29; lack of substantial, 71; Mormon, 144; of no offense, 19. See also American culture Cursillo movement, 134 customization by megachurches, 188 CUUPS. See Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans Daily Readings from Your Best Life (Osteen), 100 Dancing Rabbi, 63 Darrow, Clarence, 89 darshan, online, 123 Darwin, Charles, 87

254 daughter churches, 200 Davis, David Brion, 151 Davis, Sarah Frances, 213 Dawson, Lorne, 242 death, culture of, 29 decorum, 63 democracy, expected by Americans, 58 demographics, 176 denominations: affiliation, 12; decline in American, 1; identity, 189; membership, 14; records, 14–16, 183; and regional persistence, 180; retention, 20; trends in, 177 descendant generations, 126 Deseret, 174 DeVoto, Bernard, 151 difference, American essence and, 146 Dignity (organization), 28 dioceses, bankruptcy of, 37, 56 Disciples movement, 142 discontinuity, change signaling, 25 dispensationalism, 88 dissenters, 166 diversity: of African American religion, 223; after 1990, 177; of ethnic and religious groups, 118; implications of, 152; increasing, 180; in Roman Catholic Church, 41–42; twentiethcentury America and, 151 divine healing, 93 Divine Principle (Moon), 233 divine racism, 221 Divine Socialism, 234 Diwali, 121 Dollar, Creflo, 196, 209 Doyle, Thomas, 49 Drew, Timothy. See Ali, Noble Drew Duquesne University, 92 early national period (1789–1830), 169 Eastern Orthodox Christianity, 167 Eck, Diana, 113 eclecticism of Neopagans, 239 ecological devastation, 71 ‘‘Economic Justice for All’’ (1986), 32, 34–36

INDEX economy of America, 34 ecumenical Hinduism, 121 Egan, Cardinal Edward, 53 Elat Chayyim, 74 elderly mainline affiliates, 16 elite Buddhism, 112 Ely, Richard, 151 emerging/emergent church movement, 188, 192–94 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 111, 113 employment, 34 English colonies, 166 Episcopal Church: African American woman bishop ordination by, 213; baptisms in 1950, 8; membership decline of, 2; membership trends in, 4–5, 14–15; spiritual seeking and numerical growth, 18 Equal Rights Amendment, 153 equal rights for women, 19 essences, 152, 155 establishment, sense of, 173 ethnicity and theology, 121 ethnoreligious communities, 119 Eucharist: access to, 60; gift of, requiring priests, 39; as an instrument of politics, 32. See also communion European Jews. See Jews evangelical gospel, 88 evangelicalism: American, 178–79; Pentecostalism and, 97; renewed influence of, 85–87 Evangelical Lutheran Church, 2, 4–5 evangelical/mainline division, 3 evangelical movements in the black church, 207 evangelical regions, voting Republican, 181 evangelical zeal of American churches, 2 Evans, John Henry, 151 evolution, 87, 88–89 faithful church, sought by the Catholic right, 57 Faith/Word movement, 92

INDEX familial network of like-minded churches, 201 Family. See Children of God ‘‘Family Game Night,’’ 158 family life, church as part of, 8 family values, 19 Fard, Wallace D., 115, 214 Farrakhan, Louis Abdul, 213, 215–16 Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, 28 female clergy, 212 female members of black church, 207 female rabbis, 77 feminism, 68, 73 Ferguson, Marilyn, 240 Fetzer, Leland, 150 five Ks, 117 Five Percent Nation of Islam, 217 Five Pillars of Islam, 217 Florida as an unaffiliated region, 180 Followers of Yahweh, 218 Foote, Julia A., 212 Ford, Henry, 230 Foster, Laurence, 236 Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, 110 Fox, Vicente, 136 Franciscans, 167 FREECOG, 231 free love, 231 French colonies, Roman Catholic influence of, 166 French Roman Catholic parishes, 167 Friedman, Milton, 35 frontier: Methodists and mythology of, 171; Mormonism and creation of, 145 Fuller Theological Seminary, 95 fundamentalism: divisions of, 94; emergence of, 87–89; heroes of, 94; Pentecostalism and, 86–87; rebirth of public, 94–97 Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies, 3 The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, 88 Gardner, Gerald, 238 Gates, Susa Young, 150

255 Gautama, Siddhartha. See Buddha Gauthe, Fr. Gilbert, 49 Gauthier, Gilbert, 36 gay marriages: black clergy opposition to, 211; Latter-day Saints opposition to, 153 Geoghan, John, 36, 50 Ghost Dance, 229–30 Gillman, Neil, 79 Girard, Rene, 222 Givens, Terryl, 155 Givens-El, John, 214 Glaude, Eddie, 222 Glenmary Research Institute, 176 global economic depression, 133 global fear, 71 globalization, 145 Golden Temple, 117 Goodykoontz, Coln B., 178 Gospel of Health and Wealth, 105 gospel people, evangelicals as, 85–86 Graham, Billy, 94, 95 Grant, Jacquelyn, 221 Great Awakening, 86 great reversal, 88 Great Salt Lake, 174 Green, Arthur, 71 Gregg, Josiah, 131 Gregory, Bishop Wilton, 37, 53 Guadalupe, Virgin of: Mexican veneration of, 131; reinventing, 136; replica of, 138; United Farm Workers’ use of, 135 Guidry, Carolyn Tyler, 213 Gullichson, Ken, 93 guru, 116 gurudwaras, 117, 119, 124 Guru Granth Sahib, 116 Guyana, Peoples Temple in, 234 Hadith, 114 Hagin, Kenneth E., 95 Hampton Ministers’ Conference, 213 Hansen, Klaus, 146 Hare Krishnas, 119, 231, 233, 236 harmonial religions, 229

256 Harris, Barbara, 213 Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 209 Hartshorne, Charles, 222 Hasidic movement, 65 havurot, 64, 69, 73–74, 79 Hawaii as an unaffiliated region, 180 healing evangelists, 91 Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Wacker), 95 Heaven’s Gate group suicide, 235 Hebrew Israelites, 218 Hebrews, biblical as black, 225 higher criticism, 87 Hillside International Truth Center, 212 Hinduism, 109, 112–14, 120 Hindus, 109, 123, 125 Hindu Temple of Atlanta, 119–20 Hispanic Catholics, 39–40, 42. See also Mexican-origin Catholics Hispanic community, immigrant, 27 The Histories and Varieties of Jewish Meditation (Verman), 75 Hoge, Dean, 2 holiness groups, 91 holiness-Pentecostalism, 101 Holocaust, 67–68 Holy Communion. See communion; Eucharist Holy Spirit, 89, 91 home mission movement, 178 Hood, Bishop James Walker, 212 house church movement, 185, 190, 191 households, 8, 17 House of Love and Prayer for Jewish Hippies, 63 Houston, Whitney, 225 Howell, Vernon. See Koresh, David Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple, 120 Huguenots or Reformed Protestants, 167 humankind, failure of, 71 ijithad, 115 ijma, 115 imams, 122

INDEX Immigrant Reform and Control Act of 1986, 114 immigrants: Americanization of, 119; Asian, 107–8, 110; Irish Catholic, 130; Jewish, to colonial America, 63; Mexican, 131–35; Pentecostalism and, 102; and transmission of religion to next generation, 125–26; undocumented Mexican, 136; world religions and, 107 immigration: Catholics in Midwest cities and, 174; from Mexico in 1980s, 136 Immigration Reform Act of 1965, 109, 110 import Buddhism, 112 individual religious identity, 186 Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975, 109 infant baptism rate, Presbyterian, 14 integrationist new religions, 230 interconnection, new networks of, 200–203 internal ministries, megachurch range of, 198 international growth of Mormonism, 153 International Israelite Board of Rabbis, 218 international migration, 123 International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Hare Krishna), 119, 231, 233, 236 Internet: house church movement and, 191; Neopagans’ use of, 239; religious reality and, 188–89 invisible Jewishness, 68 Irish Catholic immigrants, 130 Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (Jones), 220–21 Ishmael, 114 Islam, 114–16 Islamophobia, 124 Israel: African Americans and, 217; American Jews and, 67; as spiritual experience, 66

INDEX Jackson, Michael, 213 Jakes, T.D., 196, 209 Jenkins, Royall E., 216 Jesuit missionaries, 167–68 Jesus Movement (Jesus Freaks), 231 ‘‘Jesus People’’ revival, 93 Jewish Catalog, 73 Jewish groups in the black church, 218 Jewish Identity in America, 69 Jewish immigrants to colonial America, 63 Jewishness, creating a more personallydefined form of, 68 Jewish practices as spiritual, 65 Jewish Renewal movement, 72–73 Jewish retreat center, 74 Jewish secular humanism, 75 Jews: in Dutch and English colonies, 167; immigration of, 174–75. See also American Judaism; Judaism John Paul I (pope), 28 John Paul II (pope): abortion stance of, 30; charismatic personality of, 28; conservative direction of, 29; lengthy papacy of, 28–32; piety of, 29; re-centralization of authority and leadership, 54; slow reaction to the American sexual abuse crisis, 36; spiritual preferences of, 28–29; stemcell research warning, 30–31; style of governing, 29; travel of, 28; on women’s role, 40 Jones, Bob, 94 Jones, James Warren, 232, 233–34 Jones, William R., 220–21, 222 Jonestown, 234 Joseph Smith: An American Prophet (Evans), 151 Judaism, 64–66, 79. See also American Judaism Kabbalah, 65 Karaites, 218 kavvanah (proper intention), 65 Keating, Frank, 37 Kelley, Dean, 2, 5–6

257 Kelley thesis, 10 Kelly, Leontine, 213 Kerry, John, 31 Keyes, Alan, 210 Khalistan movement, 118 Khalsa, 116 Killen, Patricia, 180 Kimathi, Jaramogi Menelik, 218 King, Barbara L., 212 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 210, 211 Kingdom of God, 147–48 Knight, J.Z., 240–41 knowledge revolution, 240 Koresh, David, 235 Kos, Rudy, 36 Ku Klux Klan, 230 Kushner, Lawrence, 81 laity: clergy and, 57; employed in Catholic parishes, 58; functions as priests, sisters, and brothers, 27; liturgy and, 26; male groups of, 130; Mexican religious tradition and, 130; New Mexico reforms and authority of, 132; at parish level, 58; as professional presence in Catholicism, 41; rights and responsibilities and, 46; Spanish Catholicism and, 167; trust of priests, 48 Lakewood Church, 85, 195 Lakewood International Center, 85, 98–100 Lamm, Norman, 80 Lamy, Jean Baptiste, 132 language loss, confronting immigrant communities, 122 Latin American Catholicism, 130 Latino/Latina Catholic populations, 39 ‘‘latter rain’’ of the Holy Spirit, 90 LaVey, Anton, 231 Law, Cardinal Bernard, 37, 49, 50, 51 law, contrasted with spirituality, 80 LDS church. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

258 leadership: American episcopate and, 53; Catholic church and, 57; house churches and, 191; of megachurches, 209 Left Behind series (LaHayes), 94 Lerner, Michael, 72, 73 liberal synagogues, 77 liberation theology, 29 Liebman, Rabbi Joshua Loth, 67 Lincoln, C. Eric, 208 Lipstadt, Deborah, 69 liturgy, yoga poses and, 78 lived religion, 242 London, Rabbi Andrea, 78 Long, Charles H., 222 Long, Eddie L., 209 Lotus Sutra, 111 Louisiana Purchase, 172 Lutheran upper Midwest, 174 MacLaine, Shirley, 240 Mahabbarata, 113 Maharaj ji, 75 Mahoney, Cardinal Roger, 37, 53 mainline Protestant denominations: birth rates and, 11–14, 14–16; change and constituency of, 12; congregation types, 181; decline of, 11, 19, 176, 210; growth rates of, 6–7, 9; liberal or modernist direction of, 179; membership trends in, 2, 4–7, 14–15, 18; ordination African American women by, 212–13; prior to era of decline, 3–4; in 1960s and 1970s, 10; societal changes and, 17; twenty-first century and, 19–20; younger age cohorts in, 15 Malcolm X, 213, 215 mall-like approach of megachurches, 198 mall mentality, 188 Mamiya, Lawrence H., 208 mandirs, 113, 114, 119 mariachi mass, 135 marriage rate, U.S. in 1946 and 1947, 7 Mars Hill Bible Church, 196

INDEX Marsden, George, 178–79 Marsh, Clifton E., 215 Martinez, Father Antonio, 132 Marty, Martin E., 69 masjids, 115, 116, 119 mass, celebration of, 26 materialistic nature of Mormon theology, 146 McCarran Walter Act (1952), 108 McCarrick, Cardinal Theodore Edgar, 31, 53 McIntire, Carl, 95 McKenzie, Vashti, 213 McKinney, William, 179 McLaren, Brian, 192, 193 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 91 media, failing secular people, 71 meditation, increase in Jewish, 74–75 megachurches, 185, 194–200, 209; approach of, 188; as autonomous entities, 209; characteristics of, 198, 209; conservative theology of, 196; customization by, 188; definition of, 195; definitive study of, 209; familial networks and, 201; geographic locations of, 196, 209; Lakewood Church and, 100; networks, 201; as networks, fellowships, or associations, 202; nondenominational, 176; as not churches, 186; number of, 195, 207; pastors of, 195, 197; religious landscape and, 194; size of, 195; variety in, 195 Megachurches Today (report), 197 membership: decline of mainline denominations, 5–6; growth in 1940s and 1950s, 7 Memphis Miracle, 102 Mencken, H.L., 89 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 72 Mendi, Joe, 89 Messianic communities, 218 Methodism, 171 Methodist churches, 170

INDEX Methodist middle, 174 Mexican America, 132–35 Mexican Americans, 130 Mexican Catholicism, 173–74 Mexican Catholic religiosity, 131 Mexican culture, 135–36 Mexican immigration, 129–30; after 1900, 132–35; Gold Rush and, 131 Mexican-origin Catholics, 129, 133. See also Hispanic Catholics Mexican-origin peoples in Texas and California, 131 Mexican workers and U.S. government, 134 Mexico, annexation of northern, 173 Mexico and citizen homecoming, 133–34 Midwest cities, Catholics in, 174 migration: areas affected, 180; as no longer a one-way process, 123 millennialism, 235 Million Man March of 1995, 216 ministers, networks of, 201–2 ministries, 199, 209 minority religious traditions, 173 Mitchell, Hulon, Jr. See Yahweh, Yahweh ben model minority discourses, 152 modernism and liberal Protestants, 87 modernist, mainline Protestantism as, 179 modernity, 70, 71 Moon, Reverend Sun Myung, 233 Moore, Laurence, 146, 150 Moorish Holy Temple of Science, 213 Moorish Science Temple, 115 Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), 213 moral decay and women’s movement, 211 Morales, Juan Castillo. See Soldado, Juan moral guardian, Catholic Church role as, 29 moral issues and LDS Church, 153

259 Mormon colonization, 151 Mormon God as fundamentally American, 147 Mormonism, 237; American origins of, 142–43; in contemporary American life, 144; as essence of traditional America, 144; growth of, 142; growth rates of, 154; leadership and membership of, 143; membership composition of, 153–54; as new religious movement, 228; novel aspects of, 143; as quintessential American religion, 141; as quintessential by Americanization, 143–45; as quintessential by originary impulses, 146–48; as quintessential by Western experience, 145–46; racialism of, 153; as social organization, 151; success of, 142; as un-American, 142; wholesome American trends and, 158. See also Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Mormonism-as-quintessential argument, 148–52 Mormons and Utah, 174, 180 Morse, Samuel, 131 mortality and individual, 71 mosque communities, 121 Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, Inc., 212 MSTA. See Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) Muhammad, Elijah, 115, 213, 214–15 Muhammad, Emmanuel A., 217 Muhammad, John, 215 Muhammad, Master Fard, 214 Muhammad, Munir, 216 Muhammad, Silias, 215, 216 Muhammad, Wallace D. See Muhammed, Warith Deen Muhammad Ali, 213 Muhammed, Warith Deen, 215 multiculturalism, Pentecostalism and, 100 music in the mass, 26

260 Muslims: in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 115; ethnic origins of American, 109; in interfaith conversations, 125; number of, 109; panethnic nature of, 121; in 1870s, 115; as socially disadvantaged, 123 mysticism, contemporary Jewish, 74 NAE. See National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) Nanak, Guru, 116 National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 94, 101 National Atlas of Religion in America (NARA), 176, 183 National Baptist Convention, USA, 208, 209 National Baptist Convention of America, 208 National Council of Churches, 3, 176 nationalistic African American new religions, 230 National Lay Commission, 51 national origin, religious experience and, 110 National Origins Act of 1924, 108 National Religious Broadcasters, 94 Nation of Islam (NOI), 115, 207, 213–15, 230; of Baltimore, 217; decline in membership of, 217; Farrakhan leadership of, 216; message of, 116; Silis Muhammad’s leadership of, 216 Nation of Yahweh, 218 Native Americans: in British colonies, 169; conversion of, during Western expansion, 170; French conversion of, 167–68; population in 1890s, 175–76; religions of, 166; traditions of, 176 nativists, 130 natural-law reasoning, 32 ‘‘The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,’’ 211 Nelson, Demosthene, 218 neocharismatic renewal, 92–93

INDEX neoclassical metaphysics, 222 Neopagan census, 238 Neopaganism, 232, 237–39 Neopagan Reconstructionist groups, 238 Neopagan witches, 231 networks: megachurches and, 202; religious identity and, 203 New Age Bible, 240 New Age movement, 237, 239–41 New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, 209 New England, 170, 179 New England Congregationalists, 171 new evangelicals, 94 New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (Barlow and Gaustad), 165, 182 New Hope Christian Fellowship O’ahu, 196 new religion classification, 232 new religious movements, 228; 1800–1977, 229–31; 1978–2005, 232–33 new thought movement, 229 New World Communications, 236 niche approach, 187–88 niche-based religious organizations, 189–94 nineteenth century and regional characteristics, 169–76 nirvana, 110 NOI. See Nation of Islam (NOI) non-affiliation. See unaffiliated regions none zone, 180 Northeast as an unaffiliated region, 180 nuclear war, 32–33 nuns, 27 occult, commercial and media attention to, 231 occult movements, 229, 230, 237 Ockenga, Harold John, 94 O’Connor, Cardinal John, 33 O’Dea, Thomas, 151 Olcott, Henry Steele, 112

INDEX old-line Protestant. See mainline Protestant denominations O’Malley, Bishop Sean, 37 ‘‘On the Duties of Catholic Politicians and Voters,’’ 31 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 87 Opus Dei, 28–29 ordained ministry in Catholicism, 58–59 ordination of women, 28, 212–13 organization(s): of laity post–Vatican II, 28; as sacred idea, 147 Oriental Exclusion Act, 230–31 Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem, 218 Original Hebrew Nation, 218 originary category of Mormonism, 147 orisha-based traditions, 219–20 Orthodox Christianity, Eastern, 167 Orthodox Judaism, 64, 75, 80 Osborn, T.L., 91 Osteen, Pastor Joel, 85, 98, 99, 100 Our Lady of Guadalupe, 131, 136, 138 Our Lady of the Angels cathedral, 137–38 Out on a Limb (MacLaine), 240 overcomers, challenges for, 101–4 Ozman, Agnes, 90 Pacific Northwest as an unaffiliated region, 180 Pagan Federation International, 238 Pali canon, 111 Pan-African Orthodox Christian Churches, 218 Pan-African Orthodox Church (PAOCC), 218 Pan-African Synod, 218 pandits, 122 pan-Pagan festivals, 238 parachurch ministries, 91 parachurch realities, 204 parents, seeking religious instruction for children, 7 Parham, Charles Fox, 90

261 parishes: American, without resident priest, 27; councils advising pastors, 26; French Roman Catholic, 167; lay decision-making responsibility in, 58; outreach methods in ethnic, 135; ruled by pastors, 47; schools and Protestant hegemony, 175 pastoral care, pandits and imams not prepared for, 122 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 32 pastoral letter on the economy. See ‘‘Economic Justice for All’’ (1986) ‘‘Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities,’’ 30 pastor as king in Catholicism, 47 pastors: aging of, 101; of megachurches, 195, 197. See also clergy PCCNA. See Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America (PCCNA) Peace of Mind (Liebman), 67 peace pastoral. See ‘‘The Challenge of Peace’’ (1983) Peay, Governor Austin, 89 PEF. See Perpetual Education Fund (PEF) Penitentes of New Mexico, 167 Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America (PCCNA), 102 Pentecostal churches in studies of demography and region, 181 Pentecostal Fellowship of North America (PFNA), 101–2 Pentecostalism: emergence of, 89–91; fundamentalism and, 86–87; growth of, 93; immigrants and, 102; Mormonism and, 143; ‘‘none zone’’ and, 181; number of counties reporting, 177; public transformation of, 91–94; as reversing trend to carnality, 90; on television, 95; in twenty-first century, 98–101; waves of development of, 90; West Coast start of, 177–78

262 Pentecostal megachurches, 100 Pentecostals, 93, 95, 101–2 Peoples Temple, 232, 233–34 perfectionism, 90 permanent deacons in the American Catholic Church, 27 Perpetual Education Fund (PEF), 162 personal reflection, 65 personal spirituality, 69, 93 personal transformation and healing, 241 Peterson, Michael, 49 PFNA. See Pentecostal Fellowship of North America (PFNA) philosophy of religion, 222 physical signs of the Khalsa, 117 physicians, U.S. need for, 109 Pichler, Joseph A., 35 pietistic protest of Pentecostals, 90 Pike, Sarah, 241 Pinn, Anthony B., 219, 220, 221 Plaskow, Judith, 73 Poloma, Margaret, 103–4 polyvocality, 223 Poole, Elijah (or Eli). See Muhammad, Elijah population, continuous growth of U.S., 5 Porter, James, 36, 49 post–civil rights era, trends in African American religion, 207–24 postmodern approaches to religion, 222 postwar (World War II) religious revival, 7–9 Potter’s House, 196, 209 Potter’s House Network, 201 poverty in the U.S., 34 Powell, Colin, 210 power manifestations, 93 pragmatist theories of religion, 222 praise music, 93 prayer(s), 65, 122 prayer groups, organized by synagogues, 79 prayer service, 76 preaching, 197 Prebish, Charles, 112

INDEX premillennialism, 88 Presbyterian Church (USA), 2, 4–5, 8, 14 Presbyterian General Assembly, 88 Presbyterian polity, 182 presbytery, 182 pre–Vatican II Catholicism, 25–26 Price, Fred, 209 Priesand, Sally, 77 priest-celebrant, facing the people, 26 priesthood as a battleground, 58 priests: number of Catholic, 27; position of, 46–48; reassigning offending, 48–49; role of, in Catholicism, 58; shortage of Catholic, 39; team of assistant, 47 Princeton Theological Seminary, fundamentalism and, 88 private spirituality in Jewish communities, 69 The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic Clergy (Peterson and Doyle), 50 process philosophy, 222 professional laity, 52 Progressive National Baptist Convention, 208, 209 pro-Israel philanthropy, 67 projects of the self, 242 Promise Keepers, 210 Prophet Muhammad, 114 prosperity gospel, 204 Protestant Christianity: European origins of, 143; Mormonism claiming no allegiance to, 143; recognizable regions of, by 1790, 168 Protestant denomination conversion efforts, 136–37 Protestant Episcopal Church, 1 Protestant Establishment. See mainline Protestant denominations Protestantism and slavery, 173 Provost, James, 40 publishing among the new evangelicals, 95 pulpits, 98

INDEX Punjab, 110 Punjabi, 122 Puranas, 113 Puritans, 167, 182 purpose-driven campaigns, 203 The Purpose-Driven Life (Warren), 195–96 push/pull forces, on world religions, 107 Quakers in the English American colonies, 167 quasi-denominations, networks and associations functioning as, 202 quasi-political aims of liberal Protestants and Catholic Christians, 191 Quincy, Josiah, 149 quintessential American religion, 141 quintessential arguments for Mormonism, 148–52 quintessential claim, doctrinal and formal foundations of, 142–43 Qur’an, 114 rabbis, 77, 78 racial and ethnic religious adherence, 178 racialism of Mormonism, 153 racialization of religion, 123, 124 racial minorities, 123 racial reconciliation, 210 radicalism, black church and, 210 Ramayana, 113 Rambur, William, 231 Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, 240–41 Raphael, Mark Lee, 77 rational choice economic modeling, 6 Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI), 54 Ra Un Nefer Amen I, 219 reactionary movement, Mormonism as, 154–55 Reformed Church in America, 2, 4–5 Reformed Protestant in New England, 182

263 Reform Judaism, 64, 77, 78 region(s): denominational character of, 177, 178; influence of, on American religious life, 165–82 reincarnation, belief in, 242 religion(s): defining new and alternative, 228; diffused throughout culture, 69; field history of, 222; new and alternative (1978–2005), 232–33; racialization of, 123 religiosity, 70 religious adherence in nineteenth century, 183 religious affiliations, 178, 183 religious belief, customizable, 187 religious celebrities, 196 religious consciousness, emerging new, 242 religious data, gathering, 176–77 religious diversity. See diversity religious dominance in regional understandings, 175 religious expression, 187 religious freedom, 124 religious groups in regions, 165 religious humanists, 220 religious identity of individuals, 186 religious institutions in West, 177 religious involvement, measures of, 13 religious life, 165–82, 186 religious oppression, 124, 127 religious organization, 204 religious persecution and Mormons, 148 religious revivals, 171, 173 religious right, 19 religious socialization, 18 religious structures, 187 religious traditions, nonindigenous, 219–20 remarried and Catholic Church, 60 repatriation efforts in Los Angeles, 133 repeat offenders, priests becoming, 49 republican heritage and Mormonism, 147 restorationism, 90

264 A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles (Williamson), 241 revivals. See religious revivals revolutionary suicide drills, 234 Rice, Condoleezza, 210 Rice, John R., 94 Ricoeur, Paul, 222 Righteous Brothers, 93 ritual observance in Judaism, 64 Roberts, Oral, 91 Robertson, M.G. ‘‘Pat,’’ 97 Robinson, Bishop Ida, 212 Roe v. Wade, 30 Roman Catholic Church: moral authority of, 56; political reach of, 29; significant numbers of people leaving, 56. See also French Roman Catholic parishes Roman Catholic Church in America: after the sex scandals, 45–60; and Americanization campaigns among Mexican-origin peoples, 134; changing face of, 39; changing the public character of, 135; and consequences of the sexual abuse scandal, 55–60; and culture war in Southwest, 175; current issues and challenges facing, 39–42; local leadership of, 41; and nativists, 130; and parish schools, 175; post–Vatican II, 27–28; providing for all needs except secular employment, 47; and sexual abuse crisis, 36–37 Roman Catholicism: as compulsory in Spanish colonial policy, 167; in dense bands of religious affiliation, 178; existing in America because of immigration, 143; of the Northeast and West, 174; regions influenced by 1830, 172 Rome Synod of Bishops (2005), 59–60 Romo, Father Toribio, 137 Roof, Wade Clark, 179, 242 Roozen, David, 2 Rosensweig, Franz, 66

INDEX Roth, Rabbi Jeff, 74 ruhaniut, 65 Ryan, Leo, 234 sacred texts in Hinduism, 113 sacred thread, religion as, 119 Saddleback Community Church, 199 Sahib, Guru Granth, 117 St. Basil’s demonstration, 129 Sakyamuni (Sakya clan sage). See Buddha Sanskrit, 111, 122 Sartre, Jean Paul, 222 satellite locations, megachurches establishing, 200 Schachter, Rabbi Zalman, 72 Scientologists, 236 Scopes, John Thomas, 89 Scopes Monkey Trial, 88–89, 230 Scott, Jason, 236 scripture, translation into English, 122 Second Baptist Church, 194–95 Second Great Awakening, 229 Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). See Vatican II Council second wave of Pentecostalism, 91 sects of Islam, 114 secularized missions, transferred to the American Catholic church, 132 secular people, 70, 71 seeker-sensitive worship, 203 seeking, spirituality of, 187 selective remembering, 13 self-identification, differing from institutional identification, 177 seminaries, Catholic operating below capacity, 27 senior ministers of megachurches, 197 Sered, Susan Starr, 68 serial predator, cases of, 50 sexism, black theology failing to address, 221 sexual abuse: bishops’ criterion on, 53; changing perception of, 46; clerical celibacy and, 46; in the Roman Catholic Church in America, 36–37,

INDEX 45, 56; scale of, among Catholic clergy, 49 sexual permissiveness, abuse as a product of twentieth century, 46 sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, 211 Seymour, William J., 90 Shahada, 114 Shakers, 2, 229 shame, 46 Shanley, Joseph, 36 Sheridan, Bishop Michael, 31 Shi’ites, 114–15 Shrine of the Black Madonna, 218 Shucman, Helen, 241 Sikhism, 109, 116–18 Sikhs: challenges of social disadvantage faced by, 123; men marrying Mexican Catholic women, 117; migration to the U.S., 117; as a minority group in India, 117; as mostly from the Indian subcontinent, 109–10; number of, 109; scriptural language of, 122; scriptures, 116; underrepresented in interfaith conversations, 125 silence of victims, 48 Singing Rabbi, 63 Sinkford, William G., 220 sisters. See nuns Six Day War, 67 slavery. See African slavery Small, Mary J., 212 small group fellowships, 192, 199 Smith, Chuck, 92–93 Smith, Elder Lucy, 212 Smith, Joseph, 149, 174 Smith, Theophus, 222 smriti, 113 social conservatism of the black church, 210 social forces: American, compared to Catholic, 38; influencing birth rate and mainline decline, 12, 17–19 social gospel, 88 social justice, 74

265 social questioning, 18 societal changes in the nineteenth century, 88 societal ills, plaguing modern Americans, 71 sojourners, 177 Soldado, Juan, 137 Sonora-towns, 131 Southern Baptist Convention, 96, 210 Southwest region, 129–32, 173–74 Spanish Catholicism, 167 Spanish colonies, Roman Catholic influence of, 166 speaking in tongues, 90, 93, 103 The Spiral Dance (Starhawk), 239 SpiralScouts International, 238 spiritual consumer, 186 spirituality: among American Jews, 64; classical definition of, 66; contrasted with law, 80; defining, via experiences of individual Jews, 65; of habitation and dwelling, 187; Hebrew word for, 65; intellectual dimension of, 72; Jews’ quest for, 66–67; within Judaism, 64–66, 72; renewed in the synagogues, 76–81; rise of Jewish, 64 Spiritual Judaism (Ariel), 66 spiritual marketplace, 242 Spittler, Russell, 228 ‘‘Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church,’’ 51 Sri Venkateswara Temple, 120 sruti, 113 standardization, 181 Stanley, Andy, 196 Stanley, Charles, 196 Stark, Rodney, 154 stem cell research, 30–31 Stevenson, J. Ross, 88 Straughn, Rogelio, 219 strictness, denominational growth and, 11 strictness thesis, 6 suburbs, 8, 17

266 Sunday schools, 122–23 Sunnis (traditionalists), 114, 115 super-Americans, Mormons as, 144 Susan B. Anthony Wiccan coven, 238 Sutcliffe, Steven, 239 Sutra Pitaka, 111 Sweeney, Douglas A., 85, 86, 100–101 Sweet, Leonard, 179 Sword of the Lord (Rice), 94, 96 synagogues: institutional rather than spiritual concerns in, 69; membership failing to rebound, 68; organizing study and prayer groups, 79; renewed spirituality in, 76–81 tallit (prayer shawl), 66 Tamney, Joseph, 242 Taylor, Gardner C., 209 technology: Pentecostals fascinated with, 95; transnational ties to, 123 teffillot (prayer groups), 76 tefillin (phylacteries), 66 television, evangelicals and Pentecostals and, 95 temples. See synagogues theodicy, 220–21 theological programs, black females graduating from, 212 third wave of Pentecostalism, 92–93 Thomas, Clarence, 210 Thoreau, Henry David, 111, 113 Thumma, Scott, 209 Tijerina, Reies, 135 Tolstoy, Leo, 149–50 Torah Only groups, 218 Tov, Ba’al Shem, 74 tradition, emphasized by Jewish Renewal, 73 transcendence, 72, 75 Transcendentalists, 111, 113 The Transformation of American Religion (Wolfe), 19 transnational citizens, Mexican immigrants as, 136 transnational religious communities, 120–25

INDEX Trask, Thomas, 103 Trial of the Century, 89 tribalisms, 230 tridimensional experience, 221 Tripitake, 111 Turner, Helen Lee, 97–98 Turner, Richard Brent, 213 turn inward in the 1970s, 63 turn to the laity of Vatican II, 59 Twain, Mark, 141 twentieth century, development of regional characteristics, 176–78 twenty-first century, role of region in, 178–82 2-percent rule, 108 UFW. See United Farm Workers (UFW) UMC. See United Methodist Church unaffiliated population, 177 unaffiliated regions, 180 unchurched mainline Protestants, 18 Understanding Church Growth and Decline (Hoge and Roozen), 2 Underwood, Bishop Bernard E., 102 Unification Church, 233, 236 uniform, worn by Sikhs, 116–17 Unitarians, 2 Unitarian Universalist Association, 18, 220 United Church of Christ (UCC), 2, 4–5, 15 United Evangelical Action (periodical), 94 United Farm Workers (UFW), 135 United Methodist Church (UMC), 2, 213 United Methodists, 4–5, 6 United Nation of Islam, 216 United Nation of Nuwaubian Moors, 219 United States: census data, 183; continuous population growth, 5; as the promised land, 142; war with Mexico (1846–1848), 130 United States Catholic Conference (USCC), 30, 49

INDEX United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 54, 61 U.S. Constitution, 142, 151, 171 U.S. immigration policy, push/pull forces influencing, 107 universalism, 29, 63 Universalists, 2 University of Notre Dame, 92 Upanishads, 113 USCC. See United States Catholic Conference (USCC) Utah, 174, 179 Vatican control, American distancing from, 38 Vatican rules, enforcement by American bishops, 32 Vatican II Council, 25; and changes in church practices, 26; conspiracy theory about liberals kidnapping, 57; looking for a new Pentecost, 92; reforms producing new methods for outreach in ethnic parishes, 135 Vedanta Society, 113, 119 Vedas, 113 venue worship services, 188 Verman, Mark, 75 victims’ rights, principles addressing, 50 Vinaya Pitaka, 111 Virgin of Guadalupe. See Guadalupe, Virgin of virtual religious quests on the Internet, 188 Vivekananda, Swami, 113 Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), 28, 49, 50 Wacker, Grant, 95 Waco tragedy, 235 Walker, Theodore, Jr., 222 Walters, Bishop Alexander, 212 war as no longer morally viable, 33 Warren, Rick, 195, 199, 203 Washington, Joseph R., Jr., 208 Watt, James, 97 Waxman, Chaim, 80–81 Weakland, Archbishop Rembert, 34

267 Webb, Mohammed Alexander, 115 Wertheimer, Jack, 70 West, diverse religious landscape of the American, 176 West, Cornel, 222 West Coast, 175 Western experience, Mormonism as quintessential through, 145–46 What the Bleep Do We Know? (film), 241 White, Alfred North, 222 White, Dr. Andrew, 149 White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus (Grant), 221 Why, Lord: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (Pinn), 221 Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Kelley), 2, 5–6, 10 Wicca, 232, 237, 238 Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (Cunningham), 239 Wilcox, Melissa, 203 Williams, Peter, 142 Williams, Raymond B., 119, 121 Williamson, Marianne, 241 Willow Creek Community Church (Chicago, IL), 203 Wilmore, Gayraud S., 210 Wimber, John, 93 Wine, Sherwin, 75 Wolfe, Alan, 19 womanist theology, 221 women: in Catholic Church, 40; in Nation of Islam, 216, 217; ordination of African American, 212–13; as rabbis and cantors, 77; Sikh men marrying Mexican Catholic, 117; spiritual qualities of, 68 Women for Family and Faith, 28 Women’s Ordination Conference, 28 Word/Faith preachers, 95 World Changers Ministries, 196, 209 World Community of Al-Islam in the West, 215 World Pentecostal Conference, 101

268 World Relief humanitarian agency, 94 world religions: adherents of, 107; in America, 120–25; in America today, 118–20 World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, 88 World’s Parliament of Religions (1893), 175, 176 worship, 98, 101, 197 Wounded Knee, 229 Wright, J. Elwin, 94 Wuthnow, Robert, 204

INDEX Yahweh, Yahweh ben, 218 yoga poses, 78 Yoido Full Gospel Church, 192 York, Malachi, 219 Young, Ed, Sr., 195 Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (Osteen), 100 Zalman, Reb, 63–64, 72, 73, 74 Zell, Tim, 238 zero tolerance policy, 56

About the Editor and Contributors CHARLES H. LIPPY has been the LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee since 1994. His interests in American religious life range widely. Among his more recent publications are Do Real Men Pray? Images of the Christian Man and Male Spirituality in White Protestant America (2005) and a new edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (2005), co-edited with Samuel. S. Hill. TORIN D. ALEXANDER, a native of Murfreesboro, TN, holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics from Vanderbilt University and the University of California at Berkeley. After receiving an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in New York, he moved to Rice University, where he is a doctoral candidate in philosophical theology and African American religion. He is married to Charvonne Boykin Alexander. STEPHEN C. FINLEY is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of religious studies at Rice University, where he studies African American religion and Islam. He is particularly interested in black religion and the body and also in ways in which religious aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ritual studies relate to issues of identity, gender, and sexuality. CHESTER GILLIS is professor and chair of the department of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is the author of Roman Catholicism in America (1999) and Catholic Faith in America (2002) and editor of The Political Papacy (2006). C. KIRK HADAWAY is a sociologist who serves as director of research for the Episcopal Church. He has published eight books, including Behold

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I Do a New Thing, Rerouting the Protestant Mainstream, and Church and Denominational Growth. He is currently president-elect of the Religious Research Association. SARAH IMHOFF is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research focus is twentiethcentury American religious history and culture. KHYATI Y. JOSHI is an assistant professor in the Sammartino School of Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is the author of New Roots in AmericaÕs Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity (2006). PAUL LAKELAND is the Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J. Professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield University. A specialist in Catholic ecclesiology and postmodern theory, he is author of Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age (1997) and Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church (2003), which won the Catholic Press AssociationÕs 2004 award for the best book in theology. PENNY LONG MARLER is a professor of religion at Samford University, Birmingham, AL. She is co-author of Being There: Culture and Formation in Two Theological Schools and Young Catholics at the New Millennium. She also currently serves as director of the Center for Pastoral Excellence at Samford. SEAN McCLOUD is assistant professor of religion and modern culture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is author of Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–1993 (2004). DAVID G. ROEBUCK received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. He is director of the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center and Archive in Cleveland, TN. Assistant professor of religion at Lee University, he also serves as the executive secretary of the Society for Pentecostal Studies and historian for the Church of God and, since 1996, is a member of the Church of God Historical Commission. He regularly contributes to books and periodicals about the Pentecostal movement. ROBERTO LINT SAGARENA received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is assistant professor of religion, American studies, and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Currently completing a history of the role of religion in the creation of the American Southwest, he has particular interest in Chicano and Latina/o religious history and the history of religion in colonial and post-colonial societies in Mexico and the United States. SCOTT L. THUMMA received his Ph.D. from Emory University. He is a sociologist of religion at Hartford Institute for Religious Research,

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Hartford Seminary. He has studied megachurches since 1988, conducting the first national academic study of megachurches in 1999 and repeating and updating the study in 2005 in conjunction with the Leadership Network. RANDI JONES WALKER is associate professor of church history at the Pacific School of Religion and serves on the core doctoral faculty of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She is author of Protestantism in the Sangre de Cristos, 1850–1920 (1991). Emma Newman: A Frontier Minister (2001), and The Evolution of a U.C.C. Style: Essays in the History, Ecclesiology, and Culture of the United Church of Christ (2005). Her current research focuses on religion, race, and public policy in the North American West. ETHAN YORGASON, a cultural/historical geographer, uses Mormonism as his major case study to explore the interconnections among place, region, and identity. He teaches in the department of history and the department of international cultural studies at Brigham Young University– Hawaii and is the author of Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region.

About the Advisory Board PHILIP GOFF is director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and associate professor of religious studies and American studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, as well as co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. His recent books include Themes in American Religion and Culture and the Columbia Documentary History of Religion in American Since 1945, edited with Paul Harvey. R. MARIE GRIFFITH is associate professor of religion at Princeton University. She is author of God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission and Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. She is currently writing a book on links between evangelicalism and sexuality and also co-editing a volume on Women and Religion in the African Diaspora. PAULA KANE is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh where she holds the Marus Chair of Catholic Studies. She teaches courses on American religious history, popular religion, religion and film, immigration, and ethnicity. Her scholarly interests include sacred architecture, mystical phenomena, and gender issues in the study of religion. She is presently completing a history of the stigmata in modern Catholicism. ANTHONY B. PINN is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religious studies at Rice University. His research interests include African American religious thought, liberation theologies, religion and popular culture, the aesthetics of black religion, and African American humanism. He is author or editor of sixteen books related to these areas of research.

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AMANDA PORTERFIELD is the Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion and director of graduate studies in religion at Florida State University. She is the author of a number of books, including Protestant Experience in America (2006), Healing in the History of Christianity (2005), and The Transformation of American Religion (2001). With John Corrigan, she edits the quarterly Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. She is a past president of the American Society of Church History. PETER W. WILLIAMS is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he has taught since 1970. A past president of the American Society of Church History, he is author of Popular Religion in America, America’s Religions, and Houses of God. He is also the editor of several reference sets, including (with Charles H. Lippy) the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience.

Faith in America

Faith in America Changes, Challenges, New Directions

Volume 2 Religious Issues Today

EDITED

BY

CHARLES H. LIPPY

Praeger Perspectives

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faith in America : changes, challenges, new directions / edited by Charles H. Lippy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-98605-5 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-275-98606-3 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-275-98607-1 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-27598608-X (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. United States—Religion. I. Lippy, Charles H. BL2525.F33 2006 2006022880 200.9730 090511—dc22 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright ' 2006 by Charles H. Lippy All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006022880 ISBN: 0-275-98605-5 (set) 0-275-98606-3 (vol. 1) 0-275-98607-1 (vol. 2) 0-275-98608-X (vol. 3) First published in 2006 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10

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8 7

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5 4

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Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Chapter 1

Public Ceremonies: Ritualizing Civic, Media, and Social Life Lee Gilmore

1

Chapter 2

American Civil Religion: Myth, Reality, and Challenges Charles H. Lippy

19

Chapter 3

A Touristic Spirit in Places of Religion Thomas S. Bremer

37

Chapter 4

Religion and Politics: The Impact of the Religious Right Julie Ingersoll

59

Chapter 5

From Southern Strategy to National Strategy: How the Christian Right Is Transforming Church-State Relations Anthony E. Cook

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

79

Queering the Mainstream, Mainstreaming the Queer: LGBT People and Religion in the United States Melissa M. Wilcox

105

Gender Matters: How Second-Wave Feminism Shaped and Reshaped American Religion Barbara Brown Zikmund

129

A Baby or a Fetus? The Abortion Debate in America Deborah L. Vess

155

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Chapter 9

CONTENTS

Christian Attitudes to Reproductive Technologies Aline H. Kalbian

Chapter 10 This Mortal Coil: Mortality, Morality, and Stem Cells David H. Smith Chapter 11 Reading Foodways as Faithways in Contemporary America Corrie E. Norman

183 201

213

Chapter 12 Sacred Bodies: Religion, Illness, and Healing Jonathan R. Baer

237

Index

261

About the Editor and Contributors

277

About the Advisory Board

279

Preface

T

he American religious landscape continues to baffle pundits. The land without a legally established church, analysts long suggested, would rapidly succumb to secularization and modernization. Fewer and fewer would identify with organized religion. Matters of faith and belief would have ever declining importance in public discourse. American men and women would increasingly regard religion as an anachronism. All of that speculation proved wrong. Among the nations of the earth, the United States continues to nurture vibrant religious institutions; millions claim religious faith as vital to their own sense of well-being; politicians freely use religious language when talking about policy; matters of ethical import still stir controversy, often leading to court cases whose resolution frequently pleases no one. If religious faith remains integral to America as a nation and to Americans as a people, that faith is not cut from a single cloth. The dynamics of religious life continue to change, bringing hope to some for an even greater influence of religion in common life and fear to others that should a single religious style gain too much influence, other perspectives will become seen as dangerous falsehood. In 1976, Newsweek proclaimed the ‘‘year of the evangelical,’’ marking the coming of age of one expression of Protestant Christianity in American life.1 In December 2005, in a highly publicized court case, a judge overturned the policy of a local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, that had required biology teachers to read a statement pronouncing evolution just theory and not a proven scientific fact and also to teach what proponents called ‘‘intelligent design,’’ an understanding that detractors saw as injecting a particular theological approach into the curriculum. The thirty years framed by those two incidents mark decades of ferment and sometimes heated discussion about the role of religion in American life. Three years before the ‘‘year of the evangelical,’’ the U.S. Supreme

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Court in Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal in the United States under particular sets of circumstances, sparking a debate over the meaning of life and theological controversies over when life itself began that continued into the years after the courts struck down the required teaching of intelligent design. Along the way, fresh controversy erupted over kindred issues such as euthanasia, stem cell research, and cloning. All those controversies had religious dimensions. Meanwhile, mainline Protestant denominations bemoaned their declining memberships, even as they watched megachurches and unaffiliated congregations mushroom in size. If membership statistics remained relatively constant, there was in the decades since 1970 a shifting in terms of where folks actually became members and also a growing number who eschewed formal affiliation even if they declared themselves to be very spiritual, although not religious. Other issues rocked the religious sector, from the fundamentalist and then Pentecostal resurgence that cascaded across American Protestantism to rancorous debates over whether gay, lesbian, or transgender persons should be welcomed into church membership, given religious blessing to unions on par with marriage, and offered opportunities to serve as clergy. Some continued to struggle with the influence of second-wave feminism; if more and more bodies ordained women to the professional ministry, the nation’s two largest Christian groups, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, remained adamant in their insistence that only men could serve in the ordained professional ministry. Changes in immigration law in 1965 meant that the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of Americans who identified themselves as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or some variant thereof. As Harvard University professor Diana Eck put it, a Christian nation had become the world’s most religiously diverse country.2 Add to this pluralistic mix a growing fascination with the Internet, a passion for nature and its spiritual resources, the horror of charges of pedophilia brought against Roman Catholic priests, debates over whether the wildly popular Harry Potter books and movies etched Satanic impulses into the minds of children, concern over the morality of stem cell research, an awareness that even dietary patterns have religious dimensions, and an array of other issues. It is clear that religion, however defined, and faith, however expressed, remain central features of American life, but features that bring a host of challenges. The thirty-six essays that comprise the three volumes of Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions probe many of these currents in American religious life. The twelve in the first volume focus primarily on the transformations that have rocked organized religious life in the United States. Those in the second move broadly into areas of challenges that have come to religious practice, while the twelve essays in the third volume focus more on matters of debate and controversy. Together they suggest that faith in America is not only alive and well, but pushing in fresh directions to speak to changing circumstances and conditions of life.

PREFACE

ix

General readers, scholars, and students will find in these essays summaries of the major trends in American religious life since the last half of the twentieth century. They will also find careful reflection and analysis on the changes and challenges that have come to religious institutions, on the array of new issues that have emerged on the religious scene, and on what the future seems to hold for that unfolding drama that is faith in America.

NOTES 1. Kenneth L. Woodward et al., ‘‘Born Again!’’ Newsweek 90 (October 25, 1976): 68–76. 2. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

Acknowledgments

W

hen Praeger editor Suzanne Staszak-Silva first approached me about organizing these volumes, I knew at once that I could not undertake the task alone. After all, what stands out as a ‘‘must discuss’’ issue or topic to one interpreter of American religious life may seem to another to be peripheral at best. Hence one of my first moves was to invite a cluster of scholars to form an advisory board that would help identify the most pertinent topics for inclusion as well as scholars who might be poised to offer insightful appraisals of those topics. I am grateful to those fellow scholars who agreed to assist in this capacity: Philip Goff of Indiana UniversityPurdue University at Indianapolis, Marie Griffith of Princeton University, Paula Kane of the University of Pittsburgh, Anthony Pinn of Rice University, Amanda Porterfield of Florida State University, and Peter W. Williams of Miami University. Thank you. Countless colleagues offered names of potential contributors, sometimes making an initial contact with them on behalf of the project before I had the opportunity to invite them to participate. Altogether, thirty-nine individuals shared their research, insight, and writing skills to bring these three volumes together. I owe each a great debt, although I am sure that there are a few who are looking forward with great delight to their appearance in print since publication will finally mean that I am no longer hounding them about an endnote reference, deadline, or seemingly awkwardly constructed prose. Much of my work on these three books was completed during the fall semester of 2005, when I was fortunate to have been released from teaching responsibilities. For making that shift in teaching duties possible, I extend my thanks to William Harman, head of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of Tennessee, and to Herbert Burhenn, then dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences and now acting university provost. I have benefited from the wise editorial counsel of

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Suzanne Staszak-Silva and Lisa Pierce at Praeger; one cannot work on a project such as this without editorial support. For more than forty years, the religious culture of the United States has consumed my intellectual interests. It is my hope that the thirty-six essays in these three volumes will stimulate your reflection on the multitudinous dimensions of religion in this most religious of nations.

CHAPTER 1

Public Ceremonies: Ritualizing Civic, Media, and Social Life Lee Gilmore

A

man places one hand on the Christian scriptures while holding the other aloft and speaks words that will authorize him to lead a nation. Patriotic memory is conferred to a former national leader who was both admired and reviled. Faithful pilgrims and secular tourists flood an urban center’s streets to capacity, collectively to mourn and observe a beloved spiritual leader’s passing. Two women declare their love and commitment to one another beneath the rotunda of a civic center, with cameras capturing and ultimately displaying their challenge to the institution of marriage. An airborne fairy flits above an ostentatious display of fireworks sent aloft to commemorate a corporate fantasyland. An irreverent street preacher blurs the lines between satire and spirit as he rallies the public to resist the evils of consumerism. As this diverse collage of events illustrates, the variety of collective ritual expressions that comes to mind when we think of the term ‘‘public ceremonies’’ can be rather broad, from presidential inaugurations to fiery festivals. Therefore, in order to stake out the particular turf to be considered here, the meanings of this term and the types of ritual activities to be considered in this context must first be delineated. Taken by itself, the term ‘‘ceremony’’ implies at least some degree of formality and prescribed or decorous behavior. We might also think of marriage, baptisms, and other ‘‘rites of passage’’ as ceremonies, undertaken to commemorate significant transitions in the individual human life cycle.1 When coupled with the word ‘‘public,’’ the term shifts definitively from the realm of private family and individual experience into the sphere of events that are shared or communal, so that the passage is now one of collective and social dimensions, rather than individual transition. The term ‘‘public’’ also tends to imply a secular rather than religious context, particularly given the ostensibly secular milieu of American public social space.

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This distinction has been supported by scholars, who have generally characterized ‘‘ceremony’’ as typically transpiring outside of, or simply not requiring, specifically ‘‘religious’’ contexts. For example, ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes has described ceremony as a ‘‘ritual mode . . . [that] includes gestures such as standing for the national anthem, wearing a tribal lip disc, or bearing a clan’s coat of arms into battle. . . . Labor rallies, political fanfares, coronations, inaugurations, convocations, Olympic games, and courtroom sessions are all laden with the pomp of ceremony.’’2 He also states that such ceremonies tend to be ‘‘of legal, tribal, or racial import,’’ and that issues of power, social drama, and social identity are central concerns in such rites.3 Another important thinker on the subject of ritual and ceremony is Catherine Bell, who has discussed the nature of both ‘‘political rites’’ and what she calls ‘‘ritual-like activities.’’ Of the first category she writes that ‘‘political rituals can be said to comprise those ceremonial practices that specifically construct, display, and promote the power of political institutions (such as the king, state, the village elders) or the political interests of distinct constituencies and subgroups.’’4 As with Grimes, Bell identifies the central concern of political rites as the legitimization and construction of social power, which is carried out by means of two general processes: First, they use symbols and symbolic action to depict a group of people as a coherent and ordered community based on shared values and goals; second, they demonstrate the legitimacy of these values and goals by establishing their iconicity with the perceived values and order of the cosmos.5

She goes on to distinguish a set of common characteristics for what she calls ‘‘ritual-like activities’’ that is also useful for this discussion, stating that these are activities displaying a certain degree of ‘‘formalism, traditionalism, disciplined invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.’’6 With these issues and insights in mind, for the purposes of this chapter we shall consider public ceremonies as social events that are collectively performed, witnessed, and consumed, serving to lend purpose, color, commentary, and often some voice of authority to shared social contexts and experiences. Furthermore, in public ceremonies social values are put on display and symbolically performed so that they may be constructed and reified, as well as contested and dismantled. Such events also often have a performative dimension—that is, their performance is intended to effect tangible social or historical transitions, passages, or other changes. Finally, these ceremonies are by definition rendered ‘‘public’’ by the broad, open nature of their audience, or by their location in public space and various civic arenas. Although other typologies could doubtless be developed, in this chapter I will explore diverse expressions of public ceremony as they transpire in three general arenas, between which there is often considerable overlap. First are those arenas that denote civil or political ceremonies, which are variously tied to and often serve to establish or underscore the legitimacy of the state. Second—and increasingly—public ceremonies may, almost by

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definition, be tied to public display in the mass media, thus necessitating a brief consideration here of the ritualistic nature of certain ‘‘media events’’ themselves. Finally, there are also ceremonies that take place within public space or property—streets, parks, and civic (which could include both government and corporate) buildings—but that are generally smaller in nature and audience, and are therefore not ‘‘publicly’’ or extensively displayed in the media. In addition, for the sake of discussion, I will here describe two general types of public ceremonies with regards to social power and social normativity: those that provide legitimacy, authority, social stability, and order through appeal to cultural symbols, themes, and narratives of normativity, and those rites that call for social transformation through the deployment of symbols, themes, and narratives of reversal, resistance, and marginality. This chapter will consider several examples of public ceremonies that evince elements of each of these general arenas and types. After looking at the nature of both political and media rituals, my examination of public ceremonies here will turn to two perhaps more unexpected sites of public ceremonies that are neither strictly ‘‘civil’’ nor ‘‘mediated’’ in nature, although they both display some of these qualities. The first of these is Disneyland, in particular the recent celebrations of this institution’s fiftieth anniversary, as an example of ceremonial location that constructs a normative, corporate ideal. The second example concerns the ritualized social critiques of a New York performance artist called ‘‘Reverend Billy,’’ leader of the ‘‘Church of Stop Shopping’’ as rituals of resistance to that same ideal. A different writer on this topic would doubtless take a different approach to this subject, examining the ceremonial examples that had emerged in his or her field of interest and experience, as the examples explored here are those that have recently gained my attention. These latter two examples are among those that, I think, illustrate the scope and breadth of public ritualizing. I have also opted to explore these ‘‘alternative’’ types of public ceremony in the interest of exploring divergent cultural views on and contemporary tensions around systems of social legitimization as well as to expand the discussions around the nature of ‘‘public ceremonies.’’

CIVIC AND POLITICAL CEREMONIES One form that public ceremonies may take is the secular ritual that serves to legitimate what has been called ‘‘civil religion.’’ This term was first used by the Enlightenment figure Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that civilized nations should be bound by a ‘‘social contract’’ and that its ideals, laws, and morals should be held ‘‘sacred’’ yet independent of both the Christian religion and the state.7 In the twentieth century, sociologist Robert Bellah popularized and expanded the term by applying it to ‘‘an institutionalized collection of sacred beliefs about the American nation.’’8 Bellah also tied the concept explicitly to national and political rites, using John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration speech and its invocation of a generically understood ‘‘God’’ as an example of civil religion. Bellah argued that civil religion and its rites serve to ritualize and legitimate

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political authority by appealing to a higher ‘‘American’’ ideal, an ideal that is regarded to be in some way ‘‘sacred’’ through association with such concepts as freedom, liberty, democracy, and justice, alongside some expression of divine blessing, regardless of the extent to which our lived national reality often fails to live up to these lofty, imagined ideals. Some civil public ceremonies are also rites of passage, such as the inaugural rite that officially confers authority to incoming American presidents. The term ‘‘rites of passage’’ (or ‘‘rites de passage’’) was originally coined by the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1908, who postulated that: the life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another. . . . For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.9

Van Gennep applied spatial metaphors to the ceremonies of such social transitions, subdividing rites of passage into three basic phases: (1) rites of separation (preliminal rites); (2) rites of transition (liminal rites); and (3) rites of incorporation (postliminal).10 Presidential inaugural ceremonies conform to this now classic tripartite structure. The day’s events typically begin with a morning prayer service at a church of the future president’s choosing, which can be understood as a rite of separation from the mundane that sets both the time and the individual apart as out of the ordinary, as well as an appeal to a divine authority for blessing and recognition. To date, this service has almost always been held within the walls of various Protestant denominations, most often at St. John’s Episcopal Church, located just across the street from the White House, although John F. Kennedy attended a Catholic mass and Jimmy Carter organized an interfaith service at the Lincoln Memorial.11 This is then followed by the ‘‘liminal phase,’’ which in this case begins with a formal procession up Washington, D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue, a journey symbolizing the transition of status through the crossing of a physical threshold from the White House onto the steps of the Capitol, where the official oath of office is taken. Most soon-to-be-presidents have made this trip riding in a chauffeured car or, previously, in horse-drawn carriages. The reciprocal relationship among the three primary branches of the U.S. government is also symbolized through the newly elected leader’s movement from one zone of public authority to another, in the journey from the president’s physical locus of power (the White House) to the site of congressional power (the Capitol). The third branch of government, the judiciary, also plays its role in the ceremony as the incoming president is sworn in by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. During this culminating act, the initiate places his right hand on a Christian Bible, often a family heirloom Bible or a historic object, such as the Masonic Bible first used by George Washington, and solemnly swears to uphold the U.S. Constitution, traditionally ending the formal oath with the phrase, ‘‘So help me God.’’ Finally, the newly sworn-in president gives an inaugural address, which serves as the rite of incorporation not only for the newly

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sanctioned leader, but for the nation as well, as he (or someday she) lays out his (or her) ideological vision for the nation. Rites of passage also mark the death of former presidents, as seen in the public ceremonies surrounding the death of former president Ronald Reagan in June of 2004.12 Thousands made a pilgrimage to the Reagan Presidential Library in southern California’s Simi Valley, where the deceased lay on public display for three days, to pay tribute to a leader who symbolized the ‘‘populist’’ conservative era of the 1980s, as reconstituted in this ‘‘official’’ act of constructing public memory. Reagan’s body was then flown to Washington, D.C., for an official state funeral, featuring a final procession down Constitution Avenue for this occasion in which the caisson (a twowheeled carriage used for such events) was followed by the traditional ‘‘riderless horse,’’ with Reagan’s boots reversed in its stirrups. His body then officially lay in state beneath the Capitol rotunda—where he had taken his second oath of office in 1989 owing to inclement weather, and finally flown back once more to southern California, for interment on the grounds of the presidential library.13 In addition to these rites marking transitions of status or circumscribing public memory, other forms of civil public ceremonies include the totemistic act of saying ‘‘the pledge of allegiance’’ to the patriotic symbol of the American flag in public classrooms all across this country, as well as the act of singing the national anthem before sporting events, themselves another kind public ritual. Even the collective act of voting for public officials can be considered to be a ‘‘public ceremony’’ whereby citizens participate in a ritualized process that results in the selection of both public figureheads (candidates) and concepts (laws and ballot measures) that will have a direct impact on our collective and individual futures. These civil ceremonies all contribute to the construction of an ‘‘imagined community,’’ a term deployed by anthropologist Benedict Anderson to describe the ideological construction of national identities: It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. . . . Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.14

By deploying typically patriotic national symbols such as the American flag, which some have identified as the quintessential American totem, or the Christian Bible, an increasingly problematic symbol given the growing pluralism of the U.S. religious landscape, public ceremonies reify this larger, imagined national identity.15

MEDIA CEREMONIES/MEDIA EVENTS In another arena for our term, public ceremonies are often those events that are rendered broadly public by way of their prominence within the

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sphere of the mass media. Increasingly during the later decades of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first century, those ceremonies that are the most extensively ‘‘public’’ are almost by definition those that are ‘‘mediated’’—that is, broadcast through televised (or now in some cases online) visual media, where the audience typically includes large numbers of the population. Both the examples of presidential inaugurations and the Reagan funeral given above are certainly of this type. Some scholars have described the ways in which the media construct social rituals in response to events of significant historic, popular, and national or international social interest, such as the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, the funeral of John F. Kennedy, or more recently the nationally televised rites of mourning that took place following the tragedy of September 11, 2001. In this manner, historic events become circumscribed as such within the public memory, through framing tropes deployed by the media, as certain symbols and discourses are displayed, and not others, thereby contributing to the legitimization of social power, customs, and norms. The concept of ‘‘media event’’ as ritual was first articulated by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, who applied the theories of anthropologist Victor Turner to their argument that media events can engender a sense of communitas—that is, a social experience marked by collective feelings of communal unity, egalitarianism, and connectedness—among very large audiences.16 Turner himself had adopted and expanded van Gennep’s initial insights into the middle or liminal phase within rites of passage, arguing that this sense of what he called communitas was characteristic of liminality.17 Yet where Turner argued that rituals of liminality and communitas generally serve to disrupt the structure of normative hierarchical relationships, thereby engendering what he called ‘‘anti-structure,’’ the media events of interest to Dayan and Katz serve to cast public figures in ‘‘mythic’’ roles, confer legitimacy, reaffirm social values, reestablish social boundaries, and define memory and history, among other attributes. Dayan and Katz were also careful to differentiate between the ‘‘ceremonial’’ media events with which they were chiefly concerned—categorized as ‘‘contests, conquests, and coronations’’—from ‘‘news’’ media events that might also enthrall national or international audiences. For example, they noted that they were ‘‘interested here in the Kennedy funeral, a great ceremonial event, and not the Kennedy assassination, a great news event.’’18 From yet another perspective, performance theorist Richard Schechner argued that ‘‘news events’’ themselves take on a ritualistic quality, though perhaps are not specifically rites or ceremonies in and of themselves, through their very repetitiveness. As he argued: The ritual is in the format, in the programming, not in the content as such. The format ensures that certain contents, certain classes of events, will be repeated; and repetition is a main quality of ritual. The sense of ‘‘real life’’ is nested in the ritual format. Each facticity is part of a sequence of similar events: This fire is followed by the next and the next; this international crisis by the next and the next.19 Examples of both of these types of media ritual were in abundant evidence on September 11, 2001, and the days following the catastrophic

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events of that day. People across the United States and around the globe experienced both unity and disgust through the media’s coverage of this tragedy. The news images repetitively displayed the hijacked planes hitting New York’s World Trade Center towers over and over again, thereby reifying the public’s collective memory of the event, distilling and simplifying the public perception of the larger contexts in which the attacks took place into these supremely shocking moments. Ritualized responses to 9/11 centered around the media also transpired on a smaller scale, as individuals gathered together to observe the coverage of the events of that day. For example, members of my own community in the San Francisco Bay area converged at one person’s house in the evening to share our sense of shock, sadness, and concern, and at the center of our gathering was a television, on which was repeatedly show the images of the second plane striking the second tower, as well as images of then–New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who came to represent an individual icon of stability, solace, and order. A few days later, other public ceremonies were staged and televised, such as the memorial held at the Washington National Cathedral on September 14, which provided a public and state-sanctioned display of the grief citizens shared and glossed the official display of mourning. Led by President George W. Bush, the service was held at a site that is simultaneously an Episcopal church and an ostensibly interfaith locus of civil religion, a ‘‘house of prayer for all people.’’20 The sermon was given by Christian evangelical preacher Billy Graham, although the memorial bestowed token attention to non-Christian religions with the presence of both a rabbi and an imam, who also led those gathered in prayer.21 One week later, on September 21, a two-hour nationally televised concert patriotically titled America: A Tribute to Heroes was shown on all of the major broadcast television channels and many cable channels as well, a media first for this type of event. The ceremony was also unique in having no advertisements, as the air time was instead used to raise money as a benefit for the families of the victims. Performing on a simple stage decorated only with a few candelabras, the faces of the famous officially represented and sanctioned the nation’s sorrow and worry. Most public ceremonies are, of course, both mediated and immediate. That is, for most people such events are witnessed solely through the framing gaze of the media, but for some they are also experienced in person, thereby continuing the overlap between the general arenas being considered here. For example, the growing prominence of gay and lesbian (and other nontraditionally gendered) weddings have lately become a controversial venue of public ritualizing, as private ceremonies have become national (and international) spectacles. Such ceremonies serve to destabilize conventional social ideals of ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’ by deploying traditional symbols—white dresses, black tuxedos, rings, flowers, and both civil and religious officiants of marriage—in new and challenging ways. In such ceremonies, those on the margins are seeking to move to the center by claiming conventional social sanctions for themselves.22

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Following San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s (albeit temporary) civil sanctioning of same-sex unions in early 2004, the national and local public eye was turned to the San Francisco City Hall. Media broadcasts and publications showed colorful lines of hopeful and patient betrothed couples, many bedecked in traditional wedding finery (though in many cases clothing choices often challenged or transcended normative gender assumptions), extending for several city blocks around the city’s Civic Center. Some San Francisco residents chose to show their support of these unions by bringing flowers, as well as offerings of food and hot coffee to those who waited in line outside City Hall in the cold and damp February air. These wedding ceremonies were at once private compacts between two individuals rendered within civic, public space, and they were also made very widely public thanks to their coverage in the media. The media peak of this event occurred when actress Rosie O’Donnell and her longtime female partner flew out from the East Coast to register their own union in San Francisco, resulting in photographs published all over the world. The public ceremonies of gay and lesbian weddings were sanctioned and made available for broadcast public consumption, thanks to O’Donnell’s celebrity. Another example of a public ceremony that was both mediated and immediate is found in the rites of mourning following the death of Pope John Paul II. This event was shared on an unprecedented international public scale, as the event became a public ceremony with multiple levels of participation. For most Americans, it was experienced as a media event, witnessed solely through the power of broadcast, radio, print, cable, and Internet media. International media broadcasts focused heavily on the official Vatican rites and liturgies stemming from this event, including the public display of the pope’s body for the ‘‘rite of visitation,’’ as well as the ritualized election of the next pope. While clearly a ‘‘religious’’ rite of the Roman Catholic Church, this was also a process that intimately concerned the civic life of the Vatican as a political body, one with considerable international political significance. Yet these public ceremonies were also immediate—that is, directly experienced—for the unprecedented number of pilgrims who journeyed to Rome to view the pope’s body and generally to be part of this historic event. The city of Rome was temporarily shut down, incapacitated by the hundreds of thousands who flocked to the Vatican to share in this public mourning. Although many of the pilgrims to Rome during those weeks in April 2005 were Roman Catholic faithful who journeyed to this sacred site in order to witness to their faith and participate in an unparalleled and important moment in their tradition, there were also doubtless a number of more clearly secular ‘‘tourists’’ who traveled to Rome simply to be part of the public experience rather than to express any personal or private faith or mourning. For example, my nephew, a secular Jew, was in Europe at the time, traversing the continent in the tradition of low-budget youth travelers. He and many of his compatriots trekked to Rome that week simply because that was the ‘‘hip and happening’’ place to be in the company of friends and fellow adventurers.

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Aside from this particular historic event, elements of pilgrimage in general might be considered another form of public ceremony, as individuals collectively journey to sites that have been tinctured with layers of cultural and often ‘‘sacred’’ meanings, intended to connect them to a shared experience of something outside their ordinary existence. Such occurrences may arise in either explicitly religious or secular contexts. Secular tourism itself has been identified as having ritualistic characteristics, although a deeper consideration of these issues is beyond the scope of this chapter.23 However, this topic does lead to a consideration of other locations of secular ritualizing, at least one of which can be understood as a quintessentially American pilgrimage site.

VARIETIES OF PUBLIC CEREMONY: CONFORMITY AND DISSENT Having identified two general and frequently overlapping arenas in which public ceremonies transpire and create Americans’ collective experiences of identity, authority, reality, and meaning, I turn attention to an application of these ideas in two different public stages from my own research archives: Disneyland and the Church of Stop Shopping. Both of these examples display varying degrees of contiguity with the ceremonial arenas discussed thus far as ritual fields for the formation of civil, national, and cultural identity that have both enjoyed in their time in the media spotlight, albeit with very different levels of intensity. The ‘‘Magic Kingdoms’’ of Disneyland and Disneyworld are notorious as realms of corporate controlled fantasy. Walt Disney imagined his first theme park, opened in 1955, as a family-friendly alternative to the rougher social elements often associated with the traveling carnivals of the day. But beyond these rather simple roots, the park and its twin, Disneyworld, would become carriers of extensive layers of cultural meanings. The almost mandatory visit that middle-class American families are expected to make to one of these theme parks at least once in their children’s youth naturally invites comparison to the hajj, the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca made by millions of faithful Muslims. Indeed, the entire proscenium of Disneyland can be understood as a kind of ritual performance, where all employees are costumed ‘‘cast members’’ and where participants’ journeys into otherworldly realms are staged as recursive games. Disneyland is at once a utopian dream land and a corporate cartoon, envisioned as a fantastic empire and, in its own terms, as ‘‘the happiest place on earth,’’ where ‘‘it makes no difference who you are . . . your dreams come true.’’24 It is a space that seeks to create a sense of cheerful and harmonious equality by imagining an ideal American community. But these ‘‘dreams’’ are those that the Disney corporation dreams for the consumer, laying claim to and recreating the symbols and legends of Western cultural mythos in their own squeaky clean image. For the privilege of buying into this carefully controlled fantasy, the Disney corporation charges a premium fee.

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Although I had visited Florida’s Disneyworld a few times in my childhood, I had never visited the mother ship until I visited Disneyland for the first time in mid-2005, during the park’s celebration of its fifty-year anniversary. I was bemused at every turn at the ritualized pastiche of the exotic in dozens of venues. The day began with retro-hip-kitsch of the Tiki Room, replete with cultural stereotypes of Oceanic cultures, and the invocations to pagan Hawaiian and other Polynesian deities in the courtyard outside—Pele, Rongo, and Tangaroa. Midday found us witnessing the infamous high-gloss global multiculturalism of It’s a Small World, with its overwhelming optimism, idealistic sincerity, and mind-numbing ritualistic repetition. In the early evening, I could not partake of The Pirates of the Caribbean without thinking of the notion of ‘‘pirate utopias’’ as historic zones of freedom, anarchy, and temporary autonomy, as proposed by cultural theorist Hakim Bey.25 Yet while my own inner-culture-critic couldn’t help but be affronted by the layers of cultural appropriation and misinterpretation, neither could the inner-five-year-old not also be delighted by the memories the experience triggered. As much as the place is a Mecca for modern consumerism, it is also the bearer and reinterpreter of fantastic traditions and mythemes that have long occupied the Western worldview and subconscious. A few months after my own pilgrimage to Disneyland, I was struck by an article in Vanity Fair magazine that compared the spectacle of Disney to a ‘‘pagan cult,’’ saying: I thought about everything it was and it wasn’t, the cornucopia of image, illusion, and icon, and realized, very much to my delight, that Disney is a freaking pagan cult, that this goody-two-shoes American institution is promoting a primitive, animist religion dedicated to investing everything with life, to animating everything from teacups to trees, from carpets to houses, from ducks to mice, with the pulse of human aspiration.26

The author went on to compare Disney to a cargo cult, saying: Every chunk of arcane cargo, ardent magic, and pantheistic bric-a-brac that ever washed up on the shores of the New World from the Old had been evoked that night. Every dazzling, idolatrous image that had ever been smuggled ashore, only to be suppressed by Puritan iconoclasts, and been invited back to adorn a new cosmos, to celebrate the restoration of a lost magical world presently in the sole possession of children.27

The author’s simplistic read of the nature of paganism, animism, and cargo cults notwithstanding, these quotes nevertheless get at the ritual effervescence that suffuses and exudes from Disneyland. It has come to embody America’s collective desire for magic and the extraordinary, themes that were vividly brought to life by the fireworks ceremony commemorating and extolling the park’s creation. Another journalist, this one a religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, similarly observed the preference for ‘‘magic’’ over ‘‘religion’’ as the

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supernatural trope of choice, invoking early-twentieth-century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski as he wrote: There is a key theological dimension to Disney’s choice of magic over religion. . . . Magic, Malinoswski said, ‘‘is an attempt to manipulate spiritual forces so that the supplicant gets what he or she wants, whereas in pure religion [sic] the individual surrenders to spiritual forces so that those forces (i.e. God) can do through him or her what those forces desire.’’28

The scurrilous ‘‘magical’’ and ‘‘pagan’’ undercurrents within Disney’s sources of imagination notwithstanding, this writer’s conclusion supports the prevailing view of Disney as a positive source to engender ‘‘family values,’’ arguing that Disney’s films are ‘‘useful tools in building a general, moral sensibility among children and in reinforcing parental and religious values.’’29 Disney’s turn to pre-Christian mythology and iconography for many of its animated features, and in turn themed ‘‘rides’’ within the parks themselves, has been known to cause trouble between the Disney corporation and conservative Christians, who promoted a boycott of the Magic Kingdoms in the mid-1990s. Thus, Disney has also often been the focus of public critique from both the ‘‘left’’ and the ‘‘right,’’ as attendees are not blind to the ‘‘staged authenticity’’ of an experience that is bought and sold, wrapped in a corporate bow.30 My own day at Disneyland, which was at once extraordinarily surreal and utterly banal, culminated in an impressive commemorative ‘‘fireworks spectacular,’’ a pyrotechnic history of Disneyland’s fifty-year sovereignty over the American public imagination titled ‘‘Remember . . . Dreams Do Come True.’’ The public ceremony was one of reifying the collective image of Disney as a normative fantasy land, as a place to live out an idealized family fantasy on the theme of magic, hopes, and dreams coming true, for a specifically circumscribed time and place. The cultural thefts and corporate repackagings for which Disney is famous were in abundant evidence, as the soundtrack traced the history of the Disney empire, from the nativity of Mickey Mouse, to the pure and innocent/wicked and wise feminine archetypes of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella to the indigenous ancestor reverence of The Lion King, to the utopian futurism of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear. By ceremonially appropriating and successfully deploying these layers upon layers of cultural mythos, the entreaty for magical wishes made upon a star and dreams coming true seemed quite sincere as fantastic fireworks and the now-classic Disney tunes filled the air. Finally, Tinkerbell herself from Peter Pan, the embodiment of the power of childhood magic to keep real fairies alive and an emblem of all that Disney claims to represent (far beyond the children’s story first authored by Victorian playwright J.M. Barrie), soared through the skies high above, a costumed acrobat on a high-wire, fluttering above the Magic Kingdom’s glittering castle. Given the centuries, if not millennia, of the deep history of the symbolic universe out of which Disneyland constructs its Magic Kingdom, this self-congratulatory pyrotechnic extravaganza participated in a kind of civil

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religious discourse through its symbolic performance of quintessentially American narratives of individual identity and community values. Through the context and experience of this public ceremony, an idealized history of the American public imagination was displayed and reflexively constructed in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Disney corporation’s own social location in the American national identity, by promoting the cosmic constellation of its own borrowed icons.

STOP SHOPPING A final venue of public ceremony to investigate are political protests as carefully staged counter-ceremonies in which both small and massive groups mobilize in order to symbolically challenge current events, prevailing attitudes, and public policy. Over the past several decades, such events have become more and more theatrical, as various activist cohorts design costumes, puppets, and other dramatic objects that help to instill a mood of ritual and ceremony within these demonstrations. For example, an artistically inclined San Francisco–based collective called Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, first formed in 1989, creates massive symbolic ‘‘puppets’’ that are part-costumes worn by individuals and part-giant marionettes with appendages controlled by other performers. These colorful contraptions— which take the forms of animals, elements, and Mother Earth, to name just a few examples—are paraded through city streets during public demonstrations as well as theatrical public performances, adding a dramatic and ritualistic flair to politically charged events.31 Another example can be seen in the work of a New York–based group called Greene Dragon, first organized in response to the 2002 Republican party convention held there. It takes its name from the pub that was the gathering place of the instigators of a historic act of patriotic political resistance, the famous Boston Tea Party. Members’ participation in larger organized public protest events is distinguished by their eighteenth-century costumes: powdered wigs, three-cornered hats, breeches, and ball gowns—often in the colors red, white, and blue and usually embellished with a twenty-first-century twist.32 But the specific set of examples I wish to showcase are the political protests, performances, and public ceremonies of another New York–based performance artist who calls himself ‘‘Reverend Billy’’ (a.k.a. Bill Talen), who is the leader of the ‘‘Church of Stop Shopping’’ and who orchestrates various public rituals and events that challenge the prevailing corporate hegemony. Talen, who had formerly directed a San Francisco production company called Life on the Water in the late 1980s and 1990s, moved to New York in the mid-1990s where he eventually reinvented himself as ‘‘Reverend Billy.’’ Inspired in part by his friend and mentor the Rev. Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal priest with long ties to the New York theater community whose parish (St. Clement’s) also served as a part-time theater for which Talen became the house manager, Talen soon took this character into the

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street and began to preach his unique gospel on the dangers of multinational corporations and mindless consumerism in full and fiery evangelical style.33 Costumed as an evangelical preacher, complete with a clerical collar and an off-white polyester sport coat, Rev. Billy and the two-dozen-strong Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, themselves dressed in bright gold satin robes, target stores like Starbucks and Wal-Mart, both reviled in some circles for their reputation for pushing out local businesses whenever they move into a neighborhood. These ‘‘retail interventions’’ include vocal prayers for the ‘‘exorcism’’ of cash registers and credit cards, as when Rev. Billy in many performances has called ‘‘the God that is not a product’’ and ‘‘the Goddess who would never allow herself to be frozen and denippled in a Starbucks logo.’’ Billy’s performed actions have also included a critique of the Disney franchise, as he has been known to storm into the massive Disney store in New York’s Times Square, which became a dominating force in that neighborhood during the Giuliani-era as the district’s odd assortment of street performers and peddlers were driven out, with a stuffed doll of Mickey Mouse stapled to a cross, praying for the demons of blind consumerism and ‘‘sweatshop labor’’ to be driven out. Other ceremonies performed by Billy and the church have included ‘‘canonizations’’ of various civic leaders who work for social justice and against corporate globalization, such as former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez, as well as like-minded artists and writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut. Their onstage performances (or ‘‘services’’) regularly include sincerely intoned and deeply felt prayers for Americans to stop mindlessly shopping, for an ailing choir member to heal swiftly, or for the future life of a community member’s newborn child. Billy also involves the audience in the performances, for example when he instructs those gathered to reach out and feel one another’s pulses, a simple gesture through which participants were reminded of their shared humanity and of the quiet rhythm of life that unites and enlivens us. Rev. Billy and the choir regularly travel around the United States in order to preach their unconventional ‘‘gospel’’ in various communities and to lend their support to local progressive causes and initiatives. During a visit to San Francisco in June of 2005, they marched into city hall to proselytize and encourage the board of supervisors one by one to vote for recently proposed legislation that would prohibit the city from engaging in contracts with companies that use sweatshop labor. Billy and his compatriots went from office to office, placing their hands on the supervisors’ desks and offering a prayer that the civic leaders would be divinely moved to ‘‘do the right thing.’’34 Based on my first brief glimpse of Rev. Billy in a documentary film, I was expecting a cynical and somewhat caustic parody.35 I didn’t expect to like his work, let alone be moved and inspired, but the performance which Billy and the choir gave on the first night I viewed it completely outshone my expectations. I soon saw that although the style Rev. Billy and his collaborators had adopted was satirical and somewhat contrived, the message

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they preached was genuine and deeply felt.36 I was deeply impressed by lyrics such as: When did we start to believe beyond you When did the product die on the shelf I think you lost us when you said There is nothing to love but fear itself There is nothing to love but fear itself You said, Life on Earth is a network of terror And shopping keeps the demons in the zoo. Well it’s not that we’re young, or we’re black, or we’re labor. Until you change, we’re the devil to you. Until you change, we’re the devil to you.37

Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping blur the lines between sarcastic satire and sincere spiritual depth. In utilizing this ambiguity, they destabilize assumptions about what constitutes religion, spirituality, ritual, ceremony, activism, theater, and satire. Rev. Billy engages in a self-conscious reversal as the evangelical motif is sapped of its traditional associations, while simultaneously usurping those symbols to create an authentic spiritual critique. The gospel theme utilized in the church’s music also conveys an effective ritual style, one that has a powerful cultural resonance for many, although the traditional meanings of these symbols and signifiers are reversed or realigned. In accurately harnessing this ceremonial mode, Billy and the choir step into a place that resides on the border between the silly and the serious. There is a power in that ‘‘liminal’’ space, in that between-ness, something capable of touching people deeply, and that can begin to break down the barriers between everyday banality and the magic of a perhaps more inspired and sustainable way of life. Billy also utilizes the character of the court jester or trickster, whose declarations are at once jokes that lighten the heart but also contain truths to which the political establishment may be afraid to give voice. He is also an heir to theatrical schools such as Richard Schechner’s and Jerzy Grotowski’s, which have sought to disrupt the boundaries between performers and audiences by explicitly utilizing the power of theater as ritual to reach people on visceral levels.38 In Billy’s impassioned public ceremonies, he is addressing feelings of emptiness that perhaps many in our society experience, places where corporate, commodified culture has seeped in and colonized spaces within individual souls, and ‘‘exorcising’’ those ‘‘demons,’’ if only to make individuals more aware of the unwavering grip of corporate culture on our lives and worldviews. The public performances and rituals of Rev. Billy can be understood as a form of public ceremony that participates in public and civil religious discourse. In addition to the stage shows, ‘‘sermons,’’ and activist interventions, the public ceremonies of the Church of Stop Shopping and other political activists are often targeted at ‘‘reclaiming’’ the so-called public ‘‘commons,’’ which can be defined as ‘‘resources that are not divided into individual bits of property but rather are jointly held so that anyone may use them without special permission.’’39 By assuming and

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reinventing the quintessentially American symbol of the pompadoured evangelist and leveling his critique at a perceived emptiness at the heart of the U.S. civil and corporate culture, Billy and the choir aim their rituals, ceremonies, and performances at reclaiming public or common spaces by employing and valorizing the long-cherished ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. Unlike in the formal and remote civil ceremonies of presidential rites of passage and the like, or a celebration of the normative fantasy realm of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, in Rev. Billy’s public ceremonies social values are contested, deconstructed, and re-centered, creating a vision of American civil society and religion that is simultaneously politically subversive and idealistically patriotic.

PUBLIC CEREMONIES IN AMERICAN LIFE The phenomenon of ‘‘public ceremonies’’ in the United States could be examined from numerous angles. I have briefly considered just a few specific ritual expressions in order to discover the ways in which such events serve to shape and contest the bounds and discourses of American social contexts and common life. In so doing, I have framed this observation primarily within two general and overlapping arenas of expression: civil and political ceremonies, including those that support as well as those that resist or challenge the established social order; and media rituals made broadly public by way of their prominence within the global spheres of the mass media. Public ceremonies are often chiefly concerned with either displays that serve to endorse and consolidate normative social power, or with challenging and resisting that social order. Mediated public rituals—from rites of mourning for national tragedies, to queer marriage rites, to last rites of passage for deceased leaders—all serve to frame public perception and reify public memory. Public ceremonies are often performative—that is, they may effect tangible social or historical changes, as rituals intended to define a public’s national identity. Some ceremonial sites investigated here may evince a cultural shift in which public ritualization is more and more being displaced onto zones that would be conventionally considered as ‘‘secular,’’ yet these public rites may also contain sacred and private dimensions for their participants, thereby destabilizing the distinction between the ‘‘sacred’’ and the ‘‘secular.’’ By expanding the category of ‘‘public ceremonies’’ to include the perhaps more surprising examples of the ritual life of Disneyland and Rev. Billy’s unique voice of public protest, my intention has been to examine and uncover the pervasiveness of public religious, civil, and cultural symbols as they are deployed in diverse contexts to both construct and authorize, as well as resist and critique America’s social identities.

NOTES 1. On ‘‘rites of passage,’’ see Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (1908; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

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2. Ronald L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies (1982; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 47. 3. Ibid., 47–48. 4. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 128. 5. Ibid., 129. 6. Ibid., 138. 7. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920). 8. Robert Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Daedalus 96 (1967): 1–21. 9. Van Gennep, 2–3. 10. Ibid., 11, 13. 11. Information on the history of U.S. presidential inaugurations was gathered from the Web site of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies available at www.inaugural.senate.gov, accessed October 21, 2005. 12. For details of the ceremonies surrounding Ronald Reagan’s death, see www.whitehouse.gov/reagan, accessed October 21, 2005. 13. A journalist for the Village Voice suggested that Reagan should have been buried at Disneyland because of his talent for convincing the public of his own highly polished vision of reality: ‘‘Ronald Reagan is the man who destroyed America’s sense of reality . . . it was Reagan, whose most profound Freudian slip was the immortal ÔFacts are stupid things,Õ who beguiled us into living in the theme park full-time.’’ See Tom Carson, ‘‘Death of a Salesman,’’ Village Voice (June 7, 2004), available at www.villagevoice.com/news/0423,carson,54137,1. html, accessed October 15, 2005. 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; New York: Verso, 1991), 5–7. 15. See Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 16. See Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 17. See, among others, Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 315. 20. Quote from Washington National Cathedral Web site, available at www. cathedral.org/cathedral, accessed October 16, 2005. 21. See Christopher S. Wren, ‘‘Bush Leads Memorial Service for Victims of Terror Attack,’’ New York Times (September 14, 2001), available at www.nytimes. com/2001/09/14/national/14CND-PRAYER.html?ex=1130126400&en=98992 ed357251df2&ei=5070, accessed October 21, 2005. 22. The term ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’ was coined by Adrianne Rich. See her ‘‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (Summer 1980): 631–60. 23. For scholarly considerations of both pilgrimage and tourism, see, among many others, Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Simon Coleman and John Eade, eds., Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (New York: Routledge, 1992).

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24. See the official Disneyland Web site at www.disneyland.disney.go.com, accessed October 26, 2005. 25. See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991). 26. Dave Hickey, ‘‘Welcome to the Magic Kingdom,’’ Vanity Fair (August 2005): 149. 27. Ibid. 28. Mark I. Pinsky, The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 4. 29. Ibid., 12. 30. The term ‘‘staged authenticity’’ was coined by Dean MacCannell. See his The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1989). 31. For more on the Wise Fool collective see www.zeitgeist.net/wfca/wisefool. htm, accessed October 21, 2005. 32. For more on Greene Dragon, see www.greenedragon.org, accessed October 21, 2005. 33. Lanier cofounded the American Place Theater company and was the cousin of playwright Tennessee Williams. 34. See Leslie Fulbright, ‘‘Rev. Billy warns of rampant consumerism’s eternal price,’’ San Francisco Chronicle (June 4, 2005), available at www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/04/BAG6ED3FO81.DTL, accessed October 26, 2005. The legislation was passed in August 2005. 35. Directed by Jill Sharpe, this film was titled Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture. See www.culturejamthefilm.com, accessed October 21, 2005. 36. Talen later told me that his one-time director, Tony Torn, had counseled him to stretch beyond the limits of simplistic parody, saying that such banal acts could be seen regularly on forums like Saturday Night Live. 37. From ‘‘The Beyond Song,’’ composed by one of Talen’s collaborators, Benny Key. 38. See Schechner and also Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), among others. 39. Definition from www.creativecommons.org/about/legal, accessed October 21, 2005.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Grimes, Ronald L. Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Marvin, Carolyn, and David W. Ingle. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969.

CHAPTER 2

American Civil Religion: Myth, Reality, and Challenges Charles H. Lippy

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ore than a generation has passed since sociologist Robert Bellah first published his now classic essay, ‘‘Civil Religion in America.’’1 In that essay, Bellah argued that there flourished in the United States a clearly definable religion that existed alongside more traditional religions. It provided a core of values, ideals, and beliefs that molded the disparate American people into a unified commonwealth. Drawing on biblical images of a providential God active in history and rooted in events such as the American Revolution and the Civil War, this civil religion transcended mere nationalism in its celebration of liberty, equality, and justice and endowed the American enterprise with cosmic significance. Bellah’s essay generated extraordinary interest, sparking many conferences devoted to the theme in the decade that followed. It triggered a host of other articles and books that sought either to refine the hypothesis or to dismantle it, and it raised ongoing questions about just what it was that set the proverbial ‘‘melting pot’’ of a nation apart from others and gave its people common ground. In retrospect, it is clear that Bellah’s contention about an American civil religion was inextricably wedded not only to the social and cultural currents cascading through American society in the 1960s, but also to those that informed the period in American life from the close of World War II at least to the outbreak of the civil rights movement in the later 1950s. Some of that contextualization came into focus in Bellah’s subsequent monograph on American civil religion. Its title and subtitle betrayed its concern: The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial.2 By the time that work appeared, Bellah himself had become anxious about the fragility of whatever common threads held the American people together. As a sociologist in the Durkheimian tradition, he believed that

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common values and the moral behavior that issued from those values were essential to national well-being and identity. By the second half of the opening decade of the twenty-first century, the United States had undergone considerable cultural transformation since Bellah first articulated his concerns. American society had become much more ethnically diverse than it had been then, and its religious complexion even more pluralistic. More and more the historical base supporting the idea of an American civil religion seemed a mythic reconstruction of an idealized past, especially the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Hence it is worth asking whether there remains— or perhaps ever was—at the symbolic center of American culture a constellation of values and beliefs, what Bellah meant when he borrowed the designation ‘‘civil religion’’ from Jean Jacques Rousseau, that provides a sense of common identity and cultural unity to the peoples called American.3 Before wrestling with that issue, however, we must look more closely at the religious and cultural contexts that informed Bellah’s conviction about the existence of an American civil religion. That analysis will demonstrate that Bellah did predicate his hypothesis on a mythic construction of the American past; in other words, he created a past in which common values and a common identity mattered both because they were once essential to social unity and because such seemed missing in his own day. Next we shall scrutinize the years immediately following the close of World War II; it will become clear that social and cultural forces pervasive in those years were actually creating the foundation on which Bellah could build his hypothesis. We shall next probe whether Bellah’s civil religion actually did provide the broadly based sense of social cohesion and common values that he claimed. Then we shall explore forces that have marked American life in the ensuing decades that raise even more profound problems for advancing the argument that there is a single, distinctive set of beliefs and practices that provides all Americans with a sense of identity as Americans.

THE CIVIL RELIGION HYPOTHESIS AND THE AMERICA OF THE 1960s When Bellah’s essay first appeared, American culture seemed to many to be at a critical juncture. The civil rights movement that began with the Montgomery bus boycott of December 1955 had taken an increasingly radical turn.4 With black Muslims calling for racial separatism and branding white Americans as devils, the social movement based on nonviolent protest and visions of a racially inclusive society seemed to have degenerated into chaos. The world King envisioned in his famous ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech delivered at the 1963 March on Washington had become blurred. The summer of 1967 was the summer when cities burned, as Americans experienced rioting and destruction in urban areas across the nation, even within blocks of the national capitol in Washington, D.C. When King was assassinated in April 1968 and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy

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soon after, Americans relived the death of President John F. Kennedy less than five years earlier. They also came to share a fear that violent social protest was undermining the very fabric of the society. The civil rights movement and its accompanying social unrest represent only one dimension of the tumult that seemed to threaten the common life of Americans. From the time that the United States sent military advisors to Southeast Asia in the mid-1950s, national defense and security had become increasingly embroiled in the effort to halt the spread of communism in that region, particularly in Vietnam. As the American military presence grew from a handful to hundreds of thousands and as some voices kept insisting that only an infusion of thousands more troops would assure victory, concern over the wisdom of American policy grew in seemingly geometric proportions. Anti-war activity, like civil rights matters, became a matter of daily news, especially as it consumed the energy of college and university students who saw their peers drafted for service in ever larger numbers. Some male students burned their draft cards as a symbol of their opposition to the war; others fled to Canada to avoid conscription. The courts wrestled with cases brought by those who wished to claim selective conscientious objection—that is, conscientious objection to this particular military endeavor, not necessarily to all—or who espoused conscientious objection because of their personal philosophy, not because of their membership in one of the historic ‘‘peace churches’’ like the Society of Friends or the Church of the Brethren. Anguish over the war and objection to American policy became so pervasive that in March 1968 President Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation when he announced on national television that he would not seek nomination to run for another full term in that year’s presidential election. African Americans and those opposed to American military engagement in southeast Asia were not the only ones whose actions and public statements raised concerns about the cohesiveness of American society. Women were becoming increasingly vocal about matters of gender disparity in American life, about the extent to which discrimination based on gender effectively restricted access of women to some occupations and professions, and about the ways in which cultural stereotypes of gender roles had since the nineteenth century increasingly relegated women to a second-class status of dependency on fathers and husbands in almost every venue, but even for their surnames. A host of other ‘‘liberation’’ movements soon followed. Perhaps the most well-known is that which traces its roots to the group primarily of gay men and transvestites who resisted arrest when the police in the summer of 1969 raided Stonewall, a bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village that served a primarily homosexual clientele. Native Americans also began to question just how much a stake they had in American society. Recalling the brutality of forced relocation to reservations in the nineteenth century, often far removed from ancestral lands, the violence of Wounded Knee (1890), and the rampant discrimination in employment, Native Americans added their collective voice to the chorus of those who felt that mainstream American society—whatever that was— had given them a rotten deal.

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With this maelstrom of apparent dissatisfaction with so many facets of American life marking the culture of the 1960s, little wonder that at middecade, when some of these forces were at their peak and others just emerging, Bellah began to ask questions about social cohesion, about common values, about the shared identity of Americans as Americans. Even if there were signs that this commonality was endangered (recall the subtitle of Bellah’s subsequent book), Bellah was optimistic when he surveyed the American past. There he saw evidence that a providential deity had guided the events of American history to create and sustain a nation where liberty, justice, and equality were bedrock ideas in the shared ideology of its people. He looked to presidential inaugurations as times when the people came together to affirm those values, little matter that all those presidents had been white males. He also identified sacred places, usually battlefields, where freedom had been secured at the time of the American Revolution or reaffirmed in the wake of a Civil War. Yet the catalogue of those excluded from the vision of a national civil religion postulated a generation ago suggests that the hypothesis was flawed at best: African Americans who had endured a heritage of slavery, segregation, and racism; women who were denied full rights as citizens; Native Americans whose encounter with American ideals meant the mutilation of a cultural identity that had its own integrity; gay and lesbian Americans who in the 1960s frequently found that acting on their sexual orientation brought them afoul of the law in a land that proclaimed justice and equality for all; war protesters whose pride in their own nation prohibited intrusion in the internal affairs of another people. The civil religion that Bellah found existing alongside other institutional religions was a construct that emerged from the experience of white men of privilege; the past that the civil religion celebrated was that of white heterosexual men who held hegemonic power. Decisions in the nation’s courts raised a different set of questions about whether a substratum of common beliefs and values, a civil religion, was functioning in the America of the mid-1960s. In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two decisions that more than forty years later remain the topic of much controversy.5 In one, the court ruled that devotional Bible reading in public schools represented an unconstitutional violation of the clause in the First Amendment providing for so-called separation of church and state; in the other, the court ruled that even generic prayer could not be required of students as a mandatory devotional exercise. In neither instance did the court place restrictions on the academic study of religion or even of sacred texts, such as the Bible, in public school curricula, although school boards and textbook publishers for the time being scurried to remove any and all references to religion from materials in use. The court decisions represented a nod to the depth of religious pluralism in the nation, even if that pluralism was not readily apparent, for example, in rural school districts in the Midwestern heartland where a common religious style might well have transcended denominational differences. Opponents of the court decisions claimed that the rulings effectively removed God from the schools and thus represented the

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intrusion of a dangerous humanism into school systems. If religious exercises of any sort were banned from the nation’s public schools, where would one find a shared basis for morality or even for an identification with the nation and its history? One response was to be found in the sort of civil religion that Bellah proposed. Devoid of theological particularity and ties to any one religious group or denomination, civil religion could effectively replace the tacit cohesion once symbolized in the simple religious exercises in many schools—a Psalm reading at school assemblies, perhaps, and recitation of a generic prayer. Through the civil religion, one affirmed one’s identity as an American. The civil religion hypothesis thus sought to respond to another cultural trend of the 1960s, one in some ways perhaps more important than the challenges to various kinds of authority signaled by the various civil rights and liberation movements and anti-war activity, for court decisions have a way of impressing themselves on the public consciousness for generations. Other questions about that civil religion complicated the picture and raised additional concerns about not only its viability, but also its very existence. Some were apprehensive about whether what Bellah saw actually merited the designation of a religion. They claimed that there had long been connections, in the United States and elsewhere, between nationalism and religion and that peoples the world over had used religious language and religious constructs to give some overarching meaning to their own experience as a people. Some argued that not every use of religious imagery denoted the existence of a fully formed religion; indeed, some could be social convention as much as indicators of a deeply felt belief, as, for example, when politicians ended campaign speeches and formal addresses with the tag line ‘‘God bless America.’’6 As some analysts became increasingly aware, nonbelievers in any religion (not necessarily rampant atheists, but those that many commentators lumped into the category of the ‘‘unchurched’’) who would be apprehensive about making any theological claims for the nation had a long history in the United States.7 At the other extreme were those like Jehovah’s Witnesses whose religious convictions forbade them from assigning to any political order divine approbation. What spurred the hope of finding a vibrant civil religion, it now seems clear in retrospect, was the degree of social unsettledness that accompanied all of these movements and concerns. In a word, Americans who came of age in the 1950s were unaccustomed to social protest. They were unaccustomed to the challenges to authority that seemed inherent in the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, gay liberation efforts, and other cognate endeavors. Having lived through an epoch of economic depression and world war, they were more comfortable with efforts to promote solidarity than with attempts to identify flaws in the social fabric. In doing so, they presumed that there had been an American society in the past where harmony and unity prevailed. What made the 1960s seem all the more problematic and the quest for common values and beliefs in a civil religion all the more imperative was the perception that whatever had

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sustained that harmony and unity was coming apart at the seams. In this context, the immediate background of those years from the close of World War II to the outbreak of social unsettledness linked to the civil rights movement becomes vital to understanding what made the notion of an American civil religion plausible.

THE MYTH OF A COMMON PAST It is my contention that the cultural and religious forces that prevailed in American life from roughly the end of the Second World War at least until the outbreak of the civil rights movement—and in some cases even after that—were responsible for creating the sense of shared identity that allowed Bellah and others to assert that there was a mythic past sustaining an American civil religion that gave coherence and cohesion to the common life of the American people. In the immediate postwar years, as James Hudnut-Beumler has demonstrated, there was a surge in construction of religious structures across the nation that appeared to accompany a boom in religious adherence and participation.8 Some of that purported growth in adherence stemmed from the return of millions from military service and the efforts of families to establish lives for themselves apart from Depression and war. As families relocated to take advantage of employment opportunities, suburbs began to mushroom, creating the need for new religious edifices to meet their needs. As well, during the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, much-needed renovation and expansion of existing religious structures had been put on hold; members simply did not have the disposable financial resources to underwrite their cost. To the casual observer, the growth in the value and size of physical plants of religious institutions suggested a boom in the nation’s religious life. At the same time, a spirit of cooperation emerged, particularly among mainline Protestant bodies. In 1950, the Federal Council of Churches that had formed early in the century largely to help coordinate social service ministries among member denominations, reformed itself as the National Council of Churches. As an umbrella organization enjoying the support of many of the nation’s Protestant bodies, the council spawned state and local affiliates that, in turn, helped plan church growth and development in the fast-growing suburbs. Instead of competing for souls, cooperating with fellow Protestant Christians became the byword of the day. A lasting monument to the ecumenical spirit came in the erection of the Interchurch Center in New York City, with President Dwight Eisenhower participating in the ceremonies that marked the laying of the cornerstone. Here was a visible symbol of unity and common identity. Underneath this spirit of ecumenical frenzy and rapid suburban expansion came a minimizing of denominational distinctiveness among the religious communities themselves. In working together, it was important to emphasize shared convictions, beliefs, and practices, not the unique history and heritage of a particular body. Along with this erosion of difference came a dramatic increase in the rate of marriage across denominational lines. After all, if

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one denomination was pretty much the same as another, it did not matter, for example, if a Baptist married a Methodist or a Presbyterian married a Lutheran. There were common bonds that brought all together despite surface differences. Reinforcement of the common values, if not beliefs, in much of American Protestantism came unwittingly from the person whose style became synonymous with evangelism in the 1950s, Billy Graham.9 Coming to public attention following an evangelistic revival—crusade was Graham’s term for the endeavor—in California and then a highly successful campaign in 1954 in a Britain still struggling to regain a sense of national soul after World War II, Billy Graham became an American icon following his New York City crusade in 1957. Held in Madison Square Garden in the heart of Manhattan, the crusade was extended several times, climaxing in an outdoor service held at Yankee Stadium. As with other campaigns, Graham came to New York because there was widespread support for his labors among the churches and clergy of the city. Countless area pastors had the privilege of sitting on the platform at a service, thus lending an aura of authoritative support to Graham’s preaching and emphasis. Denominational affiliation made no difference. Although Graham himself was a lifelong Southern Baptist, he made no intentional reference to his denomination in his preaching, encouraging hearers to heed only his biblical message and call to conversion. Those who responded to Graham’s invitation to commit themselves to the Christian way found themselves meeting with trained counselors who also reflected diverse denominations and then being referred to congregations in the neighborhoods where they lived, without regard to denomination. Graham’s approach and message had two important consequences for the developing myth of the America of the 1950s as a religious (if not Christian) land. One was the sense that denominational difference had no significance, for the message was the same for all. The other was the sense that this ‘‘least common denominator’’ Protestantism set Americans apart from other peoples in the world. In the 1950s, that meant Americans were to be distinguished particularly from those associated with Soviet communism—godless communism. Americans were united in their opposition to communism as an economic and political system; adding a religious dimension that accented agreement and minimized difference only strengthened the popular belief that it was the American nation’s religious character that provided the bulwark against threats of annihilation from godless Communists led by the atheist Stalin. At least whatever differences there were in matters of religious belief and practice were of no account when it came to pitting American democracy against Soviet communism. Other symbols emerged in the 1950s that gave added credence to that sense of religious commonality amid diversity. One was the increasing use in academic circles of the phrase ‘‘the Judeo-Christian tradition’’ to link the Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox heritages together because of their connections to the biblical heritage. Another came in an act that went almost unnoticed at the time, Dwight Eisenhower’s prefacing his first inaugural address in 1953 with a personal prayer. If the

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president, a lay person, could pray in public at a civic event like an inauguration, then surely the American people were righteous, united in their religiosity even if they construed the particulars of doctrine differently. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, two other incidents from the 1950s that marked that sense of common spiritual identity had become matters of controversy. One was the addition of the phrase ‘‘under God’’ to the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag that early in the present century came under court scrutiny for overstepping the First Amendment’s boundary separating church and state. In the context of the 1950s, when differences were intentionally minimized and commonalities intentionally promoted, those two words carried rather different symbolic import. Recited by millions of American children at the start of each school day, the words ‘‘under God’’ signaled that the nation, despite diversity, had a definite religious orientation. They became another way to affirm that the United States was favored by the Divine, especially in contrast with the nations of the expanding communist empire that were increasingly castigated as havens of a demonic atheism. The other action came in Congressional legislation that added the words ‘‘in God we trust’’ to all American coins and currency, words that had appeared on some for generations. Having those words on all money became a way that allowed Americans, even when engaged in a simple business transaction, to receive a reminder of national links to God. Those links in turn reinforced the stark contrast between American democracy, with its capitalist economic system, and Soviet totalitarianism, with its communist economic system. An individual’s personal religious affiliation (or even lack of a formal affiliation) mattered not when it came to celebrating American ties to God and confidence—critics of a later age might say arrogance—that through reliance on God, democracy would triumph over communism even as the cold war made threats of nuclear annihilation part of daily life for millions. There was a paradox inherent in this ‘‘piety along the Potomac,’’ as one writer called it.10 In retrospect that paradox comes to the fore when one revisits one now-classic sociological study that first appeared in 1955: Protestant, Catholic, Jew by Will Herberg.11 In one sense, Herberg in his own life epitomizes the emphasis on a common faith and minimizing of religious difference that spurred the religiosity of the 1950s. Herberg worked for several years as a labor union organizer with decided Socialist leanings before he embarked on an academic career as a sociologist of religion. A practicing Jew who also wrote insightful studies of his own religious heritage, Herberg for many years held professorial rank on the faculty of the theological school of Drew University, a Methodist institution, and helped train hundreds of students who pursued ministerial vocations in Protestant churches. Little wonder, then, that one theme Herberg advances in Protestant, Catholic, Jew was a claim that by the mid-twentieth century, for all practical purposes it mattered little in American culture whether one’s religious affiliation was with any of those large traditions, for Americans had come to regard each as offering moral instruction and other pragmatic teaching

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that helped mold men and women into good citizens. What did matter, though, was having some religious label, for the label itself was a badge of social worthiness or even of trustworthiness when it came to the realms of business and politics. In other words, the particularities of belief were unimportant in the public sphere; after all, those particularities could divide a people. But espousing some belief was important, for that meant that an individual was a person of integrity. Although Herberg did not make an issue of the contrast between this basic religiosity, this simple religion of American culture as such, and godless communism, looking back, it is hard not to see that it was a vital subtext in the case Herberg makes. At the same time, Herberg was well aware that there was a stunning difference between this common religiosity of the American people and the biblical traditions that most would say informed it. For Herberg, the biblical tradition contradicted the essence of this ‘‘religion of the American way of life.’’ This culture religion or emerging civil religion was buttressed by what pundits came to call ‘‘conspicuous consumption,’’ an emphasis on the acquisition of material goods and the like as evidence of prosperity, happiness, and the rightness/righteousness of American democracy and capitalism. There was no demand for costly commitment, for pursuit of justice, for prophetic witness that challenged the easy equation of American ways and policies with the truth of an absolute God. Herberg bemoaned the absence of authentic discipleship demanded by biblical religion in this civil religion of the American nation. But more than a half century after Herberg penned his words, it is clear that he captured much of the spirit of a postwar America yearning to have some way to promote a common national identity when there was no Great Depression or World War II to forge bonds of unity through shared experience of hardship or battle. In many ways, the election in 1960 of the Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy as president of the United States represented the zenith of this civil religion, with its blurring of religious distinctions and its stress on the common values held by all ‘‘real’’ Americans in the ongoing battle against godless totalitarian communism. If nothing else, Kennedy’s razor-thin victory exemplified the retreat of anti-Catholic attitudes and discrimination, both subtle and overt, that had marked the American Catholic experience since the colonial era. A Roman Catholic was now in charge of the crusade against godless communism, and Kennedy rose to the occasion when he peppered his inaugural address with religious imagery that drew on the common Protestant-Catholic-Jewish scriptures and made patriotism a religious sensibility. The oft-quoted image about asking what one can do for this country, not what the nation can do for the individual, echoed the call to discipleship in the biblical tradition. But it also indicated that certain ideas and images about the nation had taken on a transcendent quality; they had become the core of a civil religion that united the American people into a cohesive whole. Or did they? It was, perhaps, more useful for politicians to emphasize the common ties and the American identity of the people of the United States than it was to recognize the depth of diversity underneath. After all,

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it was the same year that Herberg published Protestant, Catholic, Jew that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Birmingham, Alabama, public bus, a simple act that gave birth to the civil rights movement. That movement, of course, set in process the protests and forces that revealed how large a gap separated the American ideals of liberty, justice, equality, and freedom from the lived reality of those ideals. It launched a time of transformation that upset long-standing American patterns based on legally sanctioned segregation and racism. When the structures of segregation seemed dominant, was there anything left to an American civil religion? Did there remain a cluster of ideals and values that cut across ethnic, racial, gender, social class, and every other kind of distinction that divided Americans? The civil rights movement, as intimated earlier, brought to the surface the differences among the American people, not the common ties that bound them into a cohesive entity. Other social movements already mentioned, from second-wave feminism to the gay liberation movement, suggested Americans were not of a single mind when it came to understanding how to find one’s place in the democratic structures of the nation. Increasingly shrill protests over American policy in southeast Asia during the years of engagement in Vietnam only added to the anxiety that there was no longer a common base to the culture, that the American civil religion had become dysfunctional.

STRUGGLES WITH DIVERSITY By the beginning of the twenty-first century, much of this cultural angst seemed part of the distant past. But other transformations in American life, some barely discernible when Robert Bellah issued his call for a revitalized civil religion, had come to the fore, raising fresh challenges for those who hope to identify core values and collective memories that reflect a common identity. Some of the most significant resulted from the passage of federal legislation in 1965 that radically altered immigration policies that had been in effect since the early 1920s. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration Act of 1965, he naively observed that the new law would ‘‘not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.’’12 Johnson misjudged the situation, for that law has played a major role in the changing shape of religious pluralism in the United States and generating new questions about the viability of an American civil religion. Prior to enactment of this legislation, there had been strict caps not only on the total number of immigrants who could enter the country in any given year, but also restrictions placed on the number who could come from any one country. In the latter case, a rather convoluted formula, based on national origins determined by the 1890 census, fixed the quota. After the law changed, however, the number of immigrants increased so dramatically that by the 2000 census, the total was nearly 1 million a year or approximately the same number per year as in the decade before World War I when immigration was at its zenith. If a larger total population meant that in 2000 a smaller proportion was foreign-born

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than had been the case a century earlier, the new immigration did affect the daily life of millions of Americans, Lyndon Johnson’s musings to the contrary. Since 1965, the bulk of immigrants has come from Latin America, Asia, and the Near East, with Latin Americans constituting the largest cluster. Indeed, the Census Bureau in 2000 reported that just over one-half of all those in the United States who were foreign-born came from Latin America; over half of those came from Mexico. Just over one-quarter came from Asia, the second largest source of immigrants.13 The majority of Hispanic immigrants identify with the Christian tradition in some form, as do a majority of those coming from Asia.14 Yet the style of Christianity of Hispanic Americans is rather different from the various strands of Christianity that Will Herberg saw in 1955 when he so easily could talk about the tripartite faith communities of the American people. As well, many of those coming from Asia, the Near East, and Africa are not Christian, but Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu. This newer immigration, which has already made persons of Hispanic ethnic origin the largest minority community in the nation, reveals the extent to which earlier ideas of an American civil religion were wedded not just to the hypothetical Judeo-Christian tradition, but to understandings that emerged particularly from the religious approaches associated with Protestants whose roots were in northern and western Europe. Even more so, it reveals that the Puritan consciousness behind much of that European Protestantism gave shape to American civil religion as Bellah understood it. Few Mexican Americans, even after a generation or two in the United States, can resonate with the events of U.S. history so central to the idea of an American civil religion, particularly occasions such as the American Revolution and the Civil War. The Spanish past, a different indigenous heritage before Spanish conquest, and the fusion especially of Catholic spirituality with enduring pre-Christian currents continues to shape common identity; the historic underpinnings of the American civil religion remain topics studied in school, not elements that creep into the collective unconscious of this immigrant people. One way in which a different collective past endures in the United States comes to light in the experience of Cuban immigrants and their descendants for whom the Miami area has been home for more than half a century. As Thomas Tweed has shown, the shrine devoted to Our Lady of Charity constructed there has become a place of pilgrimage that sustains not only a Cuban Catholic religious sensibility, but also an abiding link to Cuba itself as the land of origins.15 Asian immigrants for whom Buddhist and Hindu perspectives endow life with meaning are often even more removed from the theological orientation that informed ideas of an American civil religion.16 Central to Bellah’s construction was the conviction that a providential God actively intervenes in particular historical events for the benefit of a favored people, in this case the citizens of the United States. Yet the very idea of a deity who becomes intertwined with specific historical occurrences remains alien to virtually all Hindu and Buddhist interpretations of history. Even if in

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time these Asian Americans come to understand the formative historical moments shaping the traditional American self-understanding, it seems highly unlikely that they will connect them to the mysterious workings of a providential God. The God who works in history in modes integral to civil religion is to some extent linked to ancient Hebrew ideas as recorded in the Bible; but in actuality it is the God of Calvinistic Puritan Protestantism, who foreordains all that transpires in ways that reveal divine providence and grace, that sustains the usual concept of civil religion. The human actors that appear to be moving history along are indeed just actors. Absent altogether is the notion embedded in varying ways in both Hindu and Buddhist approaches that humans find themselves in certain historical circumstances because of the consequences of earlier behavior, even behavior in a past life, moving cyclically through endless time. There is simply no way that a Buddhist or Hindu religious consciousness can maintain the plausibility of a civil religion grounded in Puritan ideas of predestination and a sense of time moving from beginning to one ultimate future end. Among the groups reflective of the ‘‘new pluralism’’ in American religious life, perhaps Muslims come closest to sharing a notion of deity active in specific events of history akin to that in the American civil religion. Yet there are striking differences, for at least in the recent past, much of the Muslim appropriation of history has identified Christianity and nations whose people are predominantly Christian with demonic forces. Few Muslims, for example, are likely to see a Judeo-Christian America as the epitome of the divine will for human society; the Qur’an itself speaks of an ideal political and social order as much as a religious orientation, and for Muslims, a social order that mirrored the divine will would not be predicated on a God who set apart American Christians and Jews as a righteous remnant, but on an absolute God who demanded total submission to the path outlined in the Qur’an. At the same time, since the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, rank-and-file Americans have tended to view even Muslim Americans with suspicion. Readily linking Islam with violence, Americans have seen Muslims as terrorists intent on undermining the American way and therefore as dangerous enemies.17 Of course, neither those Muslims who call for a jihad or holy war against American infidels nor those Americans who see all Muslims as sinister terrorists are correct. But the presence of a rapidly growing Muslim community in the United States does suggest that there are deep challenges to finding and celebrating a common understanding of what it means to be an American that is requisite to the idea of an American civil religion. If the civil rights movement, the calls for women’s equality, the sensitivity to some minority religious affiliations that prompted the Supreme Court to eliminate devotional prayer and Bible reading from the nation’s public schools, and the efforts to contrast God-inspired democratic capitalism with atheistic communism caused Bellah consternation when he appraised the status of American civil religion in the later 1960s, they pale in comparison to the challenges presented by the increasing ethnic and

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religious diversity that mark twenty-first-century America. Indeed, these newer forces may signal the inability to draw on the same mythic past to find support for a common identity of the American peoples as a people that Bellah did when he pointed to references to God and to Providence in presidential inaugural addresses, for example, as evidence of a common civic faith. There are other powerful religious challenges that compound the difficulty in maintaining a monolithic American civil religion. Shortly after Bellah lamented the fracturing of the American civil religion, religious conservatives responded to many of the same social currents by organizing quasi-religious, quasi-political groups such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. Such moves benefited from the resurgence of interest in public affairs on the part of conservative evangelical Protestants in the United States, many of them associated with one of the numerous strands of fundamentalism that had retreated from most vocal engagement in political life after the Scopes Trial in 1925. With more immediate roots in efforts by politicians such as President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s to dismantle opposition to administration policies by claiming that a ‘‘silent majority’’ supported conservative political programs, independent Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell organized the Moral Majority in 1979.18 Pat Robertson formed the Christian Coalition a decade later. Both became flagship movements of the ‘‘new Christian right’’ that sought to reclaim the sense of being a righteous, chosen people inherent in the American civil religion. More specifically, both groups mustered support for political candidates and legislation that would stem the perceived drift away from that mythic religious base that buttressed American civil religion. Such legislation would, for example, reverse the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions banning devotional prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. Both the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition endorsed legislation that would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that permitted abortion. Both sought to defeat adoption of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed by feminist leaders who already felt marginalized by the patriarchal structures of American civil religion. The Moral Majority, under Falwell’s leadership, claimed a decisive role in the election in 1980 of conservative Republican Ronald Reagan as president, even though Reagan defeated incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, an unabashed evangelical Protestant who talked more openly about his personal religious faith than virtually any of his predecessors in office. Analysts still debate precisely how influential the Moral Majority was on a national level, and Falwell formally dismantled the organization in 1989, the same year Pat Robertson formed the Christian Coalition. Yet the ‘‘new Christian right’’ has stunning symbolic import. Whether on a local level or through the voice of someone like Robertson, its representatives have freely drawn on an explicitly Christian vocabulary to anoint the mythic American past with a sacred aura far more glibly than did proponents of an American civil religion. Even more, they have been willing to identify specific policies, usually policies that would reverse current social trends, with the cause of biblical righteousness. They have not hesitated to

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see divine power operating in specific events of history, sometimes to the consternation even of those whose sensibilities are usually in harmony with the more vocal leadership. For example, in the fall of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans and much of the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf coast areas, Pat Robertson and other voices of the Christian political right pronounced the disaster the judgment of a righteous God against a profligate people, claiming that God was using the hurricane to judge America for having legalized abortion and for being lax in its vigilance against terrorism, as well as passing judgment on the city of New Orleans, the hometown of television personality Ellen Degeneres, a lesbian who had been chosen to emcee the Academy Awards ceremony. Some even noted that the hurricane benefited the nomination of politically conservative John Roberts as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. At the time, Roberts’s confirmation proceedings were getting underway, and advocates of the Christian right were among his strongest supporters.19 The way in which the Christian right has appropriated the religious language that Bellah and others used more benignly in their understanding of American civil religion represents its own challenge to finding a common value structure or even a shared perception of the American past integral to a civil religion. It has become easy to infuse public discourse with religious language and thus usurp the notion of a civil religion, thereby constricting its legitimacy only to those interpretations, policies, programs, and ventures that reflect a rigidly conservative quality. There is no room here for the diversity and pluralism represented by the new immigration and the increasing number of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists who call the United States home. Nor is there room to embrace the various movements for equal rights and liberation that sprang from the civil rights movement. From the vantage of the Christian right, these all signal the inroads of a secular humanism or a non-Christian (if not anti-Christian) quality that is eroding all that is authentically American. Because of this equation of one theological style with a ‘‘real’’ American identity, political figures who attempt to employ ‘‘least common denominator’’ religious language to drum up support for far more moderate programs and policies face difficulties. For example, although critics have raised legitimate questions about the calls for channeling federal money for social services through ‘‘faith-based’’ organizations, they may well miss opportunities to improve the delivery of social welfare because ‘‘faithbased’’ becomes equated with ‘‘Christian right’’ that in turn is thought to be inconsistent with the diversity and pluralism now characteristic of American culture. The American civil religion cannot be limited to one Christian approach, for then it will not function to endow the shared experience of all Americans with an overarching meaning and purpose. Over the last generation, interpreters of American common life have also become increasingly sensitive to the many ways region plays into one’s understanding not just of place, but of the meaning of America and of the validity of using religious images to describe that meaning.20 Racism, slavery, a biracial culture, and the dominant influence of evangelical Protestantism long set the South apart as a distinctive region, much as the Puritan

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ethos helped make New England a distinctive region. But the understanding of America as America looks rather different from the Southwest, where Hispanic influence once predominated, than it does from either New England or the South. Through Utah into Nevada and Idaho, where the Latter-day Saints exert both religious and cultural hegemony, there is yet a different prism through which to refract the events of American history and assign symbolic import to some rather than others. In the Pacific Northwest, where formal religious affiliation is the lowest for any region of the nation, drawing on religious language to articulate the significance of America rings increasingly hollow. Indeed, as noted earlier, ‘‘unchurched’’ Americans represent an important thread in the national fabric from the colonial epoch on, and their ratio of the total population has slowly but steadily increased over the years. For them, the very idea of a civil religion is problematic since many tend to have an aversion to religion itself as denoting a restrictive dogma, although many may see themselves as spiritual, and most would likely recoil at the casual linkage of religious language with particular public policies associated with the ‘‘Christian right.’’ What regional variation suggests, then, is that the apparatus making up the traditional American civil religion is more likely embedded in the corporate experience only of those who have long histories in the regions of British colonial settlement. It may not be entirely absent elsewhere, but its power is diminished.

CONSTRUCTING AN AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY When Rousseau spoke of civil religion in the eighteenth century, he was addressing the role of shared beliefs and values in granting cohesion to the people of a given nation much the way that shared history and practice give cohesion to a tribal society. But nations are larger than tribes, encompassing by their very nature a greater diversity. That diversity in turn carries an implicit threat of division, creating problems for the body politic. A civil religion in theory is one way to transcend that threat and sustain enough of a semblance of unity as to allow for viable government and social order. Rousseau articulated his theory as the modern nation state was taking shape, helping create plausibility structures that would buttress the modern nation state. In the twenty-first century, analysts are more likely to speak of a postmodern world, one in which the conditions of common life are quite different from those that prevailed in Rousseau’s day. They are even quite different from those that marked the United States of the 1960s when there was much discussion of an American civil religion. It is therefore worth asking how one might construct a civil religion for the America of the twenty-first century or at least what considerations might have to be taken into account if one wished to formulate a constellation of beliefs and values that could function to provide the cohesion once offered by a civil religion. Doing so may well entail the same

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construction of a mythic past that engaged Robert Bellah a generation ago when he described an American civil religion grounded in the events and places of early American history and looking to a providential God who worked through those events to create a special people. Surely the affirmation of pluralism would now be central to an underlying core of beliefs and values, although pluralism itself, as historian William Hutchison has demonstrated, has a contentious history.21 But that pluralism means there will be different constructions of the American past for different groups of Americans. It also means that the vocabulary used to describe that past cannot be restricted language coming from the hypothetical Judeo-Christian tradition since ever smaller numbers of those called Americans identify with it. So it will be ever more difficult even to refer to God in public discourse, not because such reference violates the principle of ‘‘separation of church and state’’ but because there is no longer a shared apprehension of what that term denotes. The radical religious pluralism that is a hallmark of twenty-first-century life makes it much more difficult to posit that there is a single divine entity whose power and will determines the destiny of this nation or any nation. At the same time, any effort to capture shared sensibilities must be attentive to the ways in which earlier efforts intentionally or unintentionally excluded much of the population, making the civil religion really the prerogative of white males of economic privilege. The transformation of American society from a Eurocentric base with an oppressed African American minority to a culture that embraces many ethnic and cultural heritages provides a rich, but challenging context for attempting to locate and describe commonality. If one dimension of that commonality is to affirm the validity and viability of an inclusive society, then shared symbols can no longer presume that the experience of white male heterosexuals as normative. Yet it is also clear, to cite just one example, from contemporary debates over samegender marriage that genuine inclusiveness is elusive at best. Can pluralism and inclusiveness exert the symbolic power to forge bonds of unity among the many peoples who comprise the American nation of the twenty-first century? The challenges to doing so are legion. But apart from affirming pluralism and inclusiveness in whatever form they present themselves, there can be no national cohesion, and American identity will wither.

NOTES 1. Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Daedalus 96, 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. See also Robert N. Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980). 2. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury, 1975). 3. Rousseau discusses the concept of civil religion in The Social Contract. Book IV, chapter 8, originally published in 1762. 4. Among the standard interpretations of the civil rights movement are David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian

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Leadership Conference (New York: Morrow, 1986); and Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). 5. A brief discussion that ably summarizes the debate over the court decisions is found in David Chidester, Pattern of Power: Religion and Politics in American Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), 261–69. 6. Among the more sustained critiques from the period when discussion of Bellah’s hypothesis and the notion of civil religion was prominent in academic circles is John F. Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979). 7. See Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 8. James Hudnut-Beumler examines many of these trends in his Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945– 1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 9. The standard biography of Graham that offers appraisal of his contextual influence is William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (New York: William Morrow, 1991). 10. The phrase comes from William Miller, Piety along the Potomac: Notes on Politics and Morals in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964). 11. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). A revised edition appeared in 1960. 12. Quoted in Roger Daniels, ‘‘Immigration,’’ in A Companion to 20thCentury America, ed. Stephen J. Whitfield, Blackwell Companions to American History (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 2004), 226, from Lyndon B. Johnson, Public Papers, 1965, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967). 13. Estimates are based on numbers in Table 3 (‘‘Foreign-Born Population by World Region of Birth for the United States and Regions: 2000’’) in Nolan Malone, Kaari F. Balluja, Joseph M. Costanza, and Cynthia J. Davis, ‘‘The ForeignBorn Population: 2000,’’ Census 2000 Brief (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau, December 2003), 6. 14. Bruce B. Lawrence, New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 7. 15. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 16. See Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001). 17. According to one poll, 44 percent of the American people thought that Islam engendered violence in its followers. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, telephone poll conducted June 24 to July 8, 2003, accessed January 3, 2005 at http://80-poll.orspub.com.libraryproxy.sdsu.edu/poll/lptext.dll/ors/ i/islam 18. Among the many studies of the emergence and impact of the ‘‘new Christian right’’ is William C. Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1996). 19. Several of the pronouncements linking Hurricane Katrina to divine judgment on America and on New Orleans are summarized at http://mediamatters. org/items/20050913004, accessed December 22, 2005. 20. See the nine-volume series on ‘‘religion by region’’ that explores links between religion and public life published under the auspices of the Leonard E.

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Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, by AltaMira Press, edited by Mark Silk and others. 21. William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Bellah, Robert N. ‘‘Civil Religion in America.’’ Daedalus 96, 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Eck, Diana. A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; rev. ed., 1960. Hutchison, William R. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Lawrence, Bruce B. New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Wilson, John F. Public Religion in American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.

CHAPTER 3

A Touristic Spirit in Places of Religion Thomas S. Bremer

A

lthough a tourist in the church may seem an odd, even sacrilegious, image, tourism has become a familiar reality at hundreds of religious places in America and around the world. In places like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, the Reverend Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, the historic mission churches of California’s scenic past, and Temple Square in Salt Lake City, the number of tourists often rivals that of the religious adherents who inhabit these sacred places. This invasion of the touristic into the sacred spaces of churches, temples, mosques, shrines, and other auspicious sites may cause concern for those who wish to maintain the sacrality of holy places through isolation from the corrosive forces of the profane world, but it also offers a glimpse into the intersections of religion and secular culture in contemporary America. In the complex relationship between tourism and religion, it would be a mistake to emphasize their commonalities to the point of suggesting that tourism amounts to a modern form of religion. Indeed, touristic practices are not a subcategory of religious practices, nor do they necessarily involve religious orientations. As a peculiar set of social practices of the modern and postmodern worlds, tourism may have some degree of historical continuity with medieval Christian pilgrimage in Western Europe, but key distinctions indicate that the discontinuities far outweigh whatever connection there may be between religious pilgrimages and tourism.1 The eminent historian of the early Christian world Peter Brown once remarked that the difference between pilgrimage and tourism has to do with the worthiness of the traveler.2 Pilgrims, he explained, go on their journeys to make themselves worthy to experience praesentia, the physical presence of the saint.3 They spend days, weeks, months, sometimes years, enduring the hardships of travel in an effort to transform themselves into

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individuals worthy of the sacramental presence that they experience at their destination.4 Pilgrims’ travels, at least ideally in Christian practice, amount to an exercise in humility, dedication, and faith. The hardships they undergo purge pilgrims of their worldly pleasures and offer them an ascetic focus on the sacred power entombed in the holy precincts of the pilgrimage destination. In contrast, tourists travel with an attitude of entitlement. They enter holy grounds as consumers of the sacred, rather than as humble souls worthy of the sacred presence, although, as we will see, many tourists at religious sites delight in consuming the aesthetic experience of sacred power. Caught up more in the logic of modern capitalism than in the ascetic demands of religious exchange, tourists expect an experience worthy of their expenditure of time, money, and energy. Thus, whereas the pilgrim seeks a self worthy of the experience, the tourist seeks experiences worthy of the self. In seeking worthy experiences, tourists are products of and enthusiastic participants in the culture of mass consumption; touristic practices exemplify the dynamics of mass popular culture characteristic of late modernity. In this sense, tourism ranks as an exemplary practice of modernity, with tourist desires driven by the conditions of modern society. Dean MacCannell claims that ‘‘sightseeing is a ritual performed to the differentiations of society.’’ He goes on to characterize sight-seeing as ‘‘a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience.’’5 MacCannell regards modern society as fragmented, discontinuous, and characterized by differentiation, which he describes as ‘‘the totality of differences between social classes, life-styles, racial and ethnic groups, age grades (the youth, the aged), political and professional groups and the mythic representation of the past to the present.’’6 He thus recognizes touristic desire as a modern impulse to ameliorate the chaotic circumstances of modernity by envisioning a transcendent unity that encompasses the bewildering array of differences. MacCannell’s account of modernity relies on structuralist assumptions that characterize modern people as estranged from the coherent structures of society. A less structuralist and more phenomenological approach to the modern world views tourism less as an exercise in sustaining social structure and more of a practice of identity formation. Tourists build, transform, and sustain identities in their touristic pursuits. These identities incorporate the vast range of differences that inhabit modernity; indeed, the touristic experience of difference can both affirm and transform one’s sense of self and one’s relationships to others. In this regard, tourism can be regarded as a ritual of identity formation. Religion plays a vital role in the touristic process of bolstering modern identities. MacCannell’s depiction of touristic practices as ‘‘a ritual performed to the differentiations of society’’ suggests that tourism itself may be a religion of modern society. He even goes so far as to claim that ‘‘tourist attractions are precisely analogous to the religious symbolism of primitive peoples.’’7 Such analogies, however, rely on a series of dubious

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assumptions, not the least being presumptions about the religious worlds of so-called ‘‘primitive peoples’’ that would make them models for understanding the status of religion in modernity. Nevertheless, the conventions of tourism do suggest ritualistic parallels to the conventions of religious people in terms of identity formation. Much like religious practitioners, tourists distinguish themselves with conventional practices that invoke transcendent meanings in their discursive engagement with difference. But whether this qualifies tourism as a religious pursuit is a debatable point, one that has little importance beyond the limited discourse of curious scholars. A more relevant point of concern regarding the intersection of religion and tourism has to do with the appeal of religious places, practices, cultures, and people as objects of touristic consumption. The ethic of consumption and the aesthetic desires of tourists make religion an attractive force in touristic practices. Whether tourists enter sacred precincts for spiritual benefits, for the pleasures of religious spectacle, for the appreciation of beautiful architecture and artwork, or for the ennobling experiences of otherness, religion fulfills touristic expectations and desires. Moreover, religious people at many sites across America and around the world encourage tourists’ encounters with the places and activities of their religious lives. From simple gift shops to elaborate religious performances, communities of religious practice have accommodated and promoted visitation at their churches, temples, mosques, shrines, and other religious places. In many instances, religious people have become willing commodities in the tourist economy. This chapter considers some of the implications of tourists at religious places with a somewhat detailed look at three particular cases: the santuario (or shrine) of Chimayo´ in New Mexico; the Precious Moments Inspiration Park in Missouri; and Spanish colonial missions in San Antonio, Texas. Each of these highlights a particular aspect of the relationship between religion and tourism. Chimayo´ draws attention to how tourists aestheticize religious phenomena in their quest for authentic experiences. The commodification of religion is the salient issue in the Precious Moments case. In San Antonio at both the Alamo and the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, tourists connect identity to places of religion.

THE AESTHETICIZATION OF RELIGION Tourists travel with expectations for aesthetically fulfilling experiences. In fact, an aestheticization of sites and experiences remains essential to the touristic enterprise. Leisure travelers everywhere bring on their journeys a modern aesthetic sense that judges their every experience according to standards of beauty and meaningfulness. In fact, the history of modern tourism itself closely parallels the history of modern aesthetics, with notions of the picturesque and the sublime informing much of travelers’ experiences in the nineteenth century when new forms of transportation and travel infrastructure greatly expanded the popularity of pleasure travels. The consequent association of travel and aesthetic experience continues today as a defining element of touristic practice.8

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At the same time, however, the pervasive desire for aesthetic fulfillment sustains a profound irony in touristic practice. For most tourists, their aesthetic expectations rely on a discourse on authenticity: Fulfilling experiences must first of all be authentic experiences. But tourists themselves are constantly denigrated as the least authentic of modern subjects. Consequently, tourists thrive on denying that they are tourists; they eschew the appeal of conventional tourist destinations and practices in an effort to distinguish their individual experience as something better than the mass of leisure travelers. Many scoff at the label of ‘‘tourist’’ and describe themselves instead as ‘‘traveler.’’ Yet the very claim that one is not a tourist perpetuates the most conventional of touristic practices. Thus, their denial, as Jonathan Culler insists, is integral to the touristic enterprise itself.9 By identifying others less astute in the aesthetic nuances of travel, one can be assured that one’s own appreciation of the places, artifacts, cultures, and people of unfamiliar lands amounts to a truly authentic experience, unlike the superficial experiences of the unwitting hordes who rush through the overhyped attractions that beckon the tourist dollar. Traveler, backpacker, vagabond, even researcher—such are the strategies of denial that separate authentic travel experiences from the mindless and usually highly orchestrated tours of the common visitor. Yet, ironically, the denial that one is a tourist itself represents a foundational characteristic of tourism, participating implicitly in the most common of tourist cliche´s, ‘‘off the beaten path.’’ The constant desire to boldly go where no one else has been, to indulge in the unique experience shared by no other outsider, establishes the traveler, the backpacker, the vagabond as the exemplary tourist. There is nothing more touristic than disparaging tourists while seeking the most authentic travel experience. This disparagement of tourism by tourists themselves reveals an aesthetic desire for authentic experience that, paradoxically, relies on conventions of touristic discourse. Those who would deny their own status as a tourist often distinguish their own pursuits from the staged experiences of the mass of common tourists by claiming a more genuine local experience in their travels. Such claims of authentic experience require markers that certify their authenticity. ‘‘The paradox,’’ Culler concludes, ‘‘the dilemma of authenticity, is that to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence not authentic in the sense of unspoiled. . . . The authentic sight requires markers, though part of our notion of authenticity is the unmarked.’’10 Indeed, indulging oneself in authentic experience erodes the authenticity that gives touristic value to the experience. Religious experiences do not escape the tourist’s desire for authenticity. Many leisure travelers seek out the lesser known and less accessible places of religiosity in preference to the more popular churches, temples, and shrines that beckon the tourists’ attentions. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, for instance, visitors crowd into a variety of religious destinations within an easy walk of the central plaza. These include the St. Francis Cathedral, built in the nineteenth century by the Archbishop Lamy, made famous in Willa Cather’s 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop; the privately

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owned Lady of Light Chapel, popularly known as the Loretto Chapel, that includes the famous Miraculous Staircase, a winding stairway with no visible means of support; the seventeenth-century Chapel of San Miguel por Barrio de Analco, claiming to be the oldest continuously occupied church in America; and the eighteenth-century Santuario de Guadalupe, the oldest surviving church in the United States dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The aesthetic appeal of these religious attractions captures tourists’ imagination in this city known for its Hispanic and Native American heritage as well as its reputation as an arts community. The possibility of an authentic religious encounter seems somewhat elusive in these places crowded with tourists enjoying Santa Fe’s persistent staging of the Southwest aesthetic experience. More sophisticated travelers seeking genuine encounters of the sacred flee the tourist districts of old Santa Fe. Many set their sights on the picturesque Santuario de Nuestro ˜or de Esquı´pulas, commonly known as El Santuario de Chimayo´ in the Sen village of El Potrero, located in the Chimayo´ Valley of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, about twenty-four miles northeast of Santa Fe. The residents of El Potrero originally built the Chimayo´ chapel in 1816 after receiving official permission the previous year. Devotion to Nuestro ˜or de Esquı´pulas had begun there sometime before 1810, likely before Sen 1805, when a local Spanish family introduced the cult of the Christ of Esquı´pulas from Guatemala, probably by way of contact with pilgrims or merchants in Mexico who were familiar with the Guatemalan shrine.11 In both Guatemala and New Mexico, religious devotion centers on a large crucifix painted dark green and decorated with painted gold leaves. Also in both places, geophagy, or the ingestion of earth, characterizes the devotional practices of the pilgrims to the site. At Esquı´pulas in Guatemala, pilgrims purchase small clay tablets decorated with images of the Virgin Mary, saints, or the Esquı´pulas crucifix, and blessed by a priest. When eaten or taken dissolved in water, these pieces of sacred earth carry curative powers for a variety of ailments, especially those connected with menstruation and childbirth.12 Likewise at Chimayo´, pilgrims scoop sacred dirt from El Pozito, a pit in the floor in a side room of the chapel. The curative powers of this earth brings relief, according to the claims of pilgrims, to a variety of pains, rheumatism, sadness, sore throat, even paralysis. Some insist that Chimayo´ dirt can ease the difficulty of childbirth, and a pinch of the sacred dust thrown into the fireplace during a thunderstorm can cause the severe weather to abate.13 Various traditions describe the origins of Chimayo´’s miraculous history. Cleofas M. Jaramillo, a local resident, recounts one version of how the crucifix came to Chimayo´: One morning a mule came down the mountain at Chimayo´ and stood for hours before the door of the fabled church until someone called the sacristan’s attention to it. The man came out to investigate and found that the mule carried across its saddle a long coffin-like box. On opening the box, they found inside it a small statue of a saint nailed on a cross. The sacristan took the statue and placed it in the Church, giving

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RELIGIOUS ISSUES TODAY ˜ or de Esquı´pulas. Soon the news spread that a it the name of Nuestro Sen miraculous statue had appeared. People from over all the state visited the statue to pay votive promises; some devotees holding lighted candles crawled on their knees to the statue.14

A more common story about the arrival of the miraculous crucifix of Esquı´pulas is told by the granddaughter of Bernardo Abeyta, the Spanish settler responsible for obtaining permission to build the original chapel. She tells of her grandfather’s discovery of the cross in a hole by the Santa Cruz River near the village of El Potrero. Sr. Abeyta was performing penance in the hills surrounding the village in accordance with the society of Penitentes to which he belonged. He suddenly noticed a bright light emanating from a hole in the ground, and when he dug in the hole with his bare hands, he found the miraculous crucifix. The people of El Potrero notified the priest at the parish church in nearby Santa Cruz, and they organized a religious procession to carry the newly discovered cross there and place it in a niche on the main altar. On the next day, however, the crucifix was gone from the altar. Residents of El Potrero found it again in the same hole by the river. Again they carried it in a holy procession to the church in Santa Cruz and placed it on the altar. And again it was gone the next day, returned to the hole near El Potrero. After a third unsuccessful attempt to place the crucifix in the parish church in Santa Cruz, the villagers understood that the crucifix wished to remain in El Potrero. To honor its wishes and to venerate the miraculous image properly, they built a chapel over the sacred hole.15 Numerous other versions follow a similar pattern of finding the cross in El Potrero, attempting to take it elsewhere, and its insistent return to the hole where it was first discovered. As Elizabeth Kay notes, these stories conform to the structure of ‘‘el ciclo de los pastores,’’ or ‘‘the shepherd’s cycle,’’ that was common in medieval Europe.16 Victor and Edith Turner explain that medieval shepherd’s cycle legends usually follow a common pattern. A shepherd, cowherd, or farmer finds a holy image buried in the ground or placed inside a cave, or sometimes found in ponds or streams, on islands or in trees. Often a miraculous event leads the shepherd or other discoverer to the image (such as a brilliant light, but also loud noises or holy visions). Usually the discoverer carries it away and attempts to worship it privately. Once revealed to the local populace, the miraculous image often is met with incredulity. Attempts to place the image in a more comfortable and accessible location, such as the local parish church, usually result in its miraculous return to the site of its discovery. After two or three such returns, the people resolve to build a church there, thus initiating veneration at the sacred place of the image’s initial appearance.17 The traditions about its miraculous discovery serve to reinforce popular ˜ or de Esquı´pulas at Chimayo´. devotion to the sacred image of Nuestro Sen Veneration of the crucifix and insistence on the curative powers of the sacred dirt taken from El Pozito inside the chapel has continued uninterrupted since the early nineteenth century. But the sacred power of the site stretches back long before the arrival of European religious traditions to

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the area. Pueblo peoples inhabited the valley continuously between 1100 C.E. and 1400 C.E., and the vicinity of today’s chapel likely served as a religious shrine thereafter.18 Local Pueblo people have organized their sacred geography since ancient times with a complex system of shrines. The Tewa people of the San Juan Pueblo, not far from Chimayo´, mark the boundaries of their world by four sacred mountains, each with a shrine on its peak in the shape of a keyhole with the opening facing the pueblo. These shrines generate blessings sent back to ‘‘the mother earth navel in the sacred center of the pueblo, thus keeping Ôeverything good and desirableÕ within the Tewa world.’’19 Closer to the pueblo are sacred hills with caves that, according to Tewa understandings, ‘‘provide entry into the underworld where the androgynous Towa e´ act as mediators between the metaphorical, mythical time of emergence from below earth to the actual, historical one of earth-surface existence.’’20 Among these hills are Tsi Mayoh, the 7,056-foot-high peak in the southeast corner of the Chimayo´ Valley that looms above the famous santuario. On its northwest face is the sacred cave where Tewa people have made their midsummer pilgrimages.21 Testimony in the early twentieth century from native informants suggests that a Tewa pueblo once occupied the area of the santuario, and a sacred pool was located where the church now stands. The Tewa people used mud from this pool, according to these accounts, for healing purposes.22 Other Pueblo peoples are known to have used spring water and mud for healing, and geophagy has been reported among Zunis, Hopis, and Navajos. Given the occurrence of these similar practices in the region, plus the sacred regard for the location by indigenous cultures, as well as the presence of pools near the present-day santuario, it seems likely, as Elizabeth Kay concludes, ‘‘that the Pueblo people were using Chimayo´ mud for its therapeutic value at the time the Spanish arrived.’’23 Indeed, ˜or de the sacred power of the place likely began long before Nuestro Sen Esquı´pulas appeared. The traditions of sacred power, both Native American and Christian, as well as the picturesque setting of the quaint adobe chapel, prove to be a fulfilling aesthetic attraction for tourists. Visitors by the thousands take snapshots of the church building with its twin bell towers; they admire the colorful folk art that decorates the interior walls of the nave. Many express their amazement (and some their skepticism) at the evidence of healing miracles as they ponder the crutches, braces, and prosthetics left by the beneficiaries of the chapel’s curative powers. And nearly everyone relishes the opportunity to experience the authentic sacred power of the shrine by reaching into El Pozito for their own handful of the blessed earth. A quick tour of the chapel, however, does not satisfy all tourists who wish to experience the santuario at Chimayo´. Every year during the Semana Santa (Holy Week) celebrations, tens of thousands of pilgrims take part in what has been called ‘‘the largest religious pilgrimage in the United States,’’24 with at least some pursuing what can be regarded as touristic intentions. Catholics, Protestants, devotees of New Age spirituality, Azteca dancers, a rich diversity of religious travelers, including the young and old, across racial and ethnic boundaries, make their way to the

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small chapel on Good Friday each spring. A few undertake a journey of hundreds of miles over a week or more; most join the route on the last ˜ola up to Chimayo´. They day for the final stretch from the town of Espan come for healing, to fulfill vows, for a ritual experience of prayer. They pray for themselves and for others; a woman carrying a cross reveals, ‘‘This is a promise walk because my sister has cancer and I made a promise to God that this is the least I can do if He helps her.’’25 They walk in community and for community, ‘‘just being able to be together with people and having everybody just be together in the spirit of prayer.’’26 They give thanks: ‘‘I have always felt that God has given me so much, and I need to join in his suffering, especially on Holy Friday. He has given me so much in this world that I’m thankful for.’’27 They walk to heal their spirits: ‘‘I find that even the steps that I take are sort of touching with Mother Earth and being healed on the way to the Santuario. It’s a real healing type of experience.’’28 But the pilgrims’ journey fulfills more than spiritual needs. For tourists, it is an authentic experience of Chimayo´. Visitors who join devout sojourners make claim to the chapel’s true meaning as they arrive at the pilgrims’ destination. Experiencing the meaning of the site in Christian pilgrimage is not the only route to the authentic spirit of Chimayo´. A visitor might claim an even more fulfilling attempt to capture religious authenticity in the difficult and potentially dangerous trek up the hill of Tsi Mayoh above the chapel to the sacred cave of indigenous traditions. Near the summit, high above the valley and far from the tour buses and crowded gift shops adjacent to the santuario, the most adventurous travelers can enter an ambiguous zone of mediation between this world and the underworld, between the mundane consciousness of modern people and an ancient power of sacred dimensions. An experience more rare than even the pilgrim’s journey, entering the sacred cave approaches the most authentic root of the Chimayo´ tradition. On the other hand, such an unwarranted intrusion into the ancient mythical world by non-Tewa people profanes the very source of its authenticity. The tourist’s desire for a genuine encounter of the most powerful of Chimayo´’s numinous qualities risks an unleashing of destructive forces that threaten not only the authenticity of the tourist’s experience, but the very foundations of a fragile coexistence between very different worlds. Crossing the boundary uninvited into the private world of ancient traditions exposes the ugly tourist in all its obsessive narcissism. Nevertheless, the rare attempt to reach the cave near the summit of Tsi Mayoh ranks such ambitious tourists well above others on the touristic scale of authentic experience. They assume their rightful place in the hierarchy of visitors to the santuario, above the pilgrims who trek to the chapel during the Semana Santa festivities, who themselves remain far superior to the common tourists who are satisfied with postcards, a handful of sacred dirt, and maybe a quick prayer before the altar. Yet all of these—tourists, pilgrims, and holy spelunkers alike—seek an aesthetic experience that takes them beyond the superficial pleasures of touristy Santa Fe.

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THE COMMODIFICATION OF RELIGION The aesthetic experiences that tourists seek inevitably lend themselves to commercial interests. Touristic practices commodify every aspect of the tourist experience, including places, artifacts, people, even whole cultures. Virtually everything that enters the touristic field of experience carries the potential of commodification in the tourist economy.29 Tourists travel as ‘‘hyperconsumers of aestheticized culture,’’30 with entrepreneurial individuals and organizations ready to serve their propensity for consumption everywhere they go. This includes places of religion. Indeed, wherever visitors enter the sacred precincts of religious sites, a gift shop, bookstore, or other commercial enterprise will not be far away. The commodification of religion in the United States stretches back at least to the early decades of the nineteenth century,31 but in the last century the importance of commercial aspects of religion parallels a cultural shift that to a large extent continues to displace traditional sources of group identity, including ethnic and religious affiliations, with a culture of consumption. This shift, according to Miguel de Oliver, heralds ‘‘the canonization of commodities, not shrines, as the primary ingredient of cultural identity.’’32 Since roughly around the turn of the twentieth century, identity has come to rely less on one’s ethnic heritage and far more on one’s patterns of consumption. ‘‘The presentation of self,’’ contends de Oliver, ‘‘as a composite of strategically displayed commodities is central to establishing and confirming social status and affiliation.’’33 Religion has not escaped this trend toward consumption as the basis of modern identities. In fact, what has been decried as ‘‘secularization,’’ as Laurence Moore argues, ‘‘has to do not with the disappearance of religion but its commodification.’’34 He notes that historically, commercial aspects have always been present in religious life. In the United States, religious pluralism has exacerbated this entanglement of religious and commercial interests. Losing the privilege of an officially sanctioned state religion, church leaders found themselves thrust into a marketplace not only of religious ideas and practices, but of all sorts of cultural commodities.35 Successfully negotiating this competitive cultural environment has driven religious individuals and groups to ever more innovative adaptations to marketplace realities. These adaptations have included a commodification of religious sentiments that attracts not only new members, but also curious visitors. Communities of religious practice have not hesitated to capitalize on their aesthetic attractions to invite visitors into their sacred worlds. Whether it be magnificent architecture, heavenly music, colorful performances of their religious culture, or some other appealing aspect of religious life, religious communities transform the places, artifacts, and events of their religiosity into appealing attractions accessible to outsiders. They then utilize this attractiveness in a variety of economic systems of exchange: a religious economy of sacred power, where visitors experience the numinous power that sustains the community; a social economy of proselytization, where the community attempts to integrate new members into its social realm;

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or a commercial economy of monetary exchange, where outsiders pay for the privilege of visiting the site or for the goods (and sometimes services) offered for sale there. In each of these, religious commodities mediate between religious insiders and outsiders. In some cases, the commodities of religious sentiment even create tourist attractions. The Precious Moments Inspiration Park near Carthage, Missouri, stands as a monument to the spectacular success of religious sentiment congealed in collectible figurines that have been described as ‘‘a giftware phenomenon like none before it.’’36 With something like a half million visitors annually, the Precious Moments Chapel and surrounding park stand alongside the popular theaters of Branson as a major tourist destination of southwest Missouri. But the appeal of the site relies on the popularity of the Precious Moments figurines and the adoration that their dedicated collectors harbor for Sam Butcher, the creator of the images. The widely circulated narratives of his generous, quasi-messianic personality enhance devotion to his precious creations and draw devoted collectors to the chapel he built in part as gratitude to their devotion that has made him very wealthy.37 Sam Butcher’s story has taken on mythological proportions among the collectors of Precious Moments figurines and other products.38 An impoverished childhood full of hardship led the young Sam toward a passion for drawing. He studied art at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berkeley, California, and then, following a conversion to Christianity in his twenties, Butcher worked as a ‘‘chalk minister’’ for Child Evangelism Fellowship in Grand Rapids, Michigan; his work involved illustrating Bible stories with chalk art on the nationally televised Tree Top House. Butcher met William Biel while working at Child Evangelism Fellowship, and together they started a Christian greeting card business in 1975 called Jonathan and David. They developed a Precious Moments line of cards, featuring Butcher’s paintings of his now well-known figures, for an international convention of the Christian Booksellers Association. The line of cards was immediately popular, and came to the attention of Eugene Freedman, president of the giftware company Enesco Corporation. Freedman met some resistance from a skeptical Butcher about licensing his artwork for reproduction as porcelain figurines, so he commissioned Japanese sculptor Yasuhei Fujioka to create a prototype, and, according to the official history published on the Precious Moments Web site, ‘‘Sam was so overwhelmed when he saw the first sample that he fell to his knees and wept.’’39 He agreed to allow Enesco to produce and market the figurines, and they very quickly became hugely popular. By 1978 Butcher was working full-time with Enesco creating Precious Moments figurines, while Biel stayed with the greeting card business. By 1984, Butcher desired to show his gratitude for the immense prosperity his Precious Moments creations had brought him. A visit to the Sistine Chapel in Rome had inspired him to build his own chapel based on his artwork, an undertaking that would, as he puts it, ‘‘honor the Lord for the blessings bestowed upon me through Precious Moments.’’40 Following a business trip to Arizona, he decided to drive to his home in

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Michigan so that he could look for a location for his chapel. He says that his intention was to ‘‘go where the Lord led me.’’41 He ended up purchasing a farm property outside Carthage, Missouri, where he began building his Precious Moments chapel. By 1989 the chapel, plus a complex that included corporate offices, restaurants, and the world’s largest Precious Moments gift shop, opened to the public. It quickly became, according to Timothy Beal, ‘‘a pilgrimage destination for hundreds of thousands of Precious Moments devotees.’’ In subsequent years Butcher added to the park, acquiring more land and building such attractions as the popular Fountain of Angels and a Victorian ‘‘wedding island’’ set on a forty-acre lake.42 For most visitors to the Precious Moments Inspiration Park, three main attractions garner their attention: the visitors’ center, the Fountain of Angels, and the Precious Moments Chapel. They begin at the visitors’ center. Besides the basic orienting information about the park, visitors see a hands-on display of the making of the porcelain figurines, plus a Disney-like miniature town populated by mechanical Precious Moments figures. Also in the visitors’ center is the gift shop, a chief attraction for nearly all visitors.43 Upon leaving the visitors’ center, the Fountain of Angels is the next stop for many visitors. The fountain features two elaborate musical water shows each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Set in an enclosure with stadium seating, the fountain itself includes more than three hundred Precious Moments figures sculpted by Sam Butcher himself.44 The highlight of the park is the Precious Moments Chapel. Free guided tours are offered throughout the day to interpret the chapel’s artwork and answer visitors’ questions. Thematically, the chapel is divided between the Old Testament on one side and the New Testament on the other. The interior walls are covered with Precious Moments paintings of biblical scenes. The center of attention focuses on the large mural at the front of the chapel where angels greet new entrants into heaven. The tour guides explain that Butcher based most of the figures in the scene on real people who have died and are now in heaven.45 The joyous, celebratory tone of the mural in the chapel indicates clearly the theological message that Butcher consistently expresses in his artistic creations. His interpretation of the Christian afterlife appears devoid of all traces of grief and suffering; as Aaron Ketchell notes, Butcher presents a ‘‘benign and innocent’’ heaven. Visitors who themselves have lost loved ones find there ‘‘a squeaky-clean representation of the world to come’’ in the infantilized imagery of the Precious Moments figures with their oversized heads featuring teardrop-shaped eyes set wide apart.46 Butcher’s theology offers a reassuring comfort that banishes any hint of suffering. For many visitors to Precious Moments Inspiration Park, the emotional depths and sense of comfort that they experience at the Fountain of Angels and the Precious Moments Chapel also generate strong desires to possess and own a tangible representation of the Precious Moments experience. Thus, visitors find solace in the purchase of figurines and other items that have made Precious Moments famous. Following their tour they return to the gift shop, where they find ‘‘mementos which serve as

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reminders of the religious promises of the site.’’47 The mostly white, middle-class women who collect Butcher’s figurines and related wares delight in the offerings they find in the park’s store, adding to collections that become reflections of their own self-understandings, reinforcing their identities in terms of religion, gender, race, age, and class.48 The expressions of identity found in these collections serve as a reminder that, like most tourist attractions, the appeal of Precious Moments Inspiration Park revolves around consumption. The sentiments of Sam Butcher’s precious theology take tangible form in the figurines that collectors long for. The emotional attachment that visitors feel to Butcher’s sanitized vision of the afterlife generates their desire to own a tangible representation of this idealized world. Invested in narratives of loss and longing, tourists at Inspiration Park buy Butcher’s creations as expressions of their own sentiments. They peruse the shelves of the gift store in search of commodities of their own interior life. Their proud display back home of a Precious Moments collection articulates an identity formulated not only in terms of class, gender, race, age, and religion, but also in their therapeutic connection to Butcher’s comforting theology. As Ketchell notes, ‘‘the therapeutic nature of consuming his [Butcher’s] wares shines through in almost all reminiscences [by Precious Moments collectors].’’49 Visitors to the Precious Moments Inspiration Park are not unique in their expression of identity through touristic consumption. The aesthetic desires of tourists everywhere in search of authentic experiences translate easily to acquisitive desires. Wherever they go, tourists seek to take possession of their experience, turning the representations of local sites, cultures, and people into commodities to own and carry home with them. The souvenirs of their travels become artifacts of nostalgia; they recall, as Susan Stewart insists, ‘‘a context of origin through a language of longing.’’50 But the ‘‘context of origin’’ itself is not free from the commodifying propensity of touristic practices. The places that attract tourist visitors, the cultural performances that tourists experience, even the people they interact with in their travels, all are sustained to some degree by the calculations of a marketplace economy. Visitors happily pay for their experiences of the places, cultures, and people they find at their destinations, and those who control and interpret these destinations are more than happy to accommodate touristic desires in exchange for tourist dollars. Religious communities are not exempt from the temptations of this tourist marketplace. Nearly everywhere that the touristic spirit might lead, places of religion welcome visitors who come for nothing more than the aesthetic experience of an unfamiliar sacred. With more dollars in the collection box and brisk sales in the gift shops, the communities of religious practice are happy to share their sacred places with tourist visitors.

SACRED PLACE AND IDENTITY Religious sites that attract tourists do more than merely generate revenues for the communities that control them. Ownership of these places

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also includes the privilege of interpretive control, which involves strategies of memory, that is, the choices one makes about what to remember, how to remember, and how to express those memories. These strategies of memory in turn reflect the values, attitudes, and perspectives that make up identity, ‘‘the meaningful self-image of affiliation with an imagined community.’’51 Thus, the manner in which communities remember and consequently interpret their sacred places plays a key role in the selfunderstanding of the community and its individual members. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘‘the making of place always involves the making of identities, and, conversely, the construction of identity always involves the construction of place. Thus place and identity emerge together in a relationship of reciprocal meaningfulness.’’52 The meaning of a particular place relies to a great degree on its meaningful association with and for individuals or groups. Simply put, people know particular places only by what those places mean to them. At the same time, the meaningfulness of place contributes to a person’s identity, to one’s meaningful self-image. How we understand the places we inhabit and cherish, as well as those we loathe, is inextricably linked to how we understand ourselves. Identity is certainly not only concerned with relationships between people and places. More than any other factor, identity is a matter of relationships between people; that is, identity is a social phenomenon. ‘‘The meaningful content of an individual’s being depends on her or his association with various social groups as imagined in her or his own cultural and historical contexts.’’53 Likewise, the meanings one associates with particular places also makes reference to social affiliations. Thus, the reciprocal meaningfulness of places and identity has its basis in the dynamics of social relations. In touristic practices at places of religion, the dynamics of place and identity, and the social relations expressed in both, oftentimes generate reinterpretations of sites according to contrasting self-understandings. An apt example of this circumstance presents itself in San Antonio, Texas, where a history of tourist practices has dramatically transformed religious places that are historically related to each other, but have become very different places with opposing understandings of national, ethnic, and religious identities. During the Spanish colonial occupation of the northern territory that would become Texas, five Catholic missions were established along the San Antonio River near the civilian settlement of San Antonio de Be´xar and the military outpost, the Presidio de Be´xar. These missions included San Antonio de Valero (Mission San Antonio) in close proximity to the civilian and military settlements, and four other missions along the river to ˜ora de la Purı´sima Concepcio´n de Acun ˜a the south: Mission Nuestra Sen (Mission Concepcio´n), Mission San Jose´ y San Miguel de Aguayo (Mission San Jose´), Mission San Juan Capistrano (Mission San Juan), and Mission San Francisco de la Espada (Mission Espada). The primary motive for these missionary enterprises concentrated on the religious conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity, but at a more general level, this involved transforming native societies according to European standards of

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civilization. In short, ‘‘religious conversion also involved cultural, social, and economic conversions.’’54 Established in the first half of the eighteenth century, the San Antonio missions flourished to varying degrees in the latter decades of the century, becoming self-sufficient communities and centers of cultural achievement for various groups of Native Americans under the tutelage of Spanish missionaries. Colonial visitors were often impressed by the beautiful architecture and the harmonious communities that resided there. One of these visitors commented following a stay at Mission San Jose´ in 1777 that the spectacular church and impressive ranchos made it ‘‘in truth, the first mission in America, not in point of time but in point of beauty, plan, and strength, so that there is not a presidio along the entire frontier line that can compare with it.’’55 Over time, however, the missions suffered from the impending collapse of Spain’s American empire. The once-glorious missions of San Antonio were eventually secularized and, following Mexico’s independence from Spain, they fell into disuse and abandonment. The northernmost of the five missions, however, found new life in its close proximity to the thriving town of San Antonio. Mission San Antonio’s location at the edge of Texas’s largest town offered a strategic military position in the growing conflict between local ‘‘Texians,’’ as they called themselves, and the national government in Mexico City. The rebels routed the Mexican General Cos and took control of San Antonio in December 1835, but when the Mexican army returned in February 1836 led by President Antonio Lo´pez de Santa Anna himself, the Texian forces fortified themselves inside the compound of the old mission commonly known as the Alamo. The beleaguered rebels, including the famous trio of William Barret Travis, James Bowie, and David Crockett, waited thirteen days for reinforcements as Santa Anna’s far superior army held them under siege. Finally on the morning of March 6, 1836 Santa Anna’s forces launched their assault; within a few hours all of the Texian defenders met their bloody deaths inside the besieged walls of the Alamo.56 Almost immediately after the successful conclusion of the war for Texas independence, the Alamo became the state’s most visited tourist attraction, a distinction it still claims today. Subsequent restorations, first by the United States Army as a supply depot and later by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), a local civic group of patriotic women, saved the former Catholic mission from total ruin. The state of Texas eventually acquired the entire Alamo site and financed preservation efforts there. In 1913 the state settled an acrimonious battle within the ranks of the DRT, dubbed ‘‘the second battle of the Alamo,’’ by awarding full custody of the site to the Alamo Mission Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. They continue today with their obligations for maintaining, protecting, and interpreting the ‘‘shrine’’ of Texas liberty. As they state on their Web site, ‘‘The Daughters of the Republic of Texas are dedicated to the preservation of the Alamo as a sacred memorial to the Alamo Defenders. The DRT is committed to the conservation of the historic grounds and the research and study of Texas History.’’57

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Although the Alamo gained fame in the nineteenth century, San Antonio’s other colonial mission sites fell into complete ruin. Eventually, however, church officials returned to revive them as Catholic churches serving local parish communities. But around the turn of the twentieth century, interest grew in restoring them to their original colonial splendor. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, the persistent efforts of Robert E. Lucey during his long reign as San Antonio’s Catholic archbishop transformed all four of the mission sites into attractive, aesthetically pleasing tourist destinations, even as they continued to serve active Catholic communities.58 Following international attention during San Antonio’s 1968 world’s fair, a local groundswell pushed for setting the four mission sites aside as a cultural park. State and local politicians convinced the U.S. Congress to establish a national historical park in San Antonio, and in 1983 the National Park Service took over responsibility for preserving, protecting, and interpreting the mission sites, except for the church buildings and other structures occupied by the Catholic communities of worship.59 Tourists today visiting the Alamo and the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park experience two very different places. Despite their common history as colonial religious missions in the Spanish settlement of Texas, these two sites now have very little in common. The very urban setting of the Alamo in the heart of San Antonio’s downtown district contrasts dramatically with the more rural, pastoral environs of the other four missions located along the river corridor on the south side of the city. But more importantly, the Alamo and the missions of the national park each express identities very different from the other. In particular, their respective messages regarding the collective identity of the American nation, plus what each conveys about religious identities, distinguish how visitors experience the Alamo and the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Interpretations of the Alamo express a national civic identity in reference to the famous battle of 1836. The DRT states on their Alamo Web site, ‘‘Although the Alamo fell in the early morning hours of 6 March 1836, the death of the Alamo Defenders has come to symbolize courage and sacrifice for the cause of Liberty.’’60 Throughout its history as a tourist destination, tour guides and visitors alike have related the significance of the site to core values of bravery and sacrifice, as well as freedom, determination, and honor.61 The stories told about the Alamo that make it such an attractive sight for the millions who have gone there claim that these values are at the heart of what makes America (and presumably Americans) great. The sacrifice of the Texian defenders who gave their lives in commitment to the ideals of the nation provides a model for the best of the American spirit. Yet the traditional interpretation of the Alamo’s significance expresses an exclusivist understanding of American national identity. It neglects the role of slavery in the Texians’ quest for independence; as the theologian Virgilio P. Elizondo has remarked, the freedom they fought for was in part the freedom to own slaves.62 Moreover, the Alamo served as a focal point for anti-Mexican sentiment throughout the nineteenth and much of the

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twentieth centuries.63 And its obsession with military events has left women in largely insignificant supporting roles, often the helpless victims of the more important forces contending on the battlefield.64 The national identity articulated in the symbolic importance of the Alamo elevates the stereotype of the white male soldier willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of values that perpetuate his own eminence. In contrast, the National Park Service has self-consciously developed an interpretive framework for San Antonio’s other four missions that disputes the narrow scope of American values presented at the Alamo. The narrative that visitors to the national park hear focuses on the colonial missions as centers of social, cultural, and economic prosperity based on harmonious relations among a diverse collection of Native American and European groups. Overcoming great hardship for their mutual well-being and defense, these communities thrived by their ability to cooperate and adapt to each other’s ways. Hence, tourists find a very different understanding of national civic identity at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, an inclusive one that emphasizes values of diversity, acceptance, and cooperation.65 The differences between the Alamo and the other missions are just as dramatic when it comes to religious identity. At the Alamo, attention to the battle of 1836 as the main historical event largely occludes the missionary history of the site. With interest there fixated primarily on its political and military significance, the religious significance of the former Mission San Antonio de Valero has nearly disappeared altogether. The mission’s stone church was never finished, and its roofless walls were at the edge of the main action when Santa Anna attacked the Alamo in 1836. Since then, with a roof and new fac¸ade added by the U.S. Army in the 1840s, the renewed chapel has gained the center of commemorative attention. It now serves as the main shrine of the Alamo site, a rather lifeless museum displaying artifacts of the battle. The only religion there is the solemn reverence for the ideals of nationalism. The DRT has purged all indications of the building’s original Christian intentions. In contrast, the National Park Service emphasizes the indispensable role of religion at San Antonio’s other four missions, both historically and today. Despite the delicate issue regarding the separation of church and state, the park’s interpretive guidelines cannot ignore the historical religious purposes that founded these missions on the Texas landscape. Moreover, the main attractions for most visitors, the magnificent church buildings, still operate as active centers for local communities of worship. Consequently, the National Park Service interpretive guidelines highlight the role of religion at the San Antonio missions. Significantly, park rangers narrate the religious history of the missions in terms of continuity, referring to contemporary congregations as ‘‘living parishes’’ that have descended directly from the missions’ original inhabitants. In this way, interpretive efforts at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park celebrate the religious life of the missions, both past and present. Far from being obscured as a historical footnote, religious identity, especially for the Catholics who worship in the mission churches, assumes a prominent place in the experiences of visitors to the park.66

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Other identities, besides the collective civic identity of the American nation and the religious identity of local Catholics, also find expression at the former colonial missions in San Antonio. Certainly, the Alamo and the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park are subject to many other interpretations that articulate a whole range of identities, including those of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and politics. The ways that different groups of people attribute meaningfulness to these sites generate attachments that reinforce their communal affiliations. These attachments subsequently enter into public performances of identity. Indeed, at places of religion that host tourist visitors, meaningful identities assume a more public role as individuals engage their self-understandings of nation, religion, race, gender, ethnicity, class, and a host of other elements of identity.

THE LIMITS OF TOURIST EXPERIENCE The religious adherents who control the sacred places that appeal to tourists are not immune to the seductive force of touristic attentions. Indeed, many of these religious people welcome visitors to their places of religion, even those who do not share their own religious inclinations. In some cases, the religious communities of practice exploit tourist visitation for their own religious purposes. At Temple Square in Salt Lake City, for example, Mormon missionaries greet tourist visitors and offer free tours of the site’s attractions. The carefully scripted tour introduces non-Mormons to historical and theological perspectives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but it also draws them into the church’s elaborate proselytization mechanism.67 The tourist’s curiosity becomes a resource for the church’s mission. At the same time, religion serves as a valuable resource for tourists. Whether seeking the sacred in places of religion or merely enjoying the aesthetic pleasures of unfamiliar religious cultures, travelers find satisfaction in their experiences of churches, temples, mosques, shrines, and other religious sites. In fact, a tourist in the church is not such an odd sight after all. Touristic practices permeate religious life in America at many levels; they can be found in the aesthetic attractions of the spiritual life, in the commodification of the sacred, and in the connection between identity and sacred places. Moreover, tourists’ own religious orientations inform their travel experiences. Wherever they go, tourists take with them their own religious beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Religious life for many Americans constitutes an important dimension of their modern identity, one they do not leave at home when they travel to religious places of tourist appeal. But modernity thrives on differences. The modern configurations of democratic politics, free market economics, and an increasingly globalized view of society all assume a nearly unfathomable diversity of people, all with very different experiences, perspectives, and conditions. At the same time, however, the forces of modernity tend to domesticate these differences. Thus, difference becomes aesthetically pleasing; the marketplace finds that the attractiveness of difference translates into marketable qualities;

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and above all for individuals trying to find their way through the complexities of modernity, differences affirm identity. All of these are at work in the practices of tourists and the industries that serve them. The conventions of tourism convert differences—those of tourists, of the places they visit, and the people who host them—into aesthetically pleasing, marketable commodities of modern identity. There are limits, however, to the domesticating force of tourism; indeed, religious life on the whole is not a tourist attraction. When religious communities welcome strangers into their sacred places, they meet them somewhere between the worlds of tourist and religious practitioner. In fact, maintaining a distance between these worlds remains essential for many religious people. Their experiences of spiritual life and religious community retain their power in economies outside the markets of touristic desires and in sacred geographies beyond the itineraries of the modern traveler. Because of this, some small piece of the sacred still escapes the jaws of touristic appetites. And for at least a few tourists, perhaps, it may be reassuring to know that some authentic experiences remain just beyond their reach.

NOTES 1. For a concise review of the historical discontinuities between medieval Christian pilgrimage and modern tourism, see Thomas S. Bremer, ‘‘Tourism and Religion,’’ in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 9261–62. 2. Personal conversation with Peter Brown, June 4, 2001, Princeton, NJ. For his account of pilgrimage in the early Christian world of Late Antiquity, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 3. Ibid., 88. 4. Brown describes this process of transformation in terms of ‘‘the therapy of distance.’’ See ibid., 87. John Inge, in his emphasis on the sacramental nature of sacred places, defines pilgrimage as ‘‘journey to places where divine human encounter has taken place. It is journey to places where holiness has been apparent in the lives of Christian men and women who have been inspired by such an encounter and have responded to it wholeheartedly in their lives: it is travel to the dwelling places of the saints.’’ He goes on to note that pilgrimages generate ‘‘an alternative sacred geography.’’ See John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 92. 5. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 13. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. Thomas S. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 5–6. 9. Jonathan Culler, ‘‘Semiotics of Tourism,’’ American Journal of Semiotics 1, 1–2 (1981): 130. Dean MacCannell also makes this point in The Tourist, 9–10. 10. Culler, 137. 11. Stephen F. De Borhegyi, ‘‘The Miraculous Shrines of Our Lord of Esquipulas in Guatemala and Chimayo, New Mexico,’’ in El Santuario De Chimayo (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press for The Spanish Colonial Arts Society, Inc., 1956), 13.

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12. Ibid., 4. 13. Ibid., 6. 14. Quoted in Elizabeth Kay, Chimayo Valley Traditions (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1987), 39–40. 15. This version of the legend is reported in De Borhegyi, 17–18. 16. Kay, 42. 17. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives, Lectures on the History of Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 41. 18. De Borhegyi, 8. 19. This is from Alfonso Ortiz’s book The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (University of Chicago Press, 1969), cited in Kay, 10. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid., 5, 11. 22. Ibid., 14. 23. Ibid., 17. 24. Sam Howarth and Enrique R. Lamadrid, Pilgrimage to Chimayo´: Contemporary Portrait of a Living Tradition (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1999), 9. 25. Ibid., 40. 26. Raymond Jones, quoted in ibid., 30. 27. Polly Tainter, quoted in ibid., 35. 28. Sister Rosina Sandoval, quoted in ibid., 38. 29. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists, 6. 30. Bremer, ‘‘Tourism and Religion,’’ 9263. 31. R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6–7. 32. Miguel De Oliver, ‘‘Historical Preservation and Identity: The Alamo and the Production of a Consumer Landscape,’’ Antipode 28, 1 (1996): 9. 33. Ibid., 10. 34. Moore, 5. 35. Ibid., 11. 36. Timothy K. Beal, Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 138. 37. In Aaron Ketchell’s estimation, ‘‘Butcher’s biography is described in such a way as to make him comparable to a lesser messiah, one who guides through example (not only exemplifying ceaseless compassion and humility but also an interminable industriousness), and one who creates a product with a certain amount of spiritual import and grace-granting characteristics.’’ Aaron K. Ketchell, ‘‘The Precious Moments Chapel: Suffering, Salvation, and the World’s Most Famous Collectible,’’ Journal of American Culture 22, 3 (1999): 29. 38. This brief outline of Sam Butcher’s life and career relies on accounts in Beal, 138; Ketchell, 28–29; and the Precious Moments Web site, http://www. preciousmoments.com/about/history/, accessed October 30, 2005. 39. Ibid. 40. Quoted in Ketchell, 29. 41. Quoted in ibid. 42. Beal, 141; Ketchell, 29. 43. Beal, 143. 44. Ibid., 144–45. 45. Ibid., 148–51. 46. Ketchell, 30.

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47. Ibid., 31. 48. Beal, 142, reports that many visitors to Precious Moments Inspiration Park are middle-aged and older women. Often, mother-daughter pairs can be seen touring the sights and shopping at the park as well. 49. Ketchell, 29. 50. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 135. 51. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists, 144. 52. Ibid., 4–5. 53. Thomas S. Bremer, ‘‘Sacred Spaces and Tourist Places,’’ in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, ed. Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (New York: Routledge, 2006), 33. 54. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists, 17–18. 55. Juan Agustı´n Morfi, History of Texas, 1673–1779, trans. Carlos Eduardo ˜ eda, 2 vols. (Albuquerque: Quivira Society, 1935), 1:95. Castan 56. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer and Tom W. Gla¨ser, Alamo Images: Changing Perceptions of a Texas Experience (Dallas: DeGolyer Library and Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 63–97. 57. ‘‘The Alamo’’ Web site of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, ‘‘Mission Statement’’ page, http://www.thealamo.org/mission.html, accessed October 30, 2005. 58. Regarding Archbishop Lucey’s role in establishing the San Antonio missions as attractive tourist destinations, see Bremer, Blessed with Tourists, 83–92. 59. Concerning the establishment of the park by Congress and the eventual opening of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, see ibid., 110–16. 60. ‘‘The Alamo’’ Web site of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, ‘‘Overview’’ page, http://www.thealamo.org/overview.html, accessed October 30, 2005. 61. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists, 40. 62. Elizondo made this remark in a personal conversation in March, 1999. For a study of slavery’s role in the war of Texas independence, see Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 48–49. 63. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists, 41–42. 64. Holly Beachley Brear argues that according to the Texas creation mythology expressed in Alamo interpretations, ‘‘women, especially Anglo women, faithfully support Anglo men, but they serve as the nemesis of any Hispanic male who may seek to possess them.’’ See Holly Beachley Brear, Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 45. 65. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists, 127–28. 66. For a discussion of National Park Service interpretations of religion in San Antonio, see ibid., 121–29. 67. Thomas S. Bremer, ‘‘Tourists and Religion at Temple Square and Mission San Juan Capistrano,’’ Journal of American Folklore 113, 450 (2000): 425–26.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Beal, Timothy K. Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

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Bremer, Thomas S. Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Inge, John. A Christian Theology of Place. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Moore, R. Laurence. Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

CHAPTER 4

Religion and Politics: The Impact of the Religious Right Julie Ingersoll

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ne of the most significant changes in American religion has been the growth of conservative Christianity and its concomitant rise in political influence. This chapter will place that growth in context, trace the rise of politicized conservative Christianity, and examine the impact of that style of conservative Christianity on the larger American culture. It is important to begin with some discussion of the relationship between religion and politics in American history because many people believe that the Religious Right is violating a long-standing separation when in fact there are few things more ‘‘American’’ than political activism rooted in religious conviction. The notion that religion and politics have ever been separate in America is something of an illusion put forth by liberal Protestants who saw their view of Protestantism as neutral because it was ‘‘true.’’ This is evident in the fact that Protestant prayer and Bible reading was not successfully challenged in the public schools, despite Catholic claims that they inculcated Protestantism, until the 1960s and their role is even still largely unsettled. The Puritans came to the Americas not to establish freedom of religion but, rather, to embark on a holy experiment: to build a model of the kingdom of God on earth. The American Revolution followed on the heels of what has been called the First Great Awakening, and the case can be made that the evangelists, traveling the disparate colonies and giving rise to a national consciousness, made the revolution possible. Likewise, the Second Great Awakening immediately preceded the Civil War, with both sides drawing on revivalist religion and contributing to regional divisions culminating in splits of the major religious bodies over slavery. By the end of the nineteenth century, American domestic politics was dominated by a series of social reform movements all having their roots in revivalist evangelicalism: women’s suffrage,

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Prohibition, the labor movement. Internationally, at this same time, a desire to ‘‘share the gospel’’ took missionaries around the world ‘‘sharing’’ also American democracy and capitalism and legitimizing expansionism, giving rise to a peace movement, and then ultimately anticommunism. The early twentieth century brought a split in revivalist religion into two camps we now call fundamentalists and modernists and a political fight over evolution. That fight seemed to culminate in the now famous Scopes Monkey Trial, in which the fundamentalists have been said to have won the court case (Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution) but lost the larger cultural battle. Most historians see the fundamentalists as withdrawing from the larger culture in the 1920s to preserve their own institutions, establish Bible colleges, and wait for the premillennial return of Jesus. By the middle of the twentieth century, religious groups were on both sides of the debate over the Vietnam War: some advocating peace and others concerned that communism threatened freedom. The American civil rights movement, the fight against nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the environmentalist movement, and even the feminist movement all had roots in religion. Religiously motivated political action is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. In fact, in some cases, religiously motivated people defy our contemporary model dividing left and right: the movements for women’s suffrage and Prohibition, for example, were intimately tied together to the point of sharing leaders and there is a core group of anti-abortion activists who also oppose nuclear weapons. Having said that, however, the last quarter of the twentieth century was dominated by the Religious Right and its political concerns that center, overwhelmingly, on issues of gender—specifically, the roles of women (including the abortion issue) and gay and lesbian rights. It is to the rise of this movement—and how we got from the retreat of the 1920s to the pervasive influence of the 1990s— that we now turn.

REEXAMINING THE ORIGINS OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT Scholars sometimes have a hard time keeping track of the Religious Right. Most do not live in their world: They don’t listen to James Dobson, don’t get newsletters from the Christian Coalition, and don’t hear the Religious Right’s agenda from the pulpits of the churches. As a result, many have repeatedly predicted its demise only to find that it has reorganized and reemerged in a new form. When the New Christian Right became suddenly public in the 1980 elections, scholars scrambled to make sense of the movement. Many looked in bewilderment at this seeming groundswell of politicized conservative religion and asked, ‘‘how is it that no one saw this coming?’’ Scholars had written the obituary for American fundamentalism and forthwith ignored developments in what they saw as insignificant vestiges of the past.

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When it became clear that this movement would continue to be a political force in American politics (albeit in various forms and incarnations),1 there developed a flurry of studies examining the organizational structure and worldview of the movement, evaluating the real impact and size of the movement, and exploring the similarities and dissimilarities between the Christian Right in America and similar movements around the world. It became clear that what was generically called ‘‘the moral majority’’ (referring to the movement rather than the specific organization) was first and foremost not as large as it had seemed. Creating the perception of big numbers was of benefit to the Religious Right’s leaders and, since sensationalism sells, the media were highly susceptible to accepting and perpetuating the perception that a major political re-alignment was taking place.2 Those same scholars observed that, instead of a populist groundswell, the Religious Right in the 1980s was primarily a coalition of Washingtonbased political action committees (PACs) and lobby groups that had built a paper giant with sophisticated direct-mail technology. With few exceptions the studies, at this point, focused on one of three primary questions: What do these Washington-based groups look like and how did they come into existence? How does the movement play into a ‘‘culture wars’’ thesis? And what impact does the vitality of the Religious Right have on the embattled secularization thesis? These studies typically begin with the months leading up to the 1980 elections and focus on those Washington-based political groups. In this version of the history, the Religious Right is described as ‘‘bursting’’ onto the American political scene, without warning, in 1980. Moen writes that by 1979 a ‘‘sleeping giant’’ had awakened from its political slumber in a bearish mood.3 Berkowitz and Green write that the movement ‘‘appeared in 1980.’’4 And, most explicitly, Michael Lienesch writes: Bringing the movement into being in late 1978 and early 1979 was a group of political professionals led by Paul Weyrich of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and Richard Viguerie, director of direct mail operations for conservative causes. (italics added)5

In fact, scholars’ version of the beginnings of the Religious Right is identical to the one put forth by Viguerie himself. Viguerie’s self-published book The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead spells out how he and several other conservative leaders created several special-interest groups to raise money and mobilize religious conservatives.6 According to Viguerie, widespread dissatisfaction in America’s heartland created an opportunity on which he and others capitalized. In the 1970s, religious conservatives around the country were unhappy over the limiting of religious influence in the public sphere as a result of broadening interpretations of the First Amendment ‘‘no establishment’’ clause, they were enraged over the increasing availability of legal abortion, they were disturbed by the gender and sexual revolutions and the continued influence of communism, and they were fearful of what they saw as the increasing willingness of the government to intrude in the running of their churches and private Christian schools.

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Most scholars accept this account of the origins of the movement. More recent studies point to the degree to which the influence of the earliest organizations dwindled over time. They then trace the rebirth of the movement in the mid-1980s as a grassroots movement whose influence has more depth and staying power than it did in its original incarnation.7 Some scholars cite Viguerie’s interpretation of the origins of the Christian Right and others merely repeat it as the conventional wisdom. There are, however, a couple of problems with this reading. The first is that it relatively uncritically accepts an activist’s reading of the history with himself at the center. Perhaps more importantly, though, it provides no bridge between the retreatism of the 1920s and the 1980 election. I argue that the origins of the movement can actually be traced back further, that there was a largely unnoticed grassroots movement through the 1960s and 1970s that had been built one church at a time by fundamentalist Christians who had developed theological sympathies with Christian Reconstructionism.8 The Reconstructionists provide a link between the fundamentalists of the turn of the twentieth century and the New Christian Right at the turn of the twenty-first century.

CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTIONISM: POPULARIZING POLITICIZED CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANITY The Christian Reconstructionists have been briefly noted in scholarly literature, and have been given more in-depth attention by a few other scholars.9 But most often these treatments have focused on the theology of the Reconstructionists; the studies have neglected the early impact Reconstructionists had on the Religious Right. The core of Christian Reconstructionism is drawn from two ideas: postmillennialism and presuppositionalism. Christian Reconstructionists embrace a postmillennialist eschatology; that is, they believe that Satan was defeated in Christ’s resurrection and that we are currently living in the thousandyear reign of the kingdom of God. They parallel the restoration of the creation with a tri-fold understanding of individual salvation. Christians are saved instantaneously at the point they accept Christianity, they increasingly experience the fruits of that salvation as they work through it in their daily lives, and they are finally and completely sanctified at the culmination of history. Postmillennialist Reconstructionists see a similar process at work in creation which was redeemed with the resurrection, in which the kingdom of God is increasingly apparent as history progresses (and as Christians labor to build it) and will be perfectly established at Christ’s second coming (thus, his coming is postmillennial). Presuppositionalists hold that all knowledge is derived from presuppositions; reasoning always requires the acceptance of premises for which there is often no proof. There is, for example, no proof that God exists. But neither can it be proven that God does not exist. Christianity and atheism each require a ‘‘leap of faith,’’ as it were. The corollary in Reconstructionism to presuppositional epistemology is ‘‘theonomy’’ (meaning ‘‘God’s law’’) which asserts that there can be no neutral, objective way to

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determine ethics and law. Humans must live under God’s law or substitute some humanistic value system; the only alternatives are an objective absolute (the Bible) or abject moral relativism resulting in chaos. The argument that the Christian Right appeared out of nowhere in 1978 or 1979 neglects the question of how it was that the Washingtonbased politicos found a responsive audience for their direct-mail mobilization. It is my argument here that Christian Reconstructionist works were already broadly disseminated among fundamentalist Christians by the time the Christian Right was ‘‘mobilized’’ and that those works created the reservoir of support that could be tapped. In 1960, Rousas John Rushdoony, patriarch of the Christian Reconstruction movement founded the Chalcedon Foundation.10 By 1977 (one year before most scholars date the beginnings of the Christian Right), he had already written more than twenty books, including his massive Institutes of Biblical Law that outlined the Reconstructionist vision for a society ordered under Old Testament biblical law.11 The works of other Reconstructionists were also widely available to fundamentalist Christians across the nation. Gary North, Rushdoony’s now estranged son-in-law and once heir apparent, was already writing for Chalcedon’s journal The Journal of Christian Reconstruction (JCR) in 1974. North had written two important Reconstructionist books including his Introduction to Christian Economics (1973).12 Also in 1974, Greg Bahnsen was on staff at the Chalcedon Foundation, and his Theonomy and Christian Ethics was in press.13 By 1976 Bahnsen was teaching at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, and future Reconstructionist pastor and theologian James Jordan was one of his students and also writing for JCR. By 1978 (one of the earliest dates set for the beginnings of the Christian Right), David Chilton, who would later write the definitive works on Reconstructionist postmillennialism,14 was also on staff at Chalcedon and writing for JCR. Also by 1978 Rus Walton had already founded his Plymouth Rock Foundation to disseminate Reconstructionist ideas in churches and Christian schools and five years earlier had written One Nation Under God, advocating Christian involvement in politics for the purpose of returning America to its ‘‘biblical roots.’’15 As obscure as these books and writers may seem to most Americans, they were not obscure in fundamentalist Christian circles. Although there were a few self-identified Christian Reconstructionist churches, more often there were a handful of Reconstructionists in non-Reconstructionist fundamentalist churches who were working to promote Reconstructionist ideas. They ordered books by mail from Fairfax Christian bookstore,16 located outside Washington, D.C., in suburban Virginia. The store carried all the important Reconstructionist works. These scattered Reconstructionists distributed those books in their churches. Before the explosion of ‘‘small group meetings’’ in conservative churches, they held weekly Bible studies in which they led their fellow church members in reading Reconstructionist books. They encouraged their churches to establish Christian schools, a key component of the Reconstructionist plan to reshape society.17 These Christian schools, in turn, used Reconstructionist materials in their

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classrooms. Reconstructionist Rosemary Thoburn not only co-founded a private Christian school in Fairfax, Virginia, but she and her adult children were active in the production of Christian school curricular materials that were distributed throughout the country. Many of the Reconstructionist theologians mentioned above taught, at one time or another, in one of the many private Christian schools around the country that were grounded in Reconstructionist ideas. So, well before the establishment of the Washington-based political organizations designed to harness the growing dissatisfaction among conservative Christians, Reconstructionists were laying an intellectual foundation for what would become the Religious Right’s critique of the late-twentieth-century American social order, and developing strategies to bring about change. Fundamentalists adopted Reconstructionist postmillennialism in a piecemeal way. Although most did not explicitly jettison their premillennial dispensationalism, they adopted what became known as ‘‘dominion theology.’’ They chose to stop focusing on what would happen eschatologically and instead focused on Christ’s command that until he returned, Christians were to disciple the nations and ‘‘occupy’’ the land.18 Fundamentalist Christians began to organize over concern that America was drifting from its holy calling as a Christian nation and specifically over concern that the changing values of America were impinging on their own family and church lives. As Matt Moen has argued, it was often issues about taxation (IRS ‘‘tyranny’’) and regulation of Christian schools that propelled fundamentalists into local politics.19 Reconstructionism’s presuppositionalism was also translated to a popular level, and it gave shape to the political movement in the form of the critique of ‘‘secular humanism.’’ As Rushdoony wrote on many occasions, if there can be no knowledge without presuppositions and if presuppositions are inherently religious, then there can be no religious neutrality. There can be no religiously neutral legal systems or economic systems (all law is someone’s view of what is right imposed on others; the originator of law can be God or ‘‘man’’ but it can never be neutral). Neither can there be religiously neutral educational systems or curricula. Believers and nonbelievers have no common ground on which to engage. All presuppositions not derived from God (i.e., from the Bible) are derived from human beings’ desire to be gods unto themselves, to determine good and evil for themselves. The result is humanism. Sometimes explicitly acknowledged, but often not, the intellectual/ theological foundation for the Religious Right’s critique of secular humanism is presuppositionalism as translated through Reconstructionist writings. For example, Rus Walton’s One Nation Under God lays out the critique of secular humanism and cites Rushdoony’s works throughout. Another writer who aligns himself with Christian Reconstructionists, John Whitehead20 ‘‘documents’’ the shift from America as a ‘‘nation founded on God’s law,’’ to one founded on ‘‘secular humanism’’ in The Separation Illusion. The book contains a foreword written by Rushdoony; Whitehead references the work of Rushdoony throughout and thanks Rushdoony in the acknowledgments for the use of his library.21

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Neither of these theological positions (postmillennialism and presuppositionalism) has been self-consciously incorporated into the fundamentalist theology of the Religious Right. In fact, Reconstructionist literature is replete with comments that belie their concern that fundamentalists were not sufficiently ‘‘epistemologically self-conscious.’’ In other words, Reconstructionists have long seen that fundamentalists use the conclusions of their work without embracing the Reconstructionist vision wholesale.22 Finally, although many deny the influence of the movement, Rushdoony and the Reconstructionists also had tremendous impact on the leaders of those Washington-based political organizations that were so prominent in the early 1980s. Reconstructionist books could usually be found in the offices of Religious Right organizations. Reconstructionists worked on staff for numerous members of Congress (one of Jack Kemp’s staffers wrote for the JCR as early as 1976, for example).23 Howard Phillips, one of the ‘‘political operatives’’ credited with building the Religious Right’s organization structure at the end of the 1970s, has called Rushdoony the ‘‘most influential man of the twenty-first century,’’ saying that Rushdoony had brought ‘‘historic changes in the thinking of countless leaders.’’ We need not agree with Phillips’s assessment of Rushdoony’s influence in order to see the impact Rushdoony (and those he has trained) has had on Phillips and his colleagues.24 This is not the first time in American history that a populist conservative Protestantism has blended theological traditions to construct a ‘‘biblical’’ rationale for engaging the culture to bring it more in line with their views. In the midst of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy at the turn of the last century, the pietistic fundamentalism that was more concerned with personal holiness than with the state of American culture was drawn into engagement when believers felt their way of life was challenged by the changes taking place. Those conservative Protestants (the original fundamentalists) drew on the intellectual and theological foundation established by the ‘‘Old Princeton’’ theologians: J. Gresham Machen, Benjamin B. Warfield, Charles Hodge, and Archibald Alexander Hodge. They created such an odd coalition that historian George Marsden has called them ‘‘preachers of paradox.’’25 Not coincidentally, the Reconstructionists see themselves as the true heirs to this reformed tradition—holding Old Princeton (and especially Machen) in high esteem. The Christian Reconstructionists can be seen as a link between the movement in the first half of the twentieth century that historian Leo Ribuffo has called ‘‘The Old Christian Right’’26 and the movement in the late twentieth century that came to be called the New Christian Right. Fundamentalism at the turn of the twentieth century was given intellectual foundation by the theologians at Old Princeton and given political expression from the 1930s to the 1950s in the ‘‘Old Christian Right.’’ This was followed in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Reconstructionist movement’s laying a parallel intellectual foundation given political expression beginning in the 1970s by the New Christian Right. Phillip Hammond and James Davison Hunter have seen other connections between the early conflict and the rise of the Religious Right at the

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end of the last century. They have argued that the rise of the Religious Right can best be seen as the ‘‘second installment’’ of the conflict between fundamentalists and modernists that began at the beginning of the century.27 The fundamentalists lost the theological conflict early on but the cultural battle was yet to be fought. It makes all the sense in the world that the second half of the war would be fought by a similar coalition of conservative religious leaders.

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT’S IMPACT ON AMERICAN POLITICS Having shown that the movement has been around for more than a century (though it has changed forms, tactics, and even issues) we can now move to the second part of my thesis: that in its most recent form, the Religious Right and the mainstream American culture have moved closer to each other. By this, I mean first, that the Religious Right has become more nuanced in its presentation of its positions and has shifted some of its focus to issues on which it has broader support, and second, that the larger American culture has moved in its ideological direction. There are any number of issues we might use to illustrate these changes but I have chosen the abortion issue as an example of increased nuance, gay and lesbian rights as an example of the shift in emphasis,28 and patriotic ‘‘God and Country’’ issues expressed in terms of the Patriot Act and the Pledge of Allegiance controversies as examples of the changed political climate in America. During the 1970s and through the 1980s, conservative churches were organized for political involvement with the abortion issue as a catalyst.29 Church members frequently moved from involvement on the abortion issue to work on other issues on the Christian Right’s agenda, but their initial introduction to political activity was often on the abortion issue. Frequently the pastor would agree to the showing of a right-to-life film in place of the usual mid-week service. After viewing ‘‘Assignment Life,’’ ‘‘Eclipse of Reason,’’ or another of the many videos that were produced and distributed nationally, church members were encouraged (often by the pastor himself from the pulpit) to become involved in some pro-life ‘‘ministry.’’ The various ‘‘right-to-life’’30 groups active at this time worked to outlaw all abortions. They also opposed most forms of contraception that were available at the time because they were ‘‘abortifacient.’’31 Through the 1990s, right-to-lifers worked on all fronts to bring an end to abortion. They worked in their communities supporting crisis pregnancy centers, participating in ‘‘Life Chain’’ demonstrations. They supported presidential candidates they hoped would sign the legislation they wanted and appoint judges who would uphold this pro-life legislation in the courts and ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade. Although they worked for candidates to the legislative branches at both the national and state levels who would support requirements for parental notification, oppose public funding for abortion, and require waiting periods and ‘‘informed

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consent,’’ first and foremost they worked for a legal recognition of their view that life begins at conception and for a ban on all abortions. By the mid-1980s, however, some right-to-lifers began to believe that efforts to turn back Roe v. Wade were failing and that more focused direct action was needed. Groups like Operation Rescue organized nonviolent sit-ins to block entrances to abortion clinics, effectively shutting them down a day at a time. Other groups, like Life Dynamics, began calling public attention to physicians who performed abortions in an effort to embarrass them out of business. When it then became clear that these efforts were not achieving success, some right-to-lifers shifted emphasis, but others became more radicalized. One result was the outbreak of clinic bombings and killings of abortion providers. Then by the beginning of the 1990s the Christian Right’s optimism with regard to effecting real change on the abortion issue had begun to wane. As the right-to-lifers saw it, twelve years (two Reagan terms and the first Bush’s term) in which they had supposedly had pro-life appointments to the Supreme Court had produced no discernable change in abortion policy anywhere in the country. With the election of President Clinton, it was clear that even right-to-life influence on court appointments was about to end, the availability of RU-486 seemed inevitable; and protest tactics such as nonviolent sit-ins were effectively halted through aggressive prosecution with the RICO laws.32 Looking back, since 1995 the only significant Supreme Court decision on abortion was a defeat for the right-tolifers: the rejection of a state ban on so-called partial birth abortion in 2000. For a time, even the more radical wing of the right-to-life movement seemed to be in retreat. Operation Rescue was disbanded and the incidences of clinic-related violence have declined. When Paul Hill was executed in 2003 for killing an abortion provider, I was outside the prison interviewing some of his supporters. I wanted to know how his execution would impact their wing of the movement and just where they saw themselves at that point in time. In general, they seemed to have little organizational focus. One supporter who had been the organizer of Operation Rescue in California was starting a new ‘‘ministry’’ on college campuses encouraging students to challenge limitations on free speech with graphic photographs of aborted babies. My conversation with Christian Reconstructionist Mike Bray, who defends the use of force to stop abortion and who served time in prison for a clinic bombing in 1984,33 concluded with his asking rhetorically, ‘‘After you’ve tried to defend the unborn, what else do you do?’’ Despite increased concern following the execution, there were no significant acts of violence as many feared.34 By the end of the first term of President George W. Bush, right-to-life politics began to reemerge, albeit with a shift away from some of the radical efforts to ban abortion altogether and towards a nuanced position more in line with the views of the majority of Americans. A case in point was the president’s signature on the ‘‘Unborn Victims of Crime Bill’’ that, for the first time, gave legal recognition to the personhood of a fetus.

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Abortion-related debate by 2005 centered on efforts to ban late-term ‘‘partial birth abortions,’’ moves to require parental notification when minors seek abortions, and questions of whether fetal tissue may be used in research. Of course, there is still strong support in the core of the Religious Right for overturning Roe v. Wade, but as I write this just a few hours after President Bush has nominated Samuel Alito to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the rhetoric coming from conservatives focuses on these issues, rather than overturning Roe. I consider this an example of increasing nuance in that ten years ago, the activists in the abortion debate were polarized: pro-lifers wanted to ban abortion from the moment of conception and pro-choicers wanted to keep abortion a matter of individual choice the entire nine months of a pregnancy. Most Americans disagreed with both positions. Right-to-lifers have moderated their approach, if not their underlying goals, to focus on abortion-related issues on which there is a broader consensus and, having done so, may meet with more political success. Furthermore, conservative justices likely to agree with right-to-lifers on Roe are also likely to be reticent to overturn what has become ‘‘settled law.’’ It seems most likely that the new more conservative court will moderate the right to an abortion, but not entirely overturn Roe. By the early 1990s the Religious Right was in the midst of a shift in emphasis from the abortion issue to the fight over gay and lesbian rights that would become the next major battleground in ‘‘the culture war.’’35 There is now a convergence of issues and events that have been called ‘‘the gaying of America.’’36 There have been a national debate over samesex marriage, a controversy over the consecration of a gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, and the run-away popularity of television’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Through the 1990s opposition to gay rights largely replaced the abortion issue at the center of the political agenda of the Religious Right. Springs of Life Ministries is an excellent early example of this shift. The Lancaster, California, church, pastored by husband and wife Ty and Jeannette Beeson, was active in the right-to-life movement and had ties to Randall Terry and Operation Rescue. But it was Springs of Life Ministries’ efforts to oppose gay rights that brought them national attention. Like the right-to-life groups in the 1980s, the Beesons began producing emotional and inflammatory videos. These videos, with the help of footage obtained at gay pride parades and gay rights demonstrations, depicted ‘‘the gay lifestyle’’ as bizarre, debauched, and lascivious. Their video, ‘‘Civil Rights or Crisis in America,’’ played a central role in the fall 1992 campaigns in favor of anti-gay initiatives in Oregon and Colorado. ‘‘The Gay Agenda,’’ however, solidified their place as leaders in the opposition to gay rights. It was distributed widely on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon and was central in the fight over gays in the military during the Clinton administration. A second example of this shift in emphasis is Randall Terry himself. Terry is not just a leader of the Christian Right, but one of the most wellknown opponents of abortion. Founder of Operation Rescue, the most

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radical and controversial of the right-to-life groups, Terry was repeatedly arrested at abortion clinics and spent a significant amount of time in jail. After one lengthy stint in jail, Terry announced plans to leave Operation Rescue and form a new group: Christian Defense Coalition, which has since been renamed the Society for Truth and Justice. Although Terry still speaks out on abortion, he has decided that abortion cannot be stopped without addressing the general ‘‘moral decay’’ of the country. In 1992 Terry distributed a brochure that read: ‘‘Christians Beware . . . to vote for Bill Clinton is a sin against God.’’ The very first reason given as to why it was a sin to vote for Clinton was that he ‘‘endorsed same sex unions.’’ In the accompanying letter, the perceived threat of homosexuality was the first issue mentioned. It was given significantly more space than the abortion issue. Until recently, Terry had been ‘‘on sabbatical,’’ but he has now reemerged to spearhead an effort to impeach Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Texas’s sodomy law. He has said that homosexuality is the ‘‘twin treachery’’ to abortion in that it is a fundamental rejection of God’s authority.37 His recent public appearances focused on the fight against same-sex marriage. There are rumors that he may become a candidate for governer in Florida, where he now lives. But as early as the first half of 1993, almost every major group associated with the Christian Right produced a package of anti-gay rights material to be sent to their supporters. Jerry Falwell sent an inflammatory piece of anti-gay literature. The envelope had no return address. There was a large picture of two men kissing and an imposing heading in red letters that read: ‘‘Is this Your Vision for America?’’ In smaller letters were the words, ‘‘ballot enclosed.’’ The envelope contained a ballot in which contributors were actually asked to ‘‘vote’’ on whether or not to keep ‘‘The Old Time Gospel Hour’’ alive, but it was clear that what they were really to vote on was whether gays should be included in the ‘‘vision for America.’’ The Rutherford Institute, which once focused on legal defense of Christians who ran afoul of the law on the abortion issue or government regulation of home schools and Christian schools, sent a package arguing that proposed gay rights bills in a number of states would violate Christians’ religious freedom.38 James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries sent out a ‘‘1993 State of the Nation Survey.’’ Of the twenty-four questions on the survey, seven dealt specifically with gays while only two mentioned abortion. Coral Ridge Ministries in a separate mailing distributed a national petition to keep gays out of the military. Concerned Women of America also sent a fundraising appeal in the form of a survey. Their ‘‘Homosexual Agenda Survey’’ was accompanied by an inflammatory letter that warned of, among other things, ‘‘sex kits’’ distributed to children in school. Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) sent a detailed description of the Gay Rights March on Washington over the signature of Andrea Sheldon, founder Lou Sheldon’s daughter. The letter contained photographs for which Ms. Sheldon apologized profusely. In addition to requesting contributions, the package also promoted TVC’s own video, ‘‘Gay Rights/Special Rights.’’ The Family Research Council has devoted issues of its ‘‘Washington Watch’’ to the gay rights battle, as has Focus on the Family with its publication ‘‘Citizen.’’

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In 2005, the fight against legal and cultural normalization of homosexuality was still the centerpiece of the Religious Right’s agenda. Battles over same-sex marriage were brewing in too many states to list. Public officials in Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, and New York have been charged with illegally issuing marriage licenses or marrying people illegally without licenses. Gay rights can be used as an ‘‘entry-level issue,’’ the way abortion was, to motivate apolitical people to become involved in politics in ways that more complicated, less visual issues cannot. Once motivated and ‘‘educated,’’ these people can be introduced to other issues. Like the abortion issue, gay rights can be framed as central to the survival of the ‘‘traditional family.’’ The issue can be effectively used in the emotionally motivational way that the abortion issue was. This is especially true of the videotaped material from the Gay Rights March and Gay Pride parades, but also the AIDS crisis, which was successfully framed as a gay issue. Gay rights issues provide good fodder for alarmist/shocking fundraising appeals. Requests for money must say ‘‘if something is not done, these terrible things will happen. . . .’’ With the abortion issue, the Christian Right can no longer offer much hope that any amount of money will bring about a ban. Threatening that proposed antidiscrimination laws would prohibit spoken opposition to homosexuality, John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute writes: ‘‘will we be able to speak about our religious faith in public places without being arrested?’’39 Falwell wrote of ‘‘homosexuals, abortionists, feminists and humanists . . . their goal . . . is the complete elimination of God from American society.’’40 Particularly threatening to conservative Christian parents are efforts to teach about homosexuality in schools. Frequent warnings issued by the American Center for Law and Justice insist that the very institution of marriage is at risk. As evidence of how effective this can be, recall the degree to which this claim has been accepted in public discourse; it is often accepted without challenge. No one explains how homosexuality and same-sex marriage threaten heterosexual marriage or how few people (and it would really be a very small percentage of people) who cannot now get married, want to get married. Nonetheless, gay rights issues fit the fundraising appeal template well. The implications of this shift are significant for the continued influence of the Christian Right. A major strategic difference between abortion and gay rights is that on the abortion issue the Christian Right was on the offensive: They were trying to change existing policy. On the gay rights issue they are largely trying to sustain the status quo. Politically, defending against change is always easier than promoting it. The issue of gay rights lends itself to compromise and piecemeal efforts, especially local efforts, in a way that the abortion issue never did. Abortion for these people was all or nothing. Once they framed the issue as protecting human life from the moment of conception, right-to-lifers could accept nothing short of a complete ban on all abortions. They could not generate broad-based public support for this extreme position. Many of the battles over gay rights, on the other hand, will be fought in state legislatures and on local school boards. This has two advantages

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for the Christian Right. First, the Christian Right is most well organized and effective at the local level. Many who share these ‘‘traditional family values’’ have been elected to school boards and city councils, for example. Second, the Christian Right will undoubtedly lose some of these smaller battles and win others. This ‘‘win some–lose some’’ situation will be much more conducive to continued involvement than the ‘‘all or nothing’’ abortion issue. The Christian Right is also likely to receive much more broad-based support for its positions on gay rights than it did on abortion. Although the majority of Americans do not necessarily view gays with the alarm and approbation that these conservative Christians do, many political moderates and even liberals do not support calls for same-sex marriage or want their children ‘‘exposed’’ to issues of homosexuality in schools. Americans generally seem increasingly sympathetic to calls for basic civil rights for gays and lesbians but also reluctant to endorse same-sex marriage. In addition to the observation that the Religious Right has modified its approach to issues in ways that may appeal more to mainstream, moderate Americans, the American public has moved in the direction of the Religious Right so much so that the Religious Right isn’t always clearly discernable right now. The Religious Right still has its own agenda, but many of the issues about which it is concerned have not been identified as necessarily ‘‘Religious Right’’ issues. There are some important controversies that have pushed the mainstream culture toward the Religious Right. The Unborn Victims of Crime bill, for example, was successfully connected with the murder of Laci Peterson, rather than the right-to-lifers; and conservative views on law and order have become broadly accepted by the general public in the aftermath of 9/11. Recent rulings that the phrase ‘‘under God’’ added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 is unconstitutional have reinvigorated the debate over religion in the public schools. The Bush administration’s support for using tax dollars to fund religiously based social service groups has been successfully portrayed as an efficient and effective method of meeting the needs of the poor. In addition, the leadership of the movement is in disarray: Some time ago, Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich publicly concluded that working in politics did not have the effect they had hoped. Ralph Reed left the Christian Coalition, which now seems to be foundering for an identity. Promise Keepers, the 1990s effort to promote male spirituality, developed a following, but insisted that it was ‘‘not political.’’ If Promise Keepers did not claim a political identity, it clearly had political dimensions. But the fact that there are few national leaders pulling conservative Christians together into a recognizable organization does not mean that the citizens those groups had mobilized have dropped out. They have, instead, been absorbed into the larger culture. They watch Fox News, they read the Drudge Report online, and they vote for conservative Republicans. Some evidence suggests that the general public has become more conservative. A fascinating article from the Web-based City Journal has made this case and offered some explanations.41 According to Brian C. Anderson, there are three ‘‘seismic events’’ that mean that conservatives are ‘‘not

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losing the culture wars anymore.’’ Those events are the meteoric growth in cable television, especially Fox News Channel and cable comedy like South Park, both of which critique liberalism in a way that no one could before; the rise of the Internet, with both online publications and blogs promoting populism in information and opinion; and a ‘‘paradigm shift’’ in the publication of best-selling conservative books. Anderson does not note the huge success of NASCAR since 1995 and the reinvention of country music as ‘‘redneck liberation,’’42 but both point to this pervasive shift toward ‘‘God-and-Country’’ Christian conservatism. Anderson missed the one seismic event that brought the broader American public closer to the Religious Right: September 11. As Attorney General, long-time Religious Right leader John Ashcroft was the architect of the Patriot Act and the various other domestic responses to terrorism. Criticized by many as an attack on civil liberties, the anti-terrorism agenda has been strongly supported by the Religious Right. The war in Iraq has been supported by religious leaders such as Southern Baptist pastor and former Southern Baptist Convention president Charles Stanley. Although the administration has consistently avoided framing the conflict over terrorism as one between Christianity and Islam, conservative religious leaders have been more willing to do so. Recall the flap in 2004 during the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting when megachurch pastor Jerry Vines preached a sermon attacking Muhammad for being an adulterer (for practicing polygamy) and a child molester (because some of his wives were ‘‘underage’’ by our standards). Pastor Vines, of course, forgot the history of polygamy in his own biblical tradition. If, on the surface, the American public rejects Vines’s extremism, at some level his position resonates with lots of Americans and makes the Religious Right leaders who are not making such statements seem mainstream.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS There can be little doubt that in his second term as president, George W. Bush became more closely aligned with the Religious Right than any previous president. When given the opportunity, he opted for nominees from this religiously conservative base rather than for nominees intended to build bridges between different factions. As of the time of this writing, however, his presidency is facing some serious challenges: waning support for the war, high-level officials being investigated, at least one indictment, and a miserably failed attempt at a stealth nomination to the Supreme Court (Harriet Miers). He then nominated an alternative candidate that the Religious Right enthusiastically supported. In doing so, he set himself up for a brutal confirmation fight, for which he may not have the political capital. The movement itself, however, may be less dependent on Bush than he is on them. When I presented some of this material to colleagues just weeks before the 2004 election, my position that the Religious Right is resilient and will continue to be a force in American politics was met with strong disagreement from many who expected the presidential election to be close. Colleagues were confident that the Religious Right’s

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influence in America was declining. Just as the 1980 election shocked those in the academy, the morning after the 2004 election left them stunned and dismayed. I believe that the core supporters of the Religious Right will be energized with regard to the abortion issues by the changes on the Supreme Court. They will continue to hope for a reversal of Roe while they work for changes in regulations on late-term abortion, parental (and spousal) notification, and limitations on fetal-related scientific research, thereby calling attention in the larger culture to the fact that abortion is legal not only in the second but even the third trimester. This may not bring a flood of moderate voters to their side but it will soften the perception of right-to-lifers as radical. The debate over same-sex marriage will continue to heat up. In addition to the various acts of civil disobedience around the country, the courts have weighed in, ruling that prohibiting gays and lesbians from marrying amounts to gender discrimination. State legislatures have responded, some with attempts to design alternative legal arrangements for same-sex couples and others with state laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. These efforts seem destined to be ruled unconstitutional as well. The likely scenario will parallel developments over interracial marriage, in which states with conflicting laws ultimately had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court for arbitration. The court is likely to rule that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby leaving the Religious Right to fight for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Predicting the future is dangerous, but my view is that, in general, the American public agrees that marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples but will not be willing to amend the Constitution to prevent gay marriage/civil unions. Working to pass such amendments at the state level, though, will aid the organizational efforts for mobilization on other issues. The movement toward the right on law and order and national security issues may be the most important indicator of the trend. There is increasing dissatisfaction with our role in Iraq, but that doesn’t translate to an increased sense of security at home. In fact, it is as likely that leaving Iraq will result in increased violence as it is that staying there will. Finally, there is another interesting angle to the Religious Right’s efforts. Although African American voters have been traditionally Democratic, they have been ‘‘liberal’’ in ways somewhat different from white Democrats. With some of the highest rates of religious participation of any population cohort, African Americans are a key target audience for the Religious Right, and there is polling data to suggest that there is strong affinity between the two groups on some key issues. A poll conducted in November 2003 and March 2004 by Henry Thomas at the Florida Center for Public and International Policy revealed some surprising results: 80 percent of the African Americans surveyed (even more than the 60 percent of whites surveyed) indicated that they supported Christian organizations receiving tax money to provide social services. In response to the assertion that faith-based organizations are better than government, there was no

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discernible difference between blacks and whites with 60 percent of both indicating a general distrust for government.43 I have argued elsewhere that conservative gender ideology is central to conservative Christian identity.44 If I am correct, then it may be most important to Religious Right efforts to enlist African American voters that those African Americans in the survey were overwhelmingly conservative on gender issues. Ninety-five percent of blacks surveyed opposed women serving as religious leaders, with 57 percent indicating that they were ‘‘strongly opposed.’’ Eighty-four percent said they disagreed with the Episcopal Church’s decision to ordain a gay bishop, with 38 percent of them indicating that they ‘‘strongly disagreed.’’ Since the mid-1990s, the Religious Right has made significant strides in addressing its historic ties to the racism of the old Christian Right, Southern Democratic conservatism, and the fight against racial integration. Groups like Promise Keepers have stressed their interest in building bridges between blacks and whites. To the dismay of more liberal African American leaders, conservative and/or Republican black leaders included people like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Cabinet members Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and former conservative Republican Congressman J.C. Watts, who became a commentator on National Public Radio. To be sure, there are African Americans who see these conservative blacks as losing touch with authentic African American experience, though it may well be that the division represents something of a coming of age of the African American community in the American political process: There is no more reason to expect all blacks to agree on politics than there is to expect all whites to agree. Furthermore, although the blacks in the Florida Center Poll were still overwhelmingly Democrat, 31 percent of them indicated that they were conservative and 45 percent indicated they were moderate, with only 15 percent identifying as liberal. Clearly one venue in which the Religious Right might make gains that will impact a tight presidential election is among African Americans, especially those in African American churches. Without being officially ‘‘Protestant,’’ American culture is and has been profoundly shaped by the revivalist transformationalist vision found in popular Protestantism. Despite the mid-twentieth century attempts to broaden church-state separation (and perhaps because of them), this revivalist, transformationalist conservative Protestantism is more widespread and more influential than before. President George W. Bush identified with this movement, and although it might not be said explicitly, much of middle America does as well. I have argued here that each time the influence of the Religious Right seems to wane and scholars pronounce it dead, it only remakes itself in more effective forms. That process is likely to continue.

NOTES 1. For an examination of the ways in which the Religious Right has evolved over the years, see Matthew C. Moen, The Transformation of the Christian Right (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).

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2. See Laura Berkowitz and John C. Green, ‘‘Charting the Coalition,’’ in Sojourners in the Wilderness, ed. Corwin E. Smidt and James M. Penning (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 58. 3. Matthew C. Moen, The Christian Right and Congress (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 3. 4. Berkowitz and Green, 57. 5. Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 6. Richard Viguerie, The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead (Falls Church, VA: By the author, 1981). 7. Moen, The Transformation of the Christian Right. 8. See Nancy Ammerman, Baptist Battles (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, Televangelism (New York: Henry Holt, 1988); and Lienesch, Redeeming America. 9. See for example, Anson Shupe, ‘‘Christian Reconstruction and the Angry Rhetoric of NeoPostmillennialism,’’ in Millennium, Messiahs and Mayhem, ed. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 1997), 195–206; and Bruce Barron, Heaven on Earth? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992). 10. Rushdoony adopted presuppositional epistemology from one of his teachers Cornelius Van Til, long-time professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. 11. Rousas John Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, CA: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1973). 12. Gary North, Introduction to Christian Economics (Vallecito, CA: Craig Press, 1973). 13. Greg Bahnsen, Theonomy and Christian Ethics (Vallecito, CA: Craig Press, 1973). 14. David Chilton, Paradise Restored (Tyler, TX: Reconstruction Press, 1985); and Chilton, Days of Vengeance (Fort Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1987). 15. Rus Walton, One Nation Under God (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1975). 16. The bookstore was owned and operated by David Thoburn who also owns Thoburn Press, which published several Reconstructionist works, and who is son of Reconstructionist writers Bob and Rosemary Thoburn. 17. See Rousas John Rushdoony, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1981); and Robert L. Thoburn, The Christian and Politics (Tyler, TX: Thoburn Press, 1984). 18. Citing the biblical text in which Jesus says, ‘‘Occupy ’till I come’’ (Luke 19:13). 19. Moen, Christian Right and Congress, 11. 20. John Whitehead became well-known later as the attorney for Paula Jones in her legal dealings with President Bill Clinton. 21. Rus Walton, One Nation Under God, rev. ed. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1987); and John W. Whitehead, The Separation Illusion (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1977). 22. For additional examples, see also Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1980); and LaHaye, The Battle for the Public School (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1983). 23. Bruce Bartlett, ‘‘The Industrial Revolution: Pro and Con,’’ Journal of Christian Reconstruction 3, 2 (Winter 1976–1977): 157–65. 24. This comment was made at a celebration for Rushdoony’s eightieth birthday. The text of Phillips’s speech is on the Web at http://www.ustaxpayers.org/ hp-rushdoony-bday.htm, accessed February 3, 1998.

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25. George Marsden, ‘‘Preachers of Paradox,’’ in his Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 98–121. 26. Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). 27. Phillip E. Hammond, The Protestant Presence in Twentieth Century America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); and James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 28. Julie Ingersoll, ‘‘From Right-to-Life to Anti-Gay Rights: Shifting Traditional Family Values,’’ unpublished paper presented to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Raleigh, NC, November 1993. 29. For a discussion of the legal history and conflict over the abortion issue, see Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also Laurence Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 30. It is tremendously difficult to choose language for this discussion. Obviously the criticism that those who are against abortion are not ‘‘consistently pro-life’’ is valid. On the other hand, those who support abortion rights are not ‘‘consistently pro-choice,’’ either. The terms ‘‘anti-abortion’’ and ‘‘pro-abortion’’ have their own shortcomings; there are no neutral terms for these groups. That said, and given my interest in scholarly description and analysis as opposed to advocacy, I have chosen to use the most common terms each group uses to describe itself. 31. By this they referred to the fact that most contraceptive pills work in such a way as to prevent the fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, rather than to prevent fertilization itself. 32. I have argued that the use of the RICO statutes to shut down the nonviolent civil disobedience contributed to the rise of the violence as it left only the more extreme activists and closed down a nonviolent way for them to express their outrage. 33. For a discussion of Mike Bray’s religious justification of violence and his ties to the Christian Reconstructionists, see Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 34. I did find an unconfirmed report of some fires started in a clinic three days after the execution at www.streetpreach.com/Bray/commentary12.htm, accessed March 16, 2004. 35. ‘‘From Right-to-Life to Anti-Gay Rights: Shifting Traditional Family Values,’’ unpublished paper presented to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Raleigh, NC, November 1993. 36. John D’Emilio, ‘‘The Gaying of America,’’ Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 6 (Winter 1999): 48–49. 37. Bret Hayward, ‘‘Terry: Abortion, homosexuality remain an affront to America,’’ Sioux City Journal online ed., posted November 23, 2003 at http:// siouxcityjournal.com/archives/, accessed December 30, 2003. 38. Perhaps unrelated to gay rights but certainly a shift from the focus on abortion, The Rutherford Institute also led the fight for the impeachment of President Clinton by acting as legal counsel to Paula Jones. 39. Letter from Rutherford Institute, January 1993. 40. Fundraising letter for ‘‘The Old-Time Gospel Hour,’’ January 1993. 41. Brian C. Anderson, ‘‘We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore,’’ City Journal, Autumn 2003, www.city-journal.org/html/13_4_were_not_losing.html, accessed November 16, 2005.

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42. David Fillingim, Redneck Liberation (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003). 43. Henry B. Thomas, ‘‘Local Public Opinion and the Faith-Based Initiative.’’ Surveys conducted in Jacksonville, FL, November 2003 and March 2004, Florida Center for Public and International Policy, University of North Florida. 44. Julie Ingersoll, Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. Fundamentalism and Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Gallagher, John, and Chris Bull. Perfect Enemies. New York: Madison Books, 2001. Harding, Susan Friend. The Book of Jerry Falwell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars. San Francisco: Basic Books, 1990. Moen, Matthew C. The Transformation of the Christian Right. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Porterfield, Amanda. The Transformation of American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 5

From Southern Strategy to National Strategy: How the Christian Right Is Transforming Church-State Relations Anthony E. Cook

T

he 2004 presidential election has led many to question whether another major political realignment may now be underway, one in which the Republican Party, through its effective manipulation of the family values agenda, is permanently attracting conservative Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish voters into the party. Between the unsuccessful candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan, Republicans perfected what has come to be called the ‘‘Southern strategy.’’1 Appealing to Southern whites that had overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party since the end of Reconstruction, the Southern strategy offered a new political home to those disenchanted with the role played by the national Democratic Party in dismantling Jim Crow segregation and advancing the civil rights of black Americans. Old Dixiecrats and Eisenhower Republicans, along with blue-collar Reagan Democrats, were all welcomed to the ‘‘new’’ Republican Party. This culturally, economically, and regionally diverse constituency, more different in many ways than the liberal Northeastern elites and poor blacks who shaped the new Democratic Party, were unified by a three-pronged agenda: states rights (representing local autonomy over race issues and an eagerness to reverse the gains of all post–World War II progressive movements), anti-communism (representing the increased militarism that gave birth in the late 1950s and early 1960s to today’s Republican-dominated defense industry), and the assault on the redistributive gains of Great Society/New Deal government (representing the upward redistribution of wealth and tax revenues to the wealthy through tax cuts, deregulation, and privatization). On the whole, the Southern strategy has served the Republican Party well in the years following the Truman presidency. But the successful

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appeal by the Bush campaign in 2004 to conservative religious voters, an appeal that to a significant degree crossed racial and cultural lines, may presage yet another remarkable political realignment advantaging the Republican Party. More critically for our purposes, this potential realignment has serious implications for church-state relations. This chapter expounds on those implications by examining the issues that have appealed to the constituency of conservative Christians voting for Bush in 2004 and whose concerns have received increasing attention from the Republican Party over the past few years. Although it is true that the declining approval ratings for President Bush and his party in the wake of the response to Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005 may ultimately alter this realignment, I am more interested in how Republican efforts to shape this new coalition, efforts we will likely continue to see, pose unique challenges for the relationship between church and state in America. I contend that the threat posed by the Republican Party’s transition from a race-based Southern strategy to a religion-based national strategy is two-fold. First, there is the threat posed by policies subsidizing religion— policies that distribute tax dollars directly to sectarian and religiously affiliated organizations through faith-based initiatives and that distribute tax dollars indirectly through tuition vouchers for parochial education. Second, there is the threat posed by initiatives intended to Christianize the public sphere—for instance, Christian Right efforts to ban same-sex marriage and abortion, to institute prayer and the teaching of creationism/ intelligent design in public schools, and to display religious symbols like the Ten Commandments on government property. In order fully to appreciate these related threats, however, it is important to first understand the nature and extent of the emerging political realignment suggested by the 2004 presidential election. Three developments are worth highlighting. First, white evangelical Protestants represent about a quarter (23 percent) of the U.S. electorate, and while they tended to favor Republicans over Democrats in 1987 by a slim margin of 34 to 29 percent, by the 2004 election that margin had increased to 48 percent versus 23 percent favoring Democrats. White evangelicals are now the core constituency of the Republican Party, 78 percent having voted for Bush in 2004, comprising 36 percent of all Bush voters in that election. By comparison, 88 percent of all black voters, the most loyal constituency in the Democratic Party, voted for Kerry in 2004, but only accounted for 21 percent of Kerry’s total votes.2 Second, the Republican Party has expanded its appeal to religious voters beyond its core of ideologically conservative white evangelicals. For instance, the regularity with which a person attended church was more important in 2004 in determining his or her vote for president than such traditionally decisive demographic characteristics as gender, age, income, and region. Only race correlated more closely to voting. Fifty-six percent of the American electorate attends church once or more a month. And Bush won 50 percent of those attending once a month, 58 percent of those attending once a week, and 64 percent of those attending more than once a week.3

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Bush’s ability to attract churchgoers cut across ideological lines within the major religious traditions. For instance, each of the major white Christian traditions—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Catholic— has traditionalist, centrist, and modernist ideological strands within it and therefore is not monolithic. Most often, there is greater similarity within the same strand across different religious traditions than among different strands within the same tradition. For instance, ideological conservatives/ traditionalists, whether coming out of evangelical, mainline Protestant, or Catholic traditions, are often more alike on key issues than are traditionalists, centrists, and modernists within the same evangelical grouping. Thus, while 78 percent of all white evangelicals voted for Bush in 2004, 88 percent of traditional evangelicals, 87 percent of whom attend church once or more a week and are the most politically conservative of all religious groups, voted for Bush. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, Bush failed to capture a majority of the modernist voters, those worshipping less frequently and who tend to be more liberal on a wide range of issues, whether the modernists are evangelical, mainline Protestant, or Catholic. Third, while white evangelicals now constitute the single largest voting bloc within the Republican Party—a bloc organized around a traditionalist core of frequent churchgoing, politically conservative Christians—it is important to understand that Bush also won a majority of other religious groups as well. For instance, he garnered a majority of traditionalists and centrists in all three white religious groups—evangelical Protestants (88 percent and 64 percent), mainline Protestants (68 percent and 58 percent), and Catholics (72 percent and 55 percent). Among the groups outside the major white religious traditions, Bush also did quite well. For instance, he won 63 percent of the Latino Protestant vote, an increase of 31 percent from the 2000 election, and among those identifying themselves as ‘‘Other Christian’’ (for example, Mormon), he won 80 percent of their vote in the 2004 election.4 Finally, let us not forget that he increased his share of the Latino Catholic vote by seven percentage points to 31 percent and his share of the black Protestant vote by twelve percentage points to 17 percent, a small but strategic increase that proved decisive in the key battle state of Ohio. Taken together, these three developments suggest an ambitious but disturbing strategy being pursued by leaders within the Republican Party. That strategy is to construct a conservative religious coalition, a national one transcending the racial, regional, and Protestant/Catholic divides that have traditionally impacted voting patterns the most. The vanguard of this movement is a conservative core of Christian evangelicals that is increasingly speaking for traditionalists and moderates, not only within their already sizable group of white evangelicals, but within mainline and other traditions as well. At the same time, this core group of conservative evangelicals has managed to drown out modernist voices within all these traditions. This is all the more disturbing when one understands that this increasingly unified voice is advocating an almost theocratic political vision, an agenda that threatens the relationship between church and state

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through initiatives designed to subsidize the church and to Christianize the state.

SUBSIDIZING THE CHURCH: SCHOOL VOUCHERS AND FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES An extensive national survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reflects a split in American public opinion on the policies of school vouchers and faith-based initiatives. Fifty percent say they support the policy of funding churches and other faith-based programs with tax dollars, but only 39 percent wish to use school vouchers to fund private education.5 In fact, between the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, there was a net decrease of 3 percent in support of school vouchers across all groups, most notably among black Protestants who decreased their support by 10 percent from 50 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2004.6 Yet, given recent Supreme Court decisions and the rightward drift of the court, there will likely be few constitutional obstacles to the privatization of social welfare to churches and their affiliates and to the continued erosion of the traditional church-state divide. In 2002, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Cleveland, Ohio, school voucher program in the case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris.7 The 5–4 vote, with Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and O’Connor in the majority, makes clear that voucher programs will have to meet certain requirements in order to be found constitutional. Most notably, those programs must permit true private choice by those in the program. In other words, the voucher must be given to individual beneficiaries, not directly to parochial schools, and the individuals must be permitted to choose among available options. In addition, the voucher program must not contain any built-in incentives to choose religious schools, and the program must have genuine nonreligious options that permit parents to send their children to other public schools. Finally, there must be a clear secular purpose for the voucher program. That is, the history and context of the program must not reflect a purpose to advance religion. At least thirty-seven out of fifty state constitutions contain stricter limits on aid to religious schools than the federal constitution, thus Zelman may not have much impact in those states. But in many of the thirteen remaining states, voucher movements are well underway. Justice Souter’s dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, characterized the majority’s decision as a ‘‘dramatic departure from basic Establishment Clause principles.’’8 As a result, ‘‘in the matter of educational aid, the Establishment Clause has largely been read away.’’9 For Souter, the Establishment Clause did not merely require neutrality in the government’s distribution of tax dollars to secular and religious organizations, it required that no government aid or assistance, either directly or indirectly, be granted to religious organizations. The 5–4 majority upholding the use of tax-supported vouchers is not likely to be unsettled by the successors to Justices Rehnquist and

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O’Connor, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In fact, it is unclear whether those successors will demand, as O’Connor wrote separately to underscore, that the program reflect a genuine choice by voucher recipients having a range of private, parochial, and public options from which to choose. Several Justices in the majority seem prepared to permit the government to disburse tax dollars directly to sectarian religions and organizations, rather than through the indirect channels of a voucher program. This may explain the boldness with which the Bush administration has pursued its faith-based initiative through executive orders, even in the face of a Republican Congress’s refusal to pass supporting legislation for the initiative. Unlike the voucher program, the faith-based initiative distributes tax dollars directly to sectarian and faith-based organizations, a policy raising serious church-state concerns under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. According to White House data reported by the Los Angeles Times, the Bush administration distributed approximately $1 billion to hundreds of faith-based groups in 2003 under one of its executive orders. In 2004, that figure doubled to $2 billion. There is strong reason to suspect that the grants have been used, in part, as a patronage system to reward supporters and sway potential voters, particularly in key battleground states.10 In the summer of 2003, Bush invited some 120 African American clergy and other community leaders to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. According to one report, flanked by seven black clergy, including the Rev. Tony Evans of Dallas and the Rev. Eugene Rivers of Boston, Bush’s message was well received, being interrupted by frequent applause and the occasional ‘‘Amen.’’ As he left the stage, one man shouted, ‘‘Mr. President, four more years!’’ As one writer observed, all of this must have ‘‘sounded like music’’ to the Bush team’s ears, which had been quite candid about their intentions. When USA Today interviewed Ed Gillespie, the newly elected Republican National Committee chairman, he cited the faith-based initiative as one of the administration’s major selling points to get more blacks to vote Republican. ‘‘I don’t expect a massive wave of party-switching among African-Americans from Democrat to Republican,’’ Gillespie told the newspaper, ‘‘but I think there is drift there.’’11 Many believe it is no mere coincidence that after black clergyman, Rev. Herb Lusk II, delivered the invocation at the 2000 Republican convention, his Philadelphia church, located in the swing state of Pennsylvania, received $1 million in federal funds, or that Bishop Harold Ray, who offered the invocation at a Dick Cheney rally in Palm Beach, Florida (another swing state) got $1.7 million for his South Florida ministry. Although he voted for Clinton and Gore in 2000, after a personal visit from President Bush in 2002 and being awarded a $1.5 million grant, Bishop Sedgwick Daniels had a change of heart in 2004, supporting the Bush ticket in the swing state of Wisconsin. In fact, the Bush administration plastered Daniels’s face on Republican Party fliers endorsing Bush as a man who ‘‘shares our views.’’ When monies were finally distributed in the election year of 2004, charities in 10 states got 40 percent of the $2 billion in taxpayer money, many of them key swing states in that year’s

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upcoming presidential election: New York, Illinois, California, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.12 Nor should one think that the potential for abuse is limited to presidential races. In 2002, the Washington Post reported that Jim Towey, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, made repeated public appearances with Republican candidates involved in close races against Democratic challengers, appearances at which he either discussed or awarded grant money. With the aim of increasing her support in the African American community, U.S. Rep. Anne M. Northup (R-KY) created a nonprofit organization to receive and distribute federal money to religious groups. The Rev. C. Mackey Daniels, pastor of West Chestnut Baptist Church in Kentucky, understood the Representative’s newfound interest in the poor for what it was, however. ‘‘Rep. Northup was never popular in the black community before,’’ he pointed out. ‘‘Now her nonprofit, Louisville Neighborhood Initiative, Inc., (LNI) doles out federal money to poor, mostly minority neighborhoods. I can’t paint a clearer picture. The support was given in order to get votes.’’13 Along with the use of religio-cultural wedge issues like same-sex marriage, the faith-based initiative has emerged as a crucial political tool in the Republican Party’s transition from a racialized Southern strategy to a Christianized national strategy seeking to unite Christian and other religious voters across racial lines. The strategy has not only had favorable results for Republicans in the African American community, but in the white and Hispanic evangelical communities as well. For instance, when Christian Right stalwart Pat Robertson expressed early reservations about the White House initiative in 2001 on his program the 700 Club, viewed by tens of millions on a weekly basis, his Operation Blessing received a half-million-dollar faith-based grant from the Department of Health and Human Resources a few months later. Since then, Robertson has not voiced any criticisms of the initiative.14 Latino evangelical leader Luis Cortes, located in swing state Pennsylvania and listed as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelical leaders in America by Time magazine, supported Ralph Nader’s presidential bid in 2000. But after four years of faith-based grants totaling $7.4 million to his ministry, Nueva Esperanza—a ministry ranking among the greatest beneficiaries of Bush’s ‘‘Compassion Capital Fund’’—Cortes became one of Bush’s biggest supporters in 2004. ‘‘I voted my self-interest,’’ Cortes told the New York Times. Cortes went on to elaborate: ‘‘This is what I tell politicians. You want an endorsement? Give us a check, and you can take a picture of us accepting it. Because then you’ve done something for Brown.’’15 This strategy of subsidizing the church and the religious sphere is not entirely political. I do not mean to suggest that it is. I have no doubt that the vast majority of this money is being distributed and used by churches and their affiliates in good faith. Similarly, I have no doubt that the school voucher program is welcomed by many parents as a crucial intervention into a dire and desperate situation, one in which parents have no options to an educational system decimated by white flight, poverty, crime, and a

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conservative judiciary that has abandoned the promise of Brown. Yet the potential for abuse is much more than speculative or theoretical, and the dangers posed to the church-state divide more than incidental. These dangers are supplemented by what may be an even more disturbing initiative by this most conservative segment of the evangelical Right—efforts to Christianize the state.

CHRISTIANIZING THE STATE: GAY RIGHTS Gary North, a prolific writer for the Christian Reconstruction movement, was quite honest about the ultimate goal of parochial education for evangelical Christians: So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order that finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.16

For North and many others on the Christian Right, school voucher programs and faith-based initiatives are but strategies for building the rank and file of their movement, a movement that ultimately seeks to mould the public sphere into the image of a fundamentalist theocratic state. This desire among the most conservative elements of the evangelical Right for government based on the laws of God may not be a consciously pursued end on the part of rank and file evangelicals. But leaders within the vanguard of the evangelical movement do not need that level of conscious devotion in order to achieve what may be their more radically right-wing agenda. They merely need the rank and file to line up when ordered and provide the necessary leverage for their broader agenda. The following sections chronicle the seminal issues in the culture wars of the past three decades. These issues have galvanized the rank and file of the Christian Right and simultaneously laid the foundation for a broader coalition consisting of conservative and moderate Christians across racial, denominational, and Catholic/Protestant lines. The 2004 presidential campaign exposed many of the cultural fissures fragmenting the geopolitical landscape. None was more volatile than the issues of gay rights in general and same-sex marriage in particular. The impact of this heated controversy on the election underscores the influence of the Religious Right on contemporary American politics and the religiopolitical realignment now raising critical questions about the future of church-state relations. Beginning in the summer of 2003, activists for gay and lesbian rights won a series of impressive victories in the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws,17 and, in what turned out to be an even more pivotal turn of events, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held in November of 2003 that the denial of same-sex marriage violated

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that state’s constitution.18 When Boston, San Francisco, and other jurisdictions began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, what had been regional rumblings erupted into national pandemonium. President Bush catapulted the controversy into a major campaign issue when he endorsed a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.19 The Senate derailed the amendment in the summer of 2004, but not before the Bush campaign had successfully cast their man as the hero defender of traditional moral values and Kerry as the villain Massachusetts liberal who—like a former son of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, defeated by President Bush’s father in 1988—was simply out of touch with the American mainstream.20 Whether this issue was the deciding factor in the 2004 election in key battleground states like Ohio is debatable, but there is strong circumstantial evidence supporting the proposition. Consider the following. Eleven states placed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages on their November 2004 ballot. All eleven, including Ohio whose amendment passed by a margin of 62–38 percent, experienced record turnouts.21 Compared to 2000, the 2004 election in Ohio saw an additional 900,000 voters cast ballots. Bush won the state by only 136,000 votes. According to exit polls, 25 percent of Ohio voters identified themselves as evangelical, exceeding the national figure of 22 percent. Among those Ohio evangelicals, 76 percent voted for Bush.22 In other words, Bush’s margin of victory could have come easily from his probable share of new evangelical voters. Another religious group often missed by the ‘‘evangelical’’ exit polling identifier was black Protestants. This group increased its vote for Bush to 16 percent—five points higher than the national average.23 None of this came as a surprise to Phil Buress, chairman of the Ohio Campaign to Protect Marriage, who notes: ‘‘We had seen polling data from six months [prior to the election] that if [a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage] was on the ballot, it would help the president by 3 to 5 percent.’’24 Republican strategists understood the critical importance of the widespread opposition to same-sex marriage in the 2004 election. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called gay marriage ‘‘the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term.’’25 A crucial question for our purposes is how will the mobilization of sentiment against same-sex marriage factor into church-state issues over the next few years? To answer that question, one must appreciate an interesting divide in American opinion on same-sex marriage versus gay rights. Although a 55 percent majority of the American public favors traditional marriage over either civil unions (18 percent) or same-sex marriage (27 percent), a considerable 57 percent majority supports gay rights.26 Gay/ lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) activists had hoped this public support for gay rights might serve as a springboard to greater liberties, such as the right to marry individuals of the same sex. Conversely, their conservative religious opponents now hope that the successes of the 2004

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campaign against same-sex marriage will facilitate passage of a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage and repeal of gay rights initiatives already on the books in the form of favorable judicial decisions protecting gay lifestyles and prohibiting discrimination against the GLBT communities. Is this increased opposition to gay rights likely? While only time will tell for sure, there are a few factors worth considering. Between the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004, the only groups registering a decline of support for gay rights were mainline Protestants (two point decrease to 60 percent), Catholics (three point decrease to 63 percent), Latino Catholics (eleven point decrease to 61 percent) and black Protestants (sixteen point decrease to 40 percent). Evangelical Protestants actually increased their support for gay rights by two percentage points to 45 percent between the two elections.27 But given the manner in which the same-sex marriage controversy of 2004 galvanized the white evangelical community and conservatives within all religious groups, a drop-off in support for gay rights below the 50 percent mark would not be surprising. In the coming years, one can expect gay rights activists to mount constitutional challenges to the state bans on same-sex marriage, particularly Nebraska’s constitutional amendment banning not only same-sex marriage but also civil unions, domestic partnerships, or any similar contract between lesbian and gay couples. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, denying homosexuals federal benefits conferred by marriage, will likely be challenged, as will the ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ ban on gays and lesbians in the military. But one can expect challenges from the Republican Right as well, challenges to reverse the inroads made by the gay rights movement over the past several years. The expansive reading of privacy rights initiated by the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade permitting abortion, as well as the 2003 landmark case of Lawrence v. Texas striking down state sodomy laws, will likely be challenged in cases reaching the Supreme Court in the coming years.28 The Right’s uproar over recent Supreme Court decisions involving gay rights has fueled some of the controversy that emerged over nominations of Roberts and Alito. Both Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas reached decisions widely heralded as pro-gay rights decisions.29 Romer v. Evans struck down a Colorado ballot initiative banning antidiscrimination lawsprotecting gays. Lawrence v. Texas ruled unconstitutional state sodomy laws upheld by the court seventeen years earlier in Bowers v. Hardwick.30 Lawrence’s extension of privacy rights to gay and lesbian consensual sexual behavior was relied on by the Massachusetts court when it ruled prohibition against same-sex marriage a violation of its state constitution. Conservatives condemned liberals on the Massachusetts and U.S. Supreme Courts as ‘‘judicial activists’’ and vowed an all-out assault on the courts. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an organization at the helm of the movement opposing same-sex marriage, observed after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement that Bush’s promise to name conservative justices, ‘‘more than perhaps any other

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thing, charged me and millions of other values voters across the land to vote for Mr. Bush.’’31 Perkins went on to note that O’Connor’s vacancy ‘‘presents the most important opportunity we may have for decades to stop the nation’s courts from stripping away our Judeo-Christian heritage.’’ Even with O’Connor’s retirement and replacement by a more conservative justice, Romer and Lawrence are in no real danger of being overruled. A five-justice majority would still uphold the decisions, a majority consisting of two justices appointed by Democratic presidents and three appointed by Republican presidents, including author of the opinion, Justice Kennedy, appointed by President Reagan. Because of his support for gay rights, many in the Republican Party have denounced Kennedy as a traitor, prompting Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to call Justice Kennedy ‘‘the most dangerous man in America.’’32

CHRISTIANIZING THE STATE: ABORTION The Supreme Court’s stand on gay rights is but the latest lightening rod around which the Christian Right, particularly the evangelical Right, has mobilized. However, abortion has galvanized the rank and file more intensely over the past three decades than any other issue, thus, its importance in understanding the strength and composition of the modern Republican party and the mission of the evangelical Right within it to transform church-state relations. On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state of Texas’s criminal abortion laws and held that a woman’s right to decide whether to have a child is part of the fundamental right to privacy guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.33 The court announced that it would strictly scrutinize any governmental restriction on the woman’s right to have an abortion before the fetus’s viability. The court ruled that after viability—the point at which the fetus could live outside the mother’s body—the state’s interest in protecting potential life was more compelling than the mother’s right to terminate her pregnancy. Thus, the state could prohibit or impose restrictions on the right to abortion at that time, subject to the woman’s right to abort, if carrying the pregnancy to term endangered the woman’s life. The 7–2 decision had a profound impact on the lives of American women. Before Roe, it is estimated that ‘‘between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred annually in the United States.’’ As many as five to ten thousand women died per year because of illegal abortions.34 It is estimated that the abortion rate peaked at more than 1.6 million in 1990.35 The split between pro-Roe and anti-Roe forces has created extremely volatile times, characterized by protests, stalking, bombings, and even murders. Views on legalized abortion and the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade have become a litmus test by which an increasingly powerful evangelical Right bestows its political blessings or curses on those seeking political office.

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In an interview with George Stephanopoulos shortly after the 2004 presidential election, James Dobson observed: ‘‘Well, the essence of it is that people of faith and the people that I think put George Bush in power again have some very strong views, and I think that this president has two years—or more broadly, the Republican Party has two years—to implement those policies [banning abortion, same-sex marriage, and lowering taxes] . . . or I believe they’ll pay a price in the next election.’’36 Organizations like James Dobson’s Focus On the Family and Tony Perkins’s Family Research Council, like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition before them, see feminism, abortion rights, and gay rights as part of the decline in values that threaten to destroy the foundation of the social order—the traditional family. The extensive organization and agitation of these groups seem to have had some impact on public opinion. Fifty-two percent of Americans still hold a pro-choice position on the issue of abortion, believing that abortion should either be legal in many circumstances (17 percent) or up to the woman to decide (35 percent). But between 1992 and 2004, the percentage of Americans adhering to this pro-choice position declined eight percentage points from a 1992 high of 60 percent. The pro-life position, characterized by a belief that abortion should either be legal in few circumstances (33 percent) or always illegal (15 percent), is held by a growing minority (48 percent) of the American population.37 Not surprisingly, an overwhelming majority (84 percent), of all evangelical traditionalists, the most conservative and staunchly Republican of the Religious Right subgroups, take this position.38 But the traditionalists are making substantial inroads into other groups. Between 1992 and 2004, the pro-life position increased most significantly among evangelical Protestants as a whole (13 percent increase to 69 percent), Latino Catholics (10 percent increase to 57 percent), black Protestants (8 percent increase to 54 percent) and white Catholics (8 percent increase to 48 percent). Between the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004, the only groups measuring an overall increase in pro-life beliefs were nontraditionalist strands of evangelical Protestants (3 percent), black Protestants (5 percent), and Latino Catholics (5 percent).39 Following the failed 1988 presidential bid of Christian Coalition’s founder Pat Robertson, the Christian Right was in turmoil. Ralph Reed, the Coalition’s executive director, split with Robertson over the appropriate strategies and tactics of the movement, preferring a grassroots, underthe-radar and incremental approach over Robertson’s national, extremely visible, and confrontational approach. The 1992 Republican Convention probably won the election for Bill Clinton, when the highly partisan and inflammatory rhetoric of Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson pushed many moderate Republicans and independents toward Ross Perot and threw the election to Clinton. Eventually, Reed’s incremental and grassroots strategy won out, as a new form of organization came into power within the Republican ranks over the Clinton years. The new strategy focused on infiltrating local

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precinct party leadership with evangelical Republicans and building a powerful network of conservative organizations that would stretch from the church, school board, and precinct grassroots, through radio and television intermediaries, to university and foundation think tanks, and finally to lobbying efforts poised to influence policy and voting on specific issues of concern to the Christian Right. It is difficult to underestimate the influence this powerful network has had on Republican Party politics. In 2005, for the fourth year in a row, President Bush found the time to address the Southern Baptist Convention, promising the group representing sixteen million evangelicals that he would work hard to ban gay marriage and abortion, and that their ‘‘family values’’ were his values, too.40 Prayer breakfasts are held every Thursday morning in the nation’s capital, and the President has established a special position in the White House to serve as a liaison to the religious constituency that accounted for a majority (58 percent) of his votes in the 2004 election. It is worth noting, however, that even if Roberts and Alito turn out to be more conservative, anti-Roe justices, there would still be a majority of justices to uphold Roe: John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter (all Republican appointees), along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (Democratic appointees) would not presently overrule Roe. As with gay rights, absent a change of heart by one of the justices, a true shift in the balance of power would only occur with the retirement of a pro-choice justice, presumably Justice Stevens, and his replacement with a decidedly pro-life justice. The willingness of Republican appointees like Kennedy, Souter, and Stevens to side with their Democratic-appointed colleagues accounts for the contempt many conservative Republicans, particularly evangelical Republicans, have for the Supreme Court. This contempt was on full display at the August 2005 Justice Sunday II—a megachurch telecast in which a succession of speakers condemned the Supreme Court’s liberalism as the prime agent of America’s decay and imminent ruin. Tom DeLay of Texas said the Supreme Court had usurped the power of Congress to make laws and was guilty of ‘‘judicial supremacy, judicial autocracy.’’ James Dobson called the court an ‘‘oligarchy,’’ while the organizer of Justice Sunday, Tony Perkins, condemned the high court for legalizing the ‘‘killing of unborn children and homosexual sodomy.’’41 These occasional rhetorical excesses, however, should not detract from what is by far the more common strategy of the modern evangelical Right—organization, lobbying, and the incremental capacity to impact public policy at every level of government. On abortion, for instance, conservatives have had much more success when they’ve focused not on making abortion illegal (which few Americans want) and focused instead on limitations (which most Americans want). For instance, thirty-four states now have laws requiring parents to be notified when a minor applies for an abortion. And, Congress is considering legislation that would require doctors to inform any woman having an abortion after twenty weeks that it will cause the fetus pain.42

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‘‘You eat an apple one bite at a time,’’ reminds Richard Land, President Bush’s Princeton- and Oxford-educated friend who heads the Southern Baptists’ public policy arm.43 Land points out that with both gay marriage and abortion the Religious Right’s current position is to leave decisions to state legislatures, as they are left in Europe. This death by a thousand blows strategy has the advantage of building grassroots support for an expansive conservative agenda, while avoiding national showdowns with the more moderate segments of the Republican Party, showdowns that scare off independent voters, as it did at the 1992 Republican Convention. Although both Land and Dobson both personally oppose gay civil unions, for instance, the federal marriage amendment they plan to revive in Congress does not ban them because, in Land’s words, ‘‘it could then become a civil-rights issue rather than a marriage issue.’’44 As a form of political strategy, incrementalism is fairly new for the evangelical Right, contrasting quite starkly with the more commonly embraced ‘‘all or nothing’’ approach to political engagement. But the Supreme Court’s whittling away of Roe v. Wade has truly come ‘‘one bite at a time.’’ Reagan was elected to office in 1980, in no small measure owing to the organization and grassroots work of evangelical organizations like the now defunct Moral Majority, headed by Lynchburg, Virginia, pastor Jerry Falwell. Overturning Roe v. Wade was a major cause around which the Moral Majority and the evangelical Right rallied in support of Reagan. After taking office, the Reagan White House directed the U.S. solicitor general routinely to petition the Supreme Court to overturn Roe in abortion rights cases reaching the court. Reagan appointee Justice O’Connor signaled what was to come in her City of Akron dissent in 1983.45 She called for replacing ‘‘strict scrutiny’’ with a less rigorous standard of ‘‘undue burden.’’46 For O’Connor, the question in cases imposing restrictions on abortion before viability was not whether the restriction was narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest but, rather, whether the restriction constituted an ‘‘undue burden’’ on the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy before viability. By the time the court decided Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1989, Justices Kennedy and Scalia had joined the court and William Rehnquist was its chief justice.47 The Missouri statute specified, among other things, that ‘‘a physician, prior to performing an abortion on any woman whom he has reason to believe is 20 or more weeks pregnant,’’ must ascertain whether the fetus is ‘‘viable’’ by performing ‘‘such medical examinations and tests as are necessary to make a finding of [the fetus’s] gestational age, weight, and lung maturity.’’48 Health professionals providing abortion services brought an action alleging the Missouri statute to be unconstitutional under Roe and its progeny. For the first time, five justices, with varying intensities, expressed hostility toward Roe: Scalia, Rehnquist, White, Kennedy, and O’Connor. Writing for the plurality, Rehnquist questioned the wisdom of the Roe court’s having entered a political quagmire better left to the individual states to navigate: ‘‘There is no merit to Justice Blackmun’s contention [in Roe] that the court should join in a Ôgreat issuesÕ debate as to whether the

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Constitution includes an ÔunenumeratedÕ general right to privacy as recognized in cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut.’’49 O’Connor reiterated her call for a lower standard of review, but was unwilling to use the present case as an opportunity to overturn Roe, since the issue of Roe’s constitutionality was not before the court. But she reassured those concerned: ‘‘When the constitutional invalidity of a State’s abortion statute actually turns upon the constitutional validity of Roe, there will be time enough to reexamine Roe, and to do so carefully.’’50 Three years later, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, one vote spared Roe from being overturned, with Rehnquist, Scalia, White, and the new Republican-appointed Clarence Thomas all in favor of overruling the landmark decision.51 Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter wrote the plurality opinion. That opinion abandoned the trimester structure of Roe and replaced the original ‘‘strict scrutiny’’ standard governing other fundamental rights for the considerably weaker undue burden standard O’Connor had championed in previous cases.52 An undue burden exists, and therefore, a provision of law is invalid, the court held, if its purpose or effect is to place substantial obstacles in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.53 Applying the new standard, the court upheld the informed consent and parental notification provisions, but ruled the husband-notification provision unconstitutional. This cleared the way for hundreds of criminal abortion restrictions enacted by various state legislatures after the Casey decision. By the time Nebraska’s ban on ‘‘partial-birth abortions’’ made it to the Supreme Court in 2000, two Clinton appointees, Justices Ginsburg and Breyer—both supporters of Roe—had replaced Justices Blackmun (pro-Roe) and White (anti-Roe).54 Thus, opponents of Roe now found themselves three votes short of reversing the landmark decision, assuming Kennedy remained pro-Roe. To overturn the case in 2005, not only would Roberts and Alito have to be clearly in the anti-Roe camp, but someone in the proRoe camp, like Kennedy or Stevens, would either have to flip-flop or retire and be replaced by a third anti-Roe justice. Writing for the majority in Stenberg v. Carhart, Justice Breyer was joined by Justices Stevens, O’Connor, Souter, and Ginsburg in ruling the Nebraska law unconstitutional. The challenged statute prohibited any procedure that ‘‘intentionally delivered into the vagina a living fetus, or a substantial portion thereof, for the purpose of performing a procedure that the perpetrator knows will kill the fetus.’’55 According to the court, the definition was too vague, potentially criminalizing not only the rare, latestage abortion technique known as D&X, Dilation and Extraction, but also the more commonly used technique known as D&E, Dilation & Evacuation.56 The court reasoned that the Nebraska statute imposed an ‘‘undue burden’’ on a woman’s ability to choose an abortion, because it failed to distinguish between these rare and common procedures, both of which might involve the introduction of a ‘‘substantial portion’’ of a still living fetus (a foot or arm) through the cervix, into the vagina.57 Furthermore,

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even with regard to the more controversial D&X procedure, the state failed to include an exception permitting the procedure when the health of the mother was endangered by the pregnancy, a requirement imposed by the holding of Roe v. Wade.58 Kennedy dissented, considering the opinion a departure from the holding in Casey that carved out a distinct role for states in protecting the unborn at every stage of pregnancy.59 Under Casey, the state was free to regulate, even before viability, so long as the regulations did not constitute an undue burden on the woman by erecting substantial obstacles to her decision to have an abortion. According to Kennedy, the court should have and could have easily interpreted the statute to ban only the D&X procedure, the only procedure involving a ‘‘delivery’’ into the vaginal canal.60 Kennedy noted that as morally objectionable as the D&E procedure might be to some, neither the state of Nebraska nor the established medical community had ever characterized the removal of limbs from the cervix to the vaginal canal, for purposes of performing the D&E procedure, a ‘‘delivery.’’61 With the exception of the crushed skull and evacuated skull contents in the D&X procedure, on the other hand, the fetus was fully ‘‘delivered’’ through a process of inducing labor over a period of sometimes days—a process that was quite similar to normal deliveries in all vital respects.62 The end result Nebraska sought to ban, Kennedy reasoned, was the abortion and delivery of a substantially intact fetus.63 Kennedy admitted that for many there might be little moral difference between a D&E procedure that dismembered a fetus, leaving only ‘‘a tray of dismembered pieces’’ and a D&X procedure that induced labor, punctured the fetus’s skull, vacuumed out skull contents and then delivered a substantially intact fetus.64 But nothing in Casey prohibits Nebraska from making this moral judgment about which procedure constitutes the greater affront to the values of life, values it may legitimately promote under Casey, so long as women continued to have reasonable alternatives to securing a pre-viability abortion.65 I have spent some time analyzing Kennedy’s concerns, because if Roberts and Alito oppose Roe, although Roe would be in no immediate jeopardy, Stenberg would likely be overruled and the states given greater leeway to ban partial birth abortions and to impose greater restrictions on pre-viability abortions as well. As with gay rights, Kennedy will occupy the balance of power on the court, holding the line between the liberal wing—Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter—and the conservative wing—Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito (assuming the latter two appointments turn out to be anti-Roe justices).

OTHER CHURCH-STATE ISSUES: TEN COMMANDMENTS, SCHOOL PRAYER, AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN According to the Pew Forum survey, 66 percent of the public supports the posting of the Ten Commandments on government property, and

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91 percent of all traditionalists within the evangelical camp support the measure. In fact, the only subgroups failing to register majority support for this initiative are modernist mainline Protestants (44 percent), secularists (43 percent), other faiths (41 percent) and Jews (34 percent). Remarkably, even 25 percent of all atheists and agnostics support the posting of the Ten Commandments on government property.66 The evangelical Right has tried to harness this popular sentiment in support of its more fundamental agenda of Christianizing a sinful moral order decaying under the influence of a Godless secular humanism. The Right has routinely criticized the liberal federal courts, along with Hollywood and popular media, of course, as a primary agent of this decay. Evidence of the court’s culpability was apparent, according to the Right, in the much publicized showdown between the federal judiciary and Alabama state judge Roy Moore over the placement of a 5,280-pound Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of Alabama’s state judicial building after Moore was elected chief judge of the court in 2001. Moore insisted he had a First Amendment right to ‘‘acknowledge God’’ as the ‘‘moral foundation of law.’’ U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson disagreed, holding that Moore had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by creating ‘‘a religious sanctuary within the walls of a courthouse.’’ When Moore refused to remove the monument, he was removed from office. The Christian Right hastily organized Ten Commandments rallies across the country, promoting their latest hero and martyr as the featured attraction. U.S. Representatives Robert Aderholt (R) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R), both of Alabama, introduced a bill stripping jurisdiction from the federal courts over all matters involving the ‘‘acknowledgment of God’’ in the public arena, including school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, and the posting of the Ten Commandments in public buildings. The Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Washington-based Christian Defense Coalition, which organized vigils outside the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo died, said, ‘‘We see this as an historic opening, and we’re going to pursue it aggressively.’’67 In two test cases involving the display of the Ten Commandments on governmental property, the Supreme Court split, permitting the display in one context but prohibiting it in the other.68 On the one hand, Texas situated its monument in a park surrounding the Texas State Capitol, a park consisting of twenty-one historical markers and seventeen monuments. On the other hand, two Kentucky counties had more recently hung framed copies of the Ten Commandments in two county courthouses.69 Writing for the court in the Kentucky case that found a constitutional violation of the Establishment Clause, Justice Souter held that the context of the state’s action revealed a predominant purpose of advancing religion. Although disappointed that the court ruled that the two Kentucky counties could not hang framed versions of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses, Rev. Mahoney said the Texas decision was sufficient to ‘‘open up a whole new frontier’’ for preserving the United States’ ‘‘Christian heritage.’’ Since the decision, Christian groups have busily planned more monuments.70

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The Christian Right has good reason to be hopeful that Roberts and Alito will correct the court’s liberal slant, at least in this area. If, as anticipated, these Bush appointees are inclined to defer more to state and local authorities in these matters, the McCreary decision is not likely to survive. Either the purpose inquiry of the Lemon test, requiring the government to have a secular purpose when advancing religious ideas, will be overruled (as Scalia prefers) or, as Souter warns, the purpose inquiry will become so superficial ‘‘that any transparent claim to secularity will satisfy it . . . cut[ting] context out of the inquiry to the point of ignoring history, no matter what bearing it actually had on the significance of current circumstances.’’71 Like the posting of the Ten Commandments on public property, school prayer enjoys broad popular support. In nationwide Gallup polls conducted between 2000 and 2005, over 70 percent of the American public indicated support for a constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer in public schools. But when further asked if they had a choice which would they prefer in the local public schools—spoken prayer or a moment of silence for contemplation or silent prayer—only 23 percent chose spoken prayer. Sixty-nine percent chose the silence/silent prayer option.72 But the school prayer controversy is an area in which the evangelical Right’s attempt to Christianize the public sphere is considerably to the right of the American mainstream. That may be due, in no small part, to the protracted battle between the Right and the Supreme Court on this issue. Before the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion became a rallying point for the conservative movement in American politics, the court’s controversial rulings on race and school prayer were targets of intense criticism and reaction by the evangelical Right. In the Brown decision of 1954 and the remedial era that followed, the high court ruled that public schools could not assign students on the basis of race and issued decrees mandating integration, busing, and financial expenditures aimed at correcting the constitutional violation.73 So, for many evangelicals, the 1962 Supreme Court case of Engel v. Vitale was but another example of a too liberal and interventionist court riding roughshod over states rights, local autonomy, and the will of the people.74 Many saw this period as the war of Yankee aggression being waged all over again and, like the nineteenth-century Northern invasion, had to be resisted by any means necessary. In Engel, the Supreme Court struck down a school practice of allowing students to read a twenty-two-word nondenominational prayer prepared by school authorities and prescribed for use in public classrooms as a part of a daily devotional program.75 The court held that the drafting and sponsorship of the prayer by public school authorities violated the Establishment Clause, even if the prayer was nondenominational and arrangements had been made for objecting students to be excused or to not recite the prayer. Since 1962, the court has expanded the principle of Engel into contexts involving voluntary prayers in schools, even prayers that are not prescribed by school authorities. The court has predicated these holdings on the presupposition that schools cannot sponsor or provide opportunities for

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students to pray at school functions without preferring either one religion over other religions or religion over nonreligion, both of which constitute violations of the Establishment Clause. For instance, in Lee v. Weisman (1992), the court struck down, as a violation of the Establishment Clause, a school board policy allowing principals to invite members of the clergy to offer prayers at middle and high school graduations, even when the school’s practice was to give clergy a pamphlet instructing that prayers be nonsectarian and composed with ‘‘inclusiveness and sensitivity.’’76 In other words, the policy still promoted religion over no religion at all. For Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, the determinative factor was that prayer at a graduation ceremony coerced students into an unconstitutional conformity because the students were a captive audience in the same way students sitting in the Engel classroom through devotion time, but given the option of leaving or not praying, were nevertheless a captive audience. But for the other justices in the majority—O’Connor, Stevens, Souter, and Blackmun—the question was not one of coercion, but whether, as here, the state had placed its official stamp of approval on the prayer. In Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), the school district permitted students to read overtly Christian prayers from the stage over the public address system at home football games.77 At first, no written policy was in place to govern such prayers. But after the plaintiffs filed suit, the district adopted a policy that allowed students to vote on whether a student would give an invocation during pre-game ceremonies and, if so, to elect a student from a list of volunteers to deliver it. Under the policy, the selected student was free to decide what message and/or invocation to deliver, but it had to be in harmony with the purposes of the policy, which were ‘‘to solemnize the event, to promote good sportsmanship and student safety, and to establish the appropriate environment for the competition.’’78 Writing an opinion in which five other justices—O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer—joined, Justice Stevens held this was not, as the school contended, a case of protected First Amendment private speech on public property. ‘‘The delivery of such a message—over the school’s public address system, by a speaker representing the student body, under the supervision of school faculty, and pursuant to a school policy that explicitly and implicitly encourages public prayer—is not properly characterized as ÔprivateÕ speech.’’79 Taken together, these cases suggest that the evangelical Right will not see major reversals in this area, unless Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito side with Scalia and Thomas and also Stevens, assuming his is the next vacancy filled on the court, is replaced by a more conservative justice as well. What is more likely to happen in the immediate future is the court’s approval of public school ‘‘moments of silence’’ and strictly voluntary ‘‘periods of reflection,’’ both justified by school authorities on secular grounds.80 These are of little consolation to die-hard evangelicals, however, that would have to sacrifice the opportunity to proselytize during ‘‘moments of silence’’ and be exposed to other belief systems—including agnostic, atheist, and pagan ones—during

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‘‘periods of reflection.’’ Until conservatives have the votes on the high court, one can expect members of Congress to continue pushing for constitutional amendments that permit spoken student- and teacher-led prayers in the public schools.81 Another area representing the evangelical Right’s attempt to Christianize the public sphere focuses on the curriculum of the public school system. In the early twentieth century evangelical fundamentalists competed head-on against the forces of modernism, vying to ban a modernist cornerstone, Darwin’s theory of evolution, from the classroom in favor of creationism. The movement met its demise in the historic Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, pitting populist William Jennings Bryan on the side of the prosecution against Clarence Darrow, who defended the biology teacher prosecuted under the Tennessee statute for teaching evolution in his classroom. In an act of either extreme hubris or grave miscalculation, Bryan insisted on taking the stand to defend creationism and was publicly humiliated by Darrow’s cross-examination. Although Scopes was found guilty, the Christian evangelical movement backing the assault on evolution and modernism began to retreat from politics and public life to pursue a separatist agenda. The combination of Brown, Engel, and Roe brought the fundamentalists out of hiding and back into public life, only this time more formidably organized and financed, and with an ascending Republican Party to champion its cause. While Americans are divided on the creationism/intelligent design vs. evolution debate, these schisms disappear when the issue centers on what children should be taught in America’s public schools. Polls reflect a surprising consensus among the American public (64 percent) that creationism should be taught along with evolution in the curriculum.82 It is of particular interest that this 64 percent consensus is so broad, with clear majorities of seculars, liberal Democrats, and those holding natural selection viewpoints agreeing that creationism should be included in the curriculum as an alternative view to evolution.83 Perhaps it is this kind of support that encouraged religious school board members in Dover, Pennsylvania, recently to mandate the teaching of intelligent design (ID) in the biology classes of their school system. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State sued the board, and the case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, is in district court at the time of writing. The school board is represented by the Thomas More Law Center, a nonprofit law firm founded to provide legal representation to Christians. Its chief counsel, Richard Thomas, is the former Michigan state prosecutor who repeatedly tried to secure the conviction of Dr. Kevorkian, but was eventually ousted from office because voters did not agree with the considerable time and resources he was devoting to prosecuting physician-assisted suicides. Thompson said he founded the law center because he felt Christians were losing the culture wars. ‘‘There are two worldviews that are in conflict,’’ Thompson said. ‘‘I do feel that even though Christians are 86% of the population, they have become second-class citizens.’’84

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The Christian Right already has similar initiatives planned in other states, including Texas. Given the number of public schools in Texas, a victory for ID there would significantly impact the textbook publishing market as a whole, prodding publishers presently excluding ID from biology textbooks to include it in order to recoup market share. As Laurie Goodstein wrote in the New York Times, the threat posed by the ID movement is even graver than this: Religious Right leaders view intelligent design as a stepping-stone to the introduction of full-blown creationism and religion into public schools. Phillip Johnson, one of the main proponents of intelligent design, pioneered a strategy called the Wedge in which ID is a vehicle to get people thinking about religion. He argues that by moving the debate from evolution vs. creationism to the question of God’s existence, people will be ready to be introduced to the truth of the Bible, the question of sin, and ultimately Jesus. Proponents of intelligent design are no different than other creationists who want to preach a religious message to students.85

This chapter has explored what I have characterized as an emerging shift in Republican Party politics from a Southern to a national strategy. The Southern strategy exploited a racial gap to attract Southern whites to the Republican Party. But the national strategy now exploits a religious gap to attract conservative and moderate voters from all religious traditions to complement the Party’s core white evangelical supporters. There is good reason to believe that this strategy will continue to prove fruitful over the coming years. Factors undermining its continued success may range from a decline in the popularity of the Republican Party in the wake of the response to Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005 and the increased opposition to the war in Iraq, to effective efforts by Democrats and others to counter the Republican Party’s strategy. I have particularly argued that the vanguard of this national strategy is a core of theologically and politically conservative evangelicals whose influence within the Republican Party is unparalleled. Their agenda, one calling for what at times sounds like a theocratic state, is likely far more radical than the agenda of moderates and modernists within their own evangelical ranks, and certainly more so than conservatives and moderates from other traditions. This realignment is being achieved through means that have lasting consequences for the future of church-state relations—efforts to subsidize the church and to Christianize the state. How this battle will ultimately play out is anyone’s guess, but the value of what is at stake can hardly be overstated.

NOTES 1. Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1970). 2. Carroll Doherty, ed., ‘‘The American Public: Opinions and Values in a 51%–48% Nation’’ in Trends 2005 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2005),

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http://pewresearch.org/trends/, accessed October 28, 2005; Heather Morton, ed., ‘‘Religion & Public Life: A Faith-Based Partisan Divide’’ in Trends 2005 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2005), http://pewresearch.org/trends/, accessed October 28, 2005; CNN election results at http://www.cnn.com/ ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html (hereinafter cited as CNN election report), accessed October 28, 2005. 3. CNN election report. 4. Morton, ‘‘Religion & Public Life.’’ 5. John C. Green, ‘‘The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004,’’ Table 25, http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/ green-full.pdf. Thirty-nine percent supported the use of vouchers and 16 percent expressed no opinion. 6. Ibid. Black Protestants recorded the largest decrease in support by six percentage points. Latino Catholics and Jews, on the other hand, increased their support of the policy by 5 percent and 6 percent, respectively. 7. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002). 8. Ibid., 717. 9. Ibid. 10. Joseph L. Conn, ‘‘Faith-Based Fiat Unable to Win Approval in Congress, Bush Forges Ahead on Controversial Religion Initiative Through Executive Action,’’ http://www.au.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5454&abbr=cs_& security=1001&news_iv_ctrl=1059, accessed October 28, 2005. 11. Joseph L. Conn, ‘‘Preaching the GOP Gospel: Using His ÔFaith-BasedÕ Initiative to Try to Win Converts in the African-American Community, Bush Seeks to Make His Calling and Election Sure,’’ http://www.au.org/site/News2?abbr=cs_& page=NewsArticle&id=5345&security=1001&news_iv_ctrl=1090, accessed October 28, 2005. 12. Associated Press, ‘‘Religious Charities in 10 States Get $1B,’’ USA Today, March 31, 2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-03-31-religious-charities_x.htm?csp=36, accessed October 28, 2005. 13. Conn, ‘‘Preaching the GOP Gospel.’’ 14. Conn, ‘‘Faith-Based Fiat.’’ 15. Joseph L. Conn, ‘‘Love for Sale: Pastor Trades Endorsement for ÔFaithBasedÕ Cash,’’ http://blog.au.org/2005/05/love_for_sale_p.html, accessed October 28, 2005. 16. Gary North, ‘‘The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right,’’ Christianity and Civilization: The Failure of the American Baptist Culture 1 (Spring 1982): 25. 17. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). 18. Goodridge v. Dep’t of Pub. Health, 440 Mass. 309 (2003). 19. George W. Bush, Transcript of Bush Statement, February 24, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/02/24/elec04.prez.bush.transcript, accessed October 28, 2005. 20. Kerry also opposed gay marriage, but supported gay civil unions, an arrangement that would entitle gay couples to certain benefits and rights of married couples. 21. See ‘‘The Backlash Myth: Progress Toward Gay Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Equality Since May 17, 2004,’’ A Report of the Human Rights Campaign, May 12, 2005. In November of 2004, voters approved constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, and Utah. The proposed amendments in Mississippi, Montana, and Oregon referred

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only to marriage, specifying that it should be limited to unions of one man and one woman. The measures in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah called for a ban on civil unions as well. After the 2004 election, other efforts to amend state constitutions were defeated in fourteen states in 2004 and several others in 2005, causing some to question the alleged ‘‘backlash’’ theory of the November 2004 election. 22. See Morton, ‘‘Religion & Public Life.’’ Religious commitment is defined as a combination of religious attendance and the voters’ self-assessments of the importance of religion in their lives. Looking behind the numbers opposed to gay marriage, other surveys reveal a correlation between the level of religious commitment possessed by voters and their opposition to gay marriage. For instance, while 80 percent of those with high levels of religious commitment oppose the practice, only 57 percent of those with average religious commitment are opposed. Opposition drops even further to 39 percent for those with low religious commitment. 23. Between 1992 and 2004 the number of Americans supporting gay rights increased by 6 percent overall, but declined by 19 percent among black Protestants, the only group registering a net decrease in support over this period. 24. Rob Boston, ‘‘The Religious Right and Election 2004: Religious Right Leaders Exaggerate Their Role at the Polls in a Bid to Win More Power in Washington, D.C.’’ http://www.au.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7078&abbr=cs_, accessed October 28, 2005. 25. Mark Crispin Miller, ‘‘None Dare Call It Stolen,’’ Harpers Magazine (September 2005): 2. 26. Green, Table 23. 27. Ibid., Table 24. 28. The only gay rights–related case on this term’s Supreme Court docket will determine whether colleges can keep military recruiters off their campuses because the military discriminates against gays. See Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973); see also Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). 29. See Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996). 30. See Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986). 31. Carolyn Lochhead, ‘‘Gay Issues Destined for Top Court: Activists Agree Justice Roberts Would be Pivotal in Same-Sex Marriage Cases,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 2005. 32. Ibid. 33. See Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). 34. See Lawrence Lader, Abortion (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Willard Cates, Jr., and Robert W. Rochat, ‘‘Illegal Abortion Deaths in the United States: Why Are They Still Occurring?’’ 14 Family Planning Perspective 163, 166 (1982). (Roe resulted in a dramatic decline in deaths resulting from illegal abortion.) 35. As reported by the National Right to Life Committee headquartered in Washington, D.C. http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/facts/abortionstats.html, accessed October 28, 2005. 36. James Dobson, ‘‘America’s Religious Right: You ain’t seen nothing yet,’’ The Economist, June 23, 2005, www.economist.com/opinion/display/Story.cfm? Story_id=4102212, accessed November 10, 2005. 37. Green, Table 20. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., Table 21. On a related issue, a majority of Americans (51 percent) support stem cell research, while only 32 percent favor a ban. A sizable percentage of those surveyed (17 percent) expressed no opinion on the matter. The only

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groups expressing a majority or near majority opinion that stem cell research should be banned were Catholic traditionalists (51 percent), evangelical traditionalists (50 percent) and black Protestants (47 percent). No more than a 35 percent plurality of any other subgroup supported a ban. For each of these groups, including evangelical traditionalists, the percentage taking a pro-life position on abortion was considerably higher than those wishing to ban stem cell research. This probably means that the campaign against Roe v. Wade will continue to be the lead cause in this area and, coupled with the fight against gay rights, constitute the vanguard of the Christian Right’s campaign to restore the primacy of the traditional family. See also Green, Table 22. 40. Dobson, ‘‘ America’s Religious Right.’’ 41. Derrick Z. Jackson, ‘‘Religious Right Bashes the Courts,’’ Boston Globe, August 16, 2005. 42. Ibid. 43. Dobson, ‘‘ America’s Religious Right.’’ 44. Jackson, ‘‘Religious Right Bashes the Courts.’’ 45. See City of Akron v. Akron Ctr. for Reprod. Health, 462 U.S. 416 (1983). 46. Ibid., 463. 47. 492 U.S. 490 (1989). 48. Ibid., 501. 49. Rehnquist argued that the framework’s key elements–trimesters and viability–are not found in the Constitution’s text, and, since the bounds of the inquiry are essentially indeterminate, the result has been a web of legal rules that have become increasingly intricate, resembling a code of regulations, rather than a body of constitutional doctrine. There is also no reason why the state’s compelling interest in protecting potential human life should not extend throughout pregnancy, rather than coming into existence only at the point of viability. Thus, the Roe trimester framework should be abandoned. Ibid., 520. See also Griswold v. Connecticut, 382 U.S. 479 (1965). 50. U.S. 479 (1965). 51. 505 U.S. 833 (1992). Justice Blackmun, the author of Roe, continued to apply the strict scrutiny standard to strike down all of Pennsylvania’s restrictions on pre-viability abortions, the most important of which were: (1) an informed consent provision allowing the state to impose a twenty-four-hour waiting period on women seeking an abortion after providing them with information about the procedure and the effects of an abortion on the fetus, information that could reflect and promote the state’s pro-life position so long as it was true and not misleading, (2) a parental consent provision requiring minors to secure the consent of a parent before receiving an abortion, unless opting for a judicial bypass procedure available to them and (3) a husband notification provision requiring the wife to notify the husband that she is having an abortion. 52. Ibid., 876. 53. Ibid., 877. 54. The case that was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding partial birth abortions was Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914 (2000). 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 1000–1001. 57. Ibid., 929–30. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 972–73. 60. Ibid., 973–74. 61. Ibid., 975–76.

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62. Ibid., 975. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. As for the state’s failure to include a health exception to the banned D&X procedure, Kennedy argued that to permit a health exception that would be decided at the discretion of the attending physician would be tantamount to having no ban at all, since such physicians could almost always claim the procedure was necessitated by the mother’s health concerns. Since there were no circumstances under which a legitimate health concern would preclude a D&E procedure while permitting a D&X procedure, there was no undue burden imposed by the state in completely banning the D&X procedure. Ibid., 964–65. 66. Green, Table 27. 67. Alan Cooperman, ‘‘Many Expect Confusion and Litigation on Ten Commandments to Continue,’’ http://www.christianalliance.org/site/apps/nl/content2. asp?c=bnKIIQNtEoG&b=873791&ct=1124701, accessed October 28, 2005. 68. See McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, 125 S.Ct. 2722 (2005) (where the executives of two Kentucky counties posted a version of the Ten Commandments on the wall of their courthouses); see also Van Orden v. Perry, 125 S.Ct. 2854 (2005) (where a monument of the Ten Commandments was one of seventeen monuments and twenty-one historical markers located on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol). 69. Justice Breyer was the only justice upholding the constitutionality of the Texas display and invalidating the Kentucky displays as unconstitutional. For Breyer, the question was what the reasonably informed person would glean from the context in which the Ten Commandments were situated. ‘‘The public visiting the capitol grounds,’’ Breyer concluded, ‘‘is more likely to have considered the religious aspect of the tablets’ message as part of a broader moral and historical message reflective of a cultural heritage.’’ Ibid., 2871. Breyer saw the forty-year history over which Texas had maintained the park monument without objection from the public, compared to the recent and more controversial erection of framed Commandments in the Kentucky courtrooms, as evidence ‘‘that few individuals, whatever their belief systems, are likely to have understood the [Texas] monument as amounting . . . to a government effort to establish religion.’’ Ibid., 2870. 70. Cooperman, ‘‘Many Expect Confusion.’’ 71. See McCreary County, 125 S.Ct., 2735. 72. See results from Gallup Poll, August 8–11, 2005, at http://www.pollingreport. com/educ2.htm#Prayer, accessed October 28, 2005. 73. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 74. Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). 75. Ibid. 76. Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992); Kennedy writing, with Blackmun, Stevens, O’Connor, and Souter joining. 77. Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 530 U.S. 290 (2000). Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer joined. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 310. 80. In Bown v. Gwinnett County School District, 112 F.3d 1464 (11th Cir. 1997) the circuit court upheld a statute specifying that ‘‘In each public school classroom, the teacher in charge shall, at the opening of school upon every school day, conduct a brief period of quiet reflection for not more than 60 seconds with the participation of all the pupils therein assembled.’’ The court relied on the fact that the statute

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explicitly stated that the time period ‘‘is not intended to be and shall not be conducted as a religious service or exercise but shall be considered as an opportunity for a moment of silent reflection on the anticipated activities of the day.’’ 81. On February 7, 2003, the Department of Education issued a directive stating that schools could lose federal funds if they don’t comply with a mandate to allow students and teachers to pray outside the classrooms. For years, U.S. Rep. Ernest J. Istook has attempted to add a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. The latest version (H.J. Res. 46) reads as follows: ‘‘To secure the people’s right to acknowledge God according to the dictates of conscience: The people retain the right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including schools. The United States and the States shall not establish any official religion nor require any person to join in prayer or religious activity.’’ 82. Morton, ‘‘Religion and Public Life.’’ A majority of only white evangelicals and black Protestants support the notion of teaching creationism instead of evolution in the public schools. 83. On the matter of evolution versus creationism and intelligent design, 78 percent of Americans say God created life on earth. But there is serious division over what they believe has happened since this creation. Forty-two percent of Americans contend that humans and other living things have existed in present form only, a view consistent with creationism, while slightly more Americans (48 percent) believe life has evolved over time. To further complicate matters, those believing in evolution are divided over God’s continued involvement, with nearly four out of every ten (18 percent of the total public) believing that evolution was guided by a supreme being in a process of intelligent design and the remaining 26 percent holding to a view of evolution through natural selection. It is important to note that creationism, subscribed to by 42 percent of the public, is most intensely supported by white evangelicals (70 percent), with majorities among both the white mainline Protestants (60 percent) and white Catholics (61 percent) taking the evolutionist position. The latter two groups are divided, however, on the question of intelligent design. Although 24 percent of mainline Protestants and 28 percent of white Catholics believe evolution was guided by a supreme being, 31 percent and 28 percent, respectively, believe life evolved through a process of natural selection. Not surprisingly, given the overwhelming identification of white evangelicals with the Republican Party, nearly 60 percent of all conservative Republicans take a creationist position, with only 11 percent of that group believing that evolution occurred through natural selection. 84. Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza, was the first financial backer of the center. Both Monaghan and Thomas are Roman Catholics. 85. Laurie Goodstein, ‘‘In Pennsylvania, It Was Religion vs. Science, Pastor vs. Ph.D., Evolution vs. the Half-Fish’’ New York Times (September 29, 2005).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars. San Francisco: Basic Books, 1990. Moen, Matthew C. The Transformation of the Christian Right. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Phillips, Kevin P. The Emerging Republican Majority. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1970. Robbins, Thomas, and Susan J. Palmer. Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. New York: Routledge, 1997.

CHAPTER 6

Queering the Mainstream, Mainstreaming the Queer: LGBT People and Religion in the United States Melissa M. Wilcox

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he American Theological Library Association’s (ATLA) religion database, which catalogues primary and secondary sources in the study of religion, includes records dating back to 1946. In the first twenty years of those records, the terms ‘‘homosexual,’’ ‘‘homosexuals,’’ and ‘‘homosexuality’’ appear a total of four times, with no appearances whatsoever of the terms ‘‘bisexual,’’ ‘‘transgender,’’ or ‘‘transsexual.’’ For the years from 1965 to 1974 the number of ATLA citations for variations on the term ‘‘homosexual’’ increases to eight; for 1975 to 1984, the number leaps to 64, and the term ‘‘transsexual’’ appears twice. The decade from 1985 to 1994 produced another jump to 178 references to homosexuality, accompanied by four references to transsexuality (but still none to variants of ‘‘bisexual’’ or ‘‘transgender’’). By the turn of the century the trend seems to have leveled off, but in the stretch from 1995 to 2004 there are even more references (nine) to transsexual and transgender topics, and the first four references to bisexuals finally appear. There are many possible explanations for the apparent explosion of publishing on lesbian and gay issues, and for the more recent attention paid to bisexuals and transgendered people. Academic publishing as a whole grew enormously during the twentieth century, and other fields, such as psychology, also saw a boom in publishing on homosexuality between 1965 and 2004. The types of publications indexed change over time, as does keyword usage, and these brief observations do not consider the ways in which and the extent to which indexed publications refer to homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality. Nevertheless, the two major jumps—from eight to 64 citations on ‘‘homosexuality’’ between 1965– 1974 and 1975–1984, and to 178 citations between 1975–1984 and 1985–1994—seem difficult to explain solely through changes in indexing

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practices. More likely, they reflect authors’ reactions to broader social changes, especially changes in religion in the United States. This chapter traces several interlaced and interacting changes in religion and the status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the United States during the twentieth century. Consistent with the shifts in the ATLA records, the most relevant changes took place approximately between 1965 and 1984, but the ramifications of those changes are still playing out in the early twenty-first century. Furthermore, like all seemingly abrupt social changes, these developments did not appear overnight, but resulted from more gradual shifts taking place across several decades of U.S. history. Accordingly, the chapter begins with the ‘‘back story’’: the development of modern conceptions of homosexuality, early interactions between those conceptions (and the people so named) and religion, and what might be called the ‘‘core factors’’ influencing the major changes in the relationship between LGBT identities and religion occurring since 1965. These factors include significant mid-century changes in the understanding and practice of religion in the United States, equally (if not more) significant changes in mainstream conceptions of ‘‘homosexuality,’’ changes in the legal and political status of LGBT people, and changes in the latter’s visibility and demands in both the public sphere generally and religious settings particularly. Resulting from these core changes, as well as from more recent factors such as the AIDS epidemic, were several developments that still shape religion in the United States today; these are the focus of the second section of this chapter. On an institutional level, new denominations and movements formed around LGBT identities, and existing denominations underwent discussions, debates, and often significant changes around their official stances toward the LGBT people in their midst. Numerous satellite groups formed, officially or unofficially affiliated with existing religious organizations but concerned centrally with supporting or resisting denominational openness to LGBT people. Parachurch organizations, which define themselves through religion but are not themselves institutions of religious practice and teaching, also took shape on both sides of the issue, offering support, activism, or a changed identity to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people joining their ranks. Both causing and resulting from these institutional developments were debates and tensions over religious LGBT issues, many of which are still ongoing today. These include not only the well-known and high-profile debates, such as discussions of the status of LGBT people in religious organizations, but also tensions in several less predictable areas. With all of these institutional changes, debates, and tensions, it is probably unsurprising that some LGBT people simply wish to withdraw from the fray altogether. For many this means ignoring religion, but for others it means finding a religious space wherein LGBT identity is not constantly highlighted in either a positive or a negative way. Each of the cases mentioned here—the institutional changes, the ongoing debates and tensions, and the tendency to withdraw from the

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fray—is a direct result of changes in the broader patterns of religion in the United States. In turn, however, each has itself influenced those patterns, as mainstream denominations change their shape and their teachings in response to debates, as new religious movements form and grow, and as satellite and parachurch groups affect the culture at large. This suggests a question, to which the chapter’s title refers and to which its conclusion returns: Did U.S. religion, in the latter half of the twentieth century, see the queering of the mainstream or the mainstreaming of at least some people once considered queer, and in either case, where might the story go from here?

THE INVENTION OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION As philosopher Michel Foucault argued in the 1970s and as historians have further documented, modern Western conceptions of sexual orientation emerged in the nineteenth century.1 Like most definitive statements about complex events, this assertion has been both misunderstood and successfully challenged. On the one hand, Foucault never meant to argue that homoeroticism was invented in the nineteenth-century West, only that homosexuality (and, by extension, heterosexuality) was. On the other hand, it may be too simple to suggest that no other culture had considered the gender of one’s erotic attachments to be constitutive of core qualities of the self. This complexity and the potential for misunderstanding make it worthwhile to explore more fully this argument regarding the invention of sexual orientation. Significant research, most of it from the last two decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, indicates that both same-sex eroticism (meaning any kind of sexual or sexualized contact between members of the same biological sex) and gender-crossing or gender diversity (meaning displaying behaviors or traits, either temporarily or permanently, that one’s society does not normatively associate with one’s biological sex) are widespread in both contemporary and historic cultures. Not all people who practice homoeroticism, however, are homosexual,2 and herein lies the key. The difference between homoeroticism and homosexuality is the difference between sexual desires and practices on the one hand, and the meaning a society assigns to those desires and practices on the other. It was a particular meaning that nineteenth-century Western thinkers invented, and one that most people identifying today as lesbian, gay, and bisexual have inherited.3 Through much of Western history, same-sex eroticism has been one among many sexual behaviors and desires considered to be anywhere from unusual or mildly scandalous to sinful and downright abominable. Just as contemporary Western cultures view most sexual practices simply as variations on taste (however acceptable or reprehensible), same-sex eroticism likewise was simply another ‘‘kink’’ in the sexual possibilities of human nature. As nineteenth-century science became fixated on classification and ranking, however, many human traits once viewed as simple variations— most notably skin color and other attributes that came to be associated

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with new concepts of race—came to hold far deeper meanings. Same-sex attraction was among them. As a result, those attracted strictly to members of the opposite sex became not only the norm, but the normal, and those attracted to the same sex came to be seen not simply as people who enjoyed unusual sex, but as intrinsically aberrant people: homosexuals.4 In reinterpreting same-sex desire as a medical/psychological issue and as a reflection of innate and fundamental difference, the sexologists of the nineteenth century made two very important changes, without which this chapter might not exist. First, they created a new class of people, ‘‘homosexuals,’’ who would eventually, Frankenstein-like (but more successfully than the monster), make their own claims to autonomy and rights, including religious rights. Second, they effectively shifted the locus of discussions about same-sex eroticism from religious communities to medical ones. While religious groups knew of the sexologists’ work, and Christians drew on the new concept of the ‘‘homosexual’’ in reinterpreting the term ‘‘sodomy,’’ for much of the twentieth century Western cultures considered homosexuality to be a disease first and a sinful behavior (resulting from the disease) second. One consequence of the simultaneous invention and medicalization of the ‘‘homosexual’’ as a type of person was that, while small communities of self-identified homosexuals were in existence from the late nineteenth century and more widespread organizing and community-building began during the Second World War, little religious organizing around LGBT issues took place until the late 1960s. There are, however, a few cases prior to this time that deserve discussion.

RELIGION AND HOMOSEXUALITY: EARLY CASES Monastic warnings against ‘‘special friendships’’ aside, some of the earliest evidence for same-sex eroticism and gender-crossing in a religious setting in the United States after the invention of modern concepts of sexual orientation comes from a study of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints.5 Throughout Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans, historian D. Michael Quinn carefully notes that expressions of love, passion, and physical intimacy were common among nineteenthcentury Americans of the same sex, both men and women, and that some forms of gender-crossing were likewise socially acceptable in some settings. Furthermore, the sexologists’ new understandings of sexual orientation made their way somewhat slowly into the broader culture, so that changes in the social meanings of same-sex intimacy and gender-crossing took place both gradually and unevenly. The facts that nineteenth-century Mormon men danced together as couples, for example, and that men shared beds with other men and women did likewise with other women, are unremarkable because such activities were widely accepted in many U.S. cultures of the time. On the other hand, by the turn of the century Quinn finds evidence that some Mormons were using the word ‘‘gay’’ in clearly homoerotic contexts (for instance, a young poet who was living in New York’s

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Greenwich Village when she published some of her poetry in a Mormon journal for young women)6 and others were living together in quietly open relationships in Utah and elsewhere. A few Mormons and exMormons of the early twentieth century were less quiet, becoming romantically involved with high-profile non-Mormons who were well known as homosexuals.7 Furthermore, Quinn devotes an entire chapter to a work he calls ‘‘the earliest community study of lesbians and gay men in America’’: a study of thirty-five lesbians and gay men in Salt Lake City, Utah, conducted by a Mormon lesbian in the 1920s and 1930s.8 References to religion in the study are sparse, but sufficient to indicate that a number of the participants were at least of Mormon background, if not currently practicing members of the Latter-day Saints (LDS) church. It is important to note that none of these same-sex erotic relationships was accepted or approved of by the LDS church; however, Quinn argues that the church’s attitude toward same-sex eroticism was relatively lenient until the 1950s, when the LDS leadership also became rapidly more conservative on many issues, including women’s inclusion in the church.9 As the Mormon leadership was increasing its vigilance and repression toward same-sex eroticism, other Christians were becoming supporters of, or at least sympathizers with, the increasingly visible gay and lesbian population. Progressive preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, in his 1943 book On Being a Real Person, was one of the first Christian leaders to advocate compassion toward homosexuals rather than open condemnation of them as sinners. Just over a decade later, in 1955, Derrick Sherwin Bailey published the first critical examination of biblical texts allegedly condemning homosexuality, and in 1960 United Church of Christ minister Robert W. Wood became the first openly gay theologian to write in support of homosexual Christians.10 Also during the mid-twentieth century, religious organizing began around the issue of homosexuality. The first known religious organization created to serve gay men and lesbians was the early Eucharistic Catholic Church, founded by Catholic ex-seminarian George Hyde and Greek Orthodox priest John Augustine Kazantks (who had lost his position in the Greek church because of his homosexuality). Work by Hyde and Kazantks eventually led to the founding of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America, a gay- and lesbian-friendly but not exclusive denomination, as well as Greenwich Village’s Church of the Beloved Disciple, founded by Rev. Robert Clement in 1969 under the auspices of the Eucharistic Catholic Church.11 Perhaps the most high-profile development involving religion and homosexuality prior to the widespread changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and one that may well have sparked some of these changes, was the formation in 1964 of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) in San Francisco. Organized as part of Glide Memorial Church’s effort to reach out to those living in San Francisco’s depressed Tenderloin district, the council counted both religious leaders and gay and lesbian activists among its members, including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of the first national lesbian rights group in the United States.

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While its main purpose was to foster dialogue between church leaders and gays and lesbians, the council somewhat unexpectedly became a force for advocacy as well after San Francisco police raided a benefit ball the group sponsored. CRH ministers, unaccustomed to the police brutality that was common in gay and lesbian public spaces at the time, protested the raid through both civil and legal channels, bringing police violence against gays and lesbians into the public eye. In the ten years of its existence, the CRH founded several other chapters across the nation, and engaged a number of liberal Protestant churches and denominations in dialogue about the inclusion of lesbians and gay men in church.12 If the Council on Religion and the Homosexual was one of the sparks that changed the status of LGBT people in U.S. religion, several other changes during the late 1960s and early 1970s provided the flint from which that spark and others were struck. These included major shifts in gay and lesbian political strategies, in mainstream understandings of homosexuality, and in religious practice in the United States.

FROM LIBERAL TO LIBERATIONIST13 The mid-twentieth century in the United States saw the rise of gay and lesbian communities, the rise of severe and institutionalized homophobia, and the formation of the earliest lesbian and gay rights organizations. In part because of the seeming contradiction of communities and advocacy groups forming during a time of increasing political repression, these early rights organizations, known collectively as the ‘‘homophile movement,’’ relied on strategies that can be classed as liberal rather than radical. Their tendency to avoid rocking the social boat is especially evident in the early history of the first homophile organization, known as the Mattachine Society, which was founded in 1948 by a member of the Communist Party but experienced a mutiny only five years later. Fearing that rumors of communism would prove fatal to their already vulnerable cause, nonCommunist members ousted their leader in 1953 and reorganized the group with less ambitious, less radical goals. Before the late 1960s, the vast majority of homophile activism took the form of an extended public relations campaign for homosexuals. Homophile leaders cultivated relationships with politicians and scientists, advocating simple human rights for homosexuals and unbiased scientific inquiry into the nature of homosexuality. These strategies allowed the groups to survive and even to make progress during an era when homosexuality was not only medicalized but also criminalized. The religious texts of the era, as discussed above, reflect a similarly circumspect approach to the question of homosexuality within Christianity. As the 1960s progressed, however, it became increasingly clear that the nonviolent resistance promulgated by the civil rights movement and the more aggressive forms of organizing developed within Black Power were also useful for other social movements whose leaders, founders, and members had been inspired and taught by civil rights activists. Homosexuals were involved in these movements as well, although many of them were relatively closeted, and some came to believe that the tactics of the

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homophile movement could never combat the homophobia they saw around them. All of this came to a head during the now-famous riots at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The Village had been known for its gay population (among others) since the turn of the twentieth century and had been a target for police raids for nearly as long, but the raid at the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969 was different because the customers fought back. New Left activists in the crowd saw their chance, and the riots became known as the birthplace of the new gay liberation movement. No longer content to work methodically within existing structures for social change, gay and lesbian liberationists named their oppression and demanded that it end—now. They protested, rallied, came out, sat in, camped it up, and horrified many (though not all) homophile activists in the process. Gay liberation became not only one more of the many social movements to develop in the 1960s, but also a very visible and vocal part of the larger sexual revolution. This last point is especially important in understanding the simultaneous growth of heterosexual religious commentary on homosexuality.

FROM MEDICINE TO MORALITY Perhaps ironically, both the homophile movement and the gay liberationists were involved in one of the earliest and most important public policy changes concerning homosexuality: the alteration of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). The authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders, the DSM listed homosexuality among those disorders in its first two editions. In 1974, it was slated to release the third edition, known as the DSM-III. Planning was underway far in advance of publication, and in 1973 a vote was scheduled to determine whether homosexuals should remain among the mentally disordered. For more than a decade prior to this vote, the homophile movement had been working with scientists, especially psychologists and psychiatrists, to develop reasonably unbiased studies of homosexuality. Most of the studies supporting the medicalization (and, by extension, the criminalization) of homosexuality relied on clinical samples. Psychiatrists and psychologists studied those of their patients who were homosexual, and perhaps the homosexuals among others’ patients as well, and drew conclusions about homosexuality based on this sample. The problem with this method was that since everyone was a patient, the sample was ‘‘pre-selected’’ to include only those with some sort of mental disturbance. Predictably, these studies all concluded that homosexuals were mentally disturbed, although the specifics varied. The reason for the clinical sampling had to do with the nature of lesbian and gay subcultures in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Criminalized, harassed, and considered sick, and subject to severe police violence, the loss of jobs and families, and ‘‘treatments’’ such as electroshock therapy and even lobotomies, gay men and lesbians knew better than to speak to strangers, especially those in the mental health profession.

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However, members of the homophile movement who volunteered for studies convinced some researchers, most notably Evelyn Hooker of the University of California at Los Angeles, to take them seriously. When the work of Hooker and her colleagues failed to find any difference in mental health between homosexuals and the rest of the population, the tide in the APA began to change. When the votes were counted in 1973, the work of the homophile movement, Hooker’s studies, and the increasing visibility of the gay liberation movement had all paid off: In the DSM-III, homosexuality was no longer classified as a mental disorder.14 Like the Stonewall riots, the change in the DSM can be seen as a turning point in gay and lesbian history in the United States. Also like the riots, it did not appear out of thin air but rather was the result of a great deal of gradual change and spurred further gradual change as well. The DSM-III can be seen as the official marker or centerpiece of the gradual demedicalization of homosexuality, a process begun prior to 1973 that continued for decades afterward. Important for the history of religion in the United States, the demedicalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s and early 1970s left opponents of the gay liberation movement with no rhetorical backing. Reacting not only to the uprising of homosexuals but also to the myriad of social changes rooted in the 1960s, social conservatives turned from medicine to morality. In the process, they refocused the entire mainstream discourse on homosexuality in the United States, shifting its locus from the therapist’s couch to the confessional. Considered throughout much of the twentieth century to be a sinful action taken because of a serious illness, homosexuality now became, purely and simply in conservatives’ eyes, a sin.

FROM RELIGION TO SPIRITUALITY Of the three key changes discussed here that prefaced the entry of LGBT people onto one of the main stages of U.S. religious history, the first has little or nothing to do with religion and the second concerns religion only toward the end, with the shift toward moral discourse on homosexuality. The third, by contrast, is centrally about religion, but has little to do with LGBT people except in that they are members of the broader culture affected by the change. This is the shift in how people in the United States think about and practice religion, a shift that some categorize as the move from ‘‘religion’’ to ‘‘spirituality.’’ The shift in U.S. religiosity that began in the 1960s and 1970s had a significant impact on LGBT people, both religiously and more broadly through the development of a concept that some have called ‘‘freedom of conscience.’’15 Sociologist Robert Wuthnow describes the change in U.S. religiosity as a shift from a ‘‘spirituality of dwelling’’ to a ‘‘spirituality of seeking,’’ a metaphor drawn in part from Catholicism.16 The traditional Catholic parish structure, he argues, is rooted in a spirituality of dwelling: The parish and the neighborhood are coexistent, and one becomes a member in a particular church not because one likes the priest or the choir, but because one lives in the neighborhood. Under this model, religious identity is not

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a matter of deep soul-searching, though it may include such; rather, religious identity is assigned at birth (or sometimes marriage), and from that point on remains a constant in one’s life. A spirituality of seeking, on the other hand, implies a certain restlessness, especially when contrasted to the older ‘‘dwelling’’ model. Under this form of spirituality, religious identity is consciously shaped by each individual. It may correspond to a particular religious tradition or organization, or it may involve a conglomeration of beliefs and practices from many different religions. Under this model, when a Catholic moves into a new neighborhood, rather than joining the church at the end of the block she explores several churches within driving distance or an easy public transit trip, selecting the one whose theology, politics, community involvement, and weekly activities best suit her tastes. She may also look into meditation classes at the local Buddhist Center, a drumming circle at the metaphysical bookstore downtown, or a charismatic home church as supplements to her attendance at mass. The shift from a fairly static, institutionally rooted religious practice to a more dynamic, individualistic17 one concerned some scholars at first, and continues to arouse wariness among some.18 As forms of religious community shifted, the measures traditionally used by sociologists to determine religious participation—primarily membership in mainline Protestant denominations like the United Methodist Church or the United Church of Christ—showed an inexorable decline. Was religion dying, as earlytwentieth-century commentators had predicted it would do by the end of the century? Would rampant religious individualism lead ultimately to millions of individual religions, with nary a synagogue, temple, or church in sight? It appears now, at least in the case of the United States, that religion was instead shifting form. Because long-term measures of religion tested only one type of religious form, it appeared that religion was dying, when in fact it was simply relocating (or, to go back to Wuthnow’s metaphor, perhaps it was dislocating). For LGBT people, often ejected from their communities of ‘‘dwelling,’’ the rise of religious individualism meant increased opportunities to be religious without having to be simultaneously closeted. LGBT people could ‘‘shop’’ for synagogues, churches, denominations, and religions that not only suited their own spiritual inclinations but also accepted or even welcomed them without demanding that they change or simply silence their gender identity or sexual orientation. Furthermore, in a culture where religion and morality are so inextricably linked, the de-institutionalization of religion also meant the individualization of morality. Just as a Catholic might now attend a meditation circle or charismatic prayer group in addition to mass, she might also openly elect to differ from the church in her understanding of reproductive politics or homosexuality. A group of such Catholics, in fact, formed an organization of their own when the church refused to recognize them, and this organization (Dignity) can be seen as a direct result of the shift from a spirituality—and morality—of dwelling to one of seeking. The 1960s and 1970s, then, saw the confluence and mutual influence of these three seemingly unrelated changes: the shift to a liberationist

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LGBT politics, the demedicalization and attendant moralization of public discourse on homosexuality, and the shift from dwelling to seeking in the realm of religion and morality. The individualization of morality likely influenced the coming-out and perhaps the radicalization of at least some LGBT people; it also led conservatives in some religions to feel that the country was becoming amoral (for the same reason some sociologists believed it was becoming areligious) and to begin moral crusades, especially against the developments of the sexual revolution. But the sexual revolution, including the gay and lesbian liberation movements, likewise spurred the individualization of morality and religion, as people involved in and influenced by those movements grappled with the conflict between their own beliefs and the doctrines of their religions. The shift from medicalization to moralization is likewise integral to the story, developing as it did in response to both liberal and liberationist activists and simultaneously interacting with a broader cultural shift toward moral debate over sexuality. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the midst of this ferment LGBT people and the challenges they raised had a part in fundamentally changing the face of religion in the United States. As the 1970s came to a close, however, the gay and lesbian liberation movements were entering periods of struggle. Rather than the vocal and often productive (even if also dangerous) struggle of their early years, the movements had claimed some victories, made some enemies, and were now, along with other progressive movements from civil rights to feminism, facing a wave of conservative backlash. Many conservatives seem to have accepted the shift from medicalization to moralization, arguing by the mid-1970s that homosexuality was an immoral choice rather than an inevitable condition, although the medical model persisted in some circles and was increasingly revived in the 1990s. As immoral people making bad choices, conservatives believed, homosexuals were undeserving of ‘‘special’’ recognition and should be barred from certain morally sensitive realms of the social order, especially anything involving the morally vulnerable such as children and teenagers. Conservative political organizers such as Anita Bryant raised the specter of the homosexual teacher to combat employment anti-discrimination laws and encouraged the patently false association between homosexuality (especially among men) and pedophilia. Lesbians and gay men continued, despite the gains of the past decade and the removal of homosexuality from the DSM, to lose child custody cases at vastly disproportionate rates, with evidence of homosexuality often being sufficient to decide the case against them. Into the midst of this increasingly difficult situation came the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Striking morally marginalized communities (primarily gay men and intravenous drug users) during the rise of a backlash against what conservatives saw as the ‘‘immorality’’ of U.S. culture, HIV and its attendant disease, AIDS, weakened the gay liberation movement both literally and figuratively. Major political leaders and scholars died of the disease, and many others—both individuals and entire organizations—became too heavily involved in caring for the sick to engage in political activism. In essence, the community turned inward.

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During the mid-1980s, the conservative backlash took advantage of both the relative silence of gay and lesbian activists and public misunderstanding of AIDS, to turn the political tide heavily against LGBT people. When that tide began to turn again in the early 1990s, it was in response both to a political shift in the country and to the rise of a new set of radical and overwhelmingly secular organizations such as Queer Nation and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), as well as the increasing visibility and activism of transgendered, transsexual, and bisexual people.

NEW DENOMINATIONS AND CHURCH MOVEMENTS The mid-twentieth century saw the appearance of LGBT religious organizations in fits and starts: the Eucharistic Catholic Church in Atlanta, which faded by the late 1950s but remained in existence long enough to sponsor New York’s Church of the Beloved Disciple in 1969; scattered theological publications; and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. On the eve of the Stonewall riots, however, defrocked Pentecostal minister Troy Perry founded the organization that remains to this day the only Protestant denomination with a specific focus on ministry to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people: the Metropolitan Community Church, or MCC.19 In both of his autobiographies, Perry recalls knowing he was gay from a very young age; he also felt called to the ministry from childhood.20 Being a part of the socially conservative Pentecostal tradition, Perry attempted to set his homoerotic attractions aside for the sake of his church and his preaching career. He married and had children, but when he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s he gained access to more readily available resources on homosexuality, as well as a thriving underground gay culture. He came out as a homosexual, losing his ministry as well as his wife and children. Seven years later, Perry recounts, he realized that he still had an unanswered call to the ministry, but that up to that point he had failed to understand with whom God intended him to work: He was called to start a Christian ministry to gay men and lesbians. On October 6, 1968, just eight months before Stonewall, MCC was founded in Perry’s living room, with twelve people in attendance. By 2005, the denomination claimed more than 40,000 members and over 300 churches in eighteen countries. In addition to being a significant part of U.S. LGBT history and activism, MCC is important within the broader story of twentieth-century U.S. religion. The denomination laid the groundwork for discussions of LGBT rights and the formation of LGBT organizations within other denominations and religions. It also has placed the World Council of Churches (in which it holds observer status) and the U.S. National Council of Churches (in which it has regularly been denied all status) under consistent pressure to acknowledge LGBT people as persons, rather than simply as a behavior or an issue. Furthermore, MCC bears comparison (as well as contrast) with the historic black denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, that were founded to serve a population experiencing regular discrimination and mistreatment at the hands of leaders in existing

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denominations. MCC is also unusually ecumenical, presaging to a certain extent the rise of nondenominational Protestant churches. Such ecumenism has been a necessity for the denomination because it draws members from across the Christian spectrum: from Seventh-Day Adventist to Presbyterian, from Church of God in Christ to Catholic. As a result of this diversity, individual MCC congregations as well as the denomination’s governing body must meet the liturgical and theological expectations of a wide variety of people. If the membership numbers are any indication, they do this with great success. A few other LGBT-focused Christian organizations have arisen in the United States since the founding of MCC, although none has ever proclaimed official denominational status. Probably the most significant of these is the Unity Fellowship Church Movement (UFCM), founded in 1982 by gospel singer Carl Bean. Although this movement also took root in Los Angeles, it focused specifically on a population that did not always see itself as well served by MCC: LGBT African Americans. MCC has had African American members since its early years, and African Americans serve as ministers and administrators in the denomination as well. For some African Americans, however, MCC congregations are not a good fit. This may be because of the style of a particular congregation or because MCC congregations are rarely predominantly African American in membership or located in heavily African American neighborhoods. Those looking for the familiar hymns and liturgical dynamics of a church in the AME, National Baptist, or other historically black churches will often be disappointed with MCC, as will those seeking a church with primary outreach to African American communities. On the other hand, the historically black denominations have been reluctant to address LGBT issues, even though some heterosexual-dominant black congregations and some heterosexual black theologians have proved supportive and even activist on questions of LGBT inclusion.21 Many LGBT African Americans, then, find a comfortable home in neither the black churches nor MCC. For all of these reasons, the UFCM has been quite successful. From its initial congregation in L.A.’s Crenshaw district (now also the national home of the movement), the UFCM has expanded to twelve congregations that remain in active contact with each other through the work of nowArchbishop Carl Bean, organizational leaders, and individual members.

NEW CONGREGATIONS, SATELLITE GROUPS, AND PARACHURCH ORGANIZATIONS The founding of MCC was the first trickle in what became a flood of religious organizing, first among LGBT people and their allies and then among their opponents. The majority of such groups retained some official or unofficial tie with pre-existing religious institutions, becoming congregations within an existing denomination or (sometimes unrecognized) satellite groups of that denomination. Others retained a religious focus but concentrated on advocacy rather than practice, becoming interdenominational ‘‘parachurch’’ organizations. Rising in the wake of the gay liberation

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movement, these activist organizations demanded and often won significant changes in Jewish and Christian organizations. One of the earliest of these groups followed closely on the heels of MCC, taking shape in San Diego and Los Angeles in 1969.22 Originally founded by a Roman Catholic priest, Dignity came under lay leadership in 1971 shortly after demanding formal recognition from the archdiocese of Los Angeles. Lay members of the organization, with the immense changes of the Second Vatican Council fresh in their minds and the gay liberation movement budding around them, expected the church to build on the reforms it had implemented so far and thus pressed church officials in Los Angeles to enter into dialogue with them over the acceptance of lesbian and gay Catholics. Rather than responding with open arms, Archbishop Timothy Manning forbade Father Nidorf from continuing his work with Dignity and effectively cut all official ties with the group. This swift and clear reaction set the tone for much of Dignity’s relationship with both the American Catholic church and the Vatican. The group has never been recognized by the Catholic church, and a Vatican edict in the mid-1980s effectively prevented sympathetic priests from offering their parish halls as worship spaces for Dignity chapters. Even with such tension between the LGBT organization and its parent religion, Dignity provides another example of the intertwined and mutual influence between LGBT organizations and religion at large in the United States. Dignity’s initial hopefulness was fueled by Vatican II and the liberalism of the American Catholic church, and its work continues to be focused around advocating change within the church; simultaneously, while the church’s official responses to gay and lesbian Catholics never mention Dignity, the organization’s influence is clear to those who can read between the lines. A similar pattern is evident in Judaism, where the earliest LGBT organizations were two synagogues, Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC) in Los Angeles and Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) in New York,23 both founded in 1972. Following the pattern set by MCC, CBST never affiliated formally with any of the denominations of Judaism and came to serve Jewish LGBT people from a wide variety of backgrounds; in the early 1990s the congregation hired a rabbi with experience in all of the major branches of U.S. Judaism. BCC, on the other hand, while beginning under the auspices of MCC (calling itself the Metropolitan Community Temple, it first met at MCC Los Angeles), soon applied for membership in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Admitted as a member of this Reform Jewish organization in 1974, it became the first LGBT congregation of any religion in the U.S. to be accepted for membership by a major denominational body. Later LGBT-focused synagogues followed both patterns, with some remaining independent and others affiliating with the Reform or Reconstructionist movements. As a result (though, again, no doubt also a cause) of this openly LGBT membership, both Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism have been on the forefront of mainstream U.S. religious groups in their official acceptance of gay men and lesbians.24 While attitudes in individual congregations may vary, both denominations now not only accept gay men and

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lesbians as members but also ordain them and allow the blessing of samesex relationships. Conservative Judaism is still in the midst of struggle on this issue: While gay men and lesbians are accepted in some Conservative congregations, and a few Conservative rabbis have come out, this branch of Judaism does not yet officially ordain out gay men and lesbians, nor does it officially allow the blessing of same-sex relationships. Both issues have been revisited by the denomination in recent years, with no resolution to date. Orthodox Judaism, on the other hand, has no such conflict: It clearly and firmly opposes all expressions of homosexuality. One of the newest developments on the scene of LGBT Judaism is an ‘‘ex-gay’’ organization called JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality). Small but cross-denominational, it appears to be taking its cues primarily from the evangelical Protestant ex-gay organizations (see below). It may appeal, however, to Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews who are homoerotically inclined, and it will bear further watching. The greatest number of congregations, satellite groups, and parachurch organizations has arisen within the many denominations of Protestant Christianity, mostly because of their greater numbers. These groups began taking shape in the early 1970s; new groups were still forming as late as the end of the 1990s. Nearly every sizable U.S. Christian organization now has a satellite group focused on LGBT inclusion; among more liberal denominations these groups may be officially recognized and even funded by the denomination, whereas in more conservative denominations they exist independently. An increasing number of these denominations also have satellite groups that encourage gay men and lesbians to strive toward heterosexuality, as do some non-Protestant organizations. Gay and lesbian Roman Catholics today can turn to the ministries of Dignity (pro-LGBT) or Courage (pro-heterosexual conversion); Mormons can contact Affirmation (pro-LGBT) or Evergreen (pro-heterosexual conversion), and so on. Because of their greater age and larger numbers (in terms of both numbers of groups and numbers of members), to date the pro-LGBT movements have had a greater impact on the shape of U.S. religious organizations. From the founding of Dignity through the recent formation of the Southern Baptist group Honesty, pro-LGBT satellite groups have existed primarily to provide support for LGBT people and to agitate for LGBT inclusion (or, in earlier years and still among more conservative groups, gay and lesbian inclusion). Their struggles and their successes have ironically led in many cases to the founding of ‘‘ex-gay’’ groups such as Courage and Evergreen. More positively from their perspective, however, they have prompted a number of changes in mainstream religious organizations. Most widely visible are the conflicts often referred to as the ‘‘homosexuality debates,’’ in which denominations struggle over some aspect of the connection between Christianity and homosexuality (bisexuals and transgender people are almost always ignored in these debates). Rather than being a single ‘‘phase’’ that denominations experience, these debates often come in waves, as a religious organization progresses down a line of questions related to the status of lesbians and gay men in its midst.

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Roughly in order of progression, the questions taken up by these groups include: (1) the ontological status of homosexuality (where do homosexuals come from?); (2) the soteriological status of homosexuality (can homosexuals be saved and go to heaven, and if so, do they have different requirements than heterosexuals?); (3) the congregational status of homosexuality (should we allow openly lesbian and gay people to join our congregations, and if so, under what restrictions, if any? Should we mandate this for all our congregations or simply allow it?); (4) the clerical status of homosexuality (can lesbians—if women’s ordination is permitted— and gay men be ordained, and if so, under what restrictions, if any?); and (5) the marital status of homosexuality (should we recognize and bless same-sex couples, and if so, should we mandate this for all our congregations or simply allow it?). Only the most liberal of religious organizations answer all of these questions in affirming ways and with no restrictions. The Episcopal Church is one of these, despite all the attention given to the 2003 ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson and the subsequent tensions in the global Anglican communion. Many mainline organizations, such as the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, and Conservative Judaism, remain immobilized partway through this list, with the conservatives in their midst threatening to secede if they move farther along the list and the liberals threatening action if they fail to do so. Conservative groups, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Orthodox Judaism, answer the first two questions in ways that are condemning of same-sex eroticism, answer the third question with a ‘‘no’’ or a qualified ‘‘yes’’ (yes, if they come to be healed of their homosexuality), and never even consider the final two questions. Also visibly involved in these complex dynamics are parachurch organizations, groups not affiliated with any specific denomination or sometimes with any specific religion (though, like the U.S. population as a whole, most are predominantly Protestant in membership). Parachurch organizations form around specific issues, often social or political, that their founders and members see as closely related to their own religious convictions. The Christian Coalition is a prime example, as are some pro-life groups. With relation to LGBT issues, three parachurch organizations stand out. The oldest of these is Exodus International, organized in 1976. The grand dame of the ex-gay movement, Exodus at one time claimed to be able to cure its participants of all homoerotic feelings. In light of repeated failures to do so (including several scandals involving the coming out of prominent leaders and the discovery of others in gay bars or secret same-sex relationships) and despite some apparent successes, in the 1990s Exodus shifted its rhetoric to a promise to help its participants control and resist those desires in order to live the ‘‘heterosexual lifestyle’’ that Exodus participants believe God requires.25 Exodus promotes its message widely, holding conferences worldwide and running large (and generally controversial) advertising campaigns. On the other side of the issue is a newer organization called Soulforce. Founder Mel White was a ghostwriter for conservative Protestant

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figurehead Jerry Falwell before coming out as a gay man.26 He then joined the leadership of MCC, holding the position of MCC Minister of Justice until 1999 when he and his partner Gary Nixon founded Soulforce. Inspired by the nonviolent protest movements of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Soulforce proclaims as its mission ‘‘freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious and political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance.’’27 Recent Soulforce actions include protests at the headquarters of the conservative parachurch organization Focus on the Family and at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. While the work of Exodus has clearly had an impact on the shape of U.S. religion in the early twenty-first century (not to mention popular culture, as the feature comedy But I’m a Cheerleader was based in part on Exodus strategies for ‘‘healing’’ homosexuality), Soulforce is still too new for its impact to be fairly assessed. An equally new parachurch movement, and one worth watching, is the Al-Fatiha Foundation, founded in Boston in 1998 by Faisal Alam, a Muslim of Pakistani heritage and a former activist with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.28 Coming out remains particularly difficult for LGBT Muslims, and very few contemporary sources address same-sex eroticism positively within an Islamic context.29 Some LGBT Muslims in the United States face rejection from their families as much because those families believe such identities are ‘‘Americanized’’ or ‘‘Westernized’’ as because they believe such identities are un-Islamic. Al-Fatiha provides a counterbalance to such arguments, correctives to claims that there is no evidence of homoeroticism or gender diversity in Islamic history, and, perhaps most importantly, a source of community for an increasingly global gathering of LGBT-identified Muslims. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, debates over LGBT issues and religion remain prominent in the United States. These include not only the ongoing debates over the status of gay men and lesbians in mainline religious organizations, but also debates over the place of religion— especially Christianity—in LGBT communities and debates within LGBT and ally religious communities over theology, political activism, the proper place of human sexuality in religion, the status of bisexuals and transgender people, and issues of racial inclusiveness. These tensions have reached into the supposedly isolated world of the academy as well. The American Academy of Religion, for instance, has yet to follow the lead of other academic societies that have issued official statements in support of same-sex marriage, and the organization’s 2004 annual meeting witnessed an intense and verbally violent debate over the nature and soteriological status of homosexuality. The American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, for their part, have remained firm in identifying homosexuality as a normal aspect of human sexual expression; frustrated members who disagreed with this position eventually founded the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), whose work, while grounded in mid-twentieth century psychology and thus roundly dismissed by APA scholars, sustains and informs the work of the religious ex-gay movement.

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LEAVING THE FRAY, FOLLOWING THE CROWD Contemporary understandings of spirituality in the United States generally stress themes of peace and harmony in addition to individualism. Consequently, quite a few LGBT people elect to leave all this religious conflict behind. Some become atheists, but many seem to stay with some form of religious practice. In the process, they may leave the fray but they are also following the crowd: pursuing the same forms of religious belief and practice as many heterosexual and monogendered people. Thus, in addition to reacting to and shaping the changes that have taken place in U.S. religion since the 1960s, LGBT people take part in those changes. Some people simply become part of the larger diversity of their religious organizations. This may be especially the case for those whose connections to their religion are important for reasons beyond the religious, especially those whose congregations or religious identities embody a specific ethnic heritage or identity. In these cases, religious participation concerns more than belief and practice; it locates the practitioner as part of a community and often provides support for living in a society that excludes or exoticizes ethnic and religious difference. But blending in can also be very much a part of the white, middle-class, Protestant mainstream; for instance, gay men and lesbians may be among those drawn to evangelical megachurches, despite the homophobia that sometimes comes from the pulpit or the congregation.30 Seeking religions in which their sexual or gender identities are simply not an issue (or seeking something else entirely, but making their final selection in part based on this criterion), some LGBT people follow the post-1965 trend of converting to Asian religions. While there are debates and tensions around same-sex eroticism and gender crossing in Buddhist and Hindu circles, many forms of those religions imported and adapted for U.S. converts are nonchalant or openly welcoming toward LGBT people. When discussions of LGBT issues take place, they are neither as widespread nor as vituperative as those within some Western religions, especially Christianity. It could be argued that new religious movements are a specialty of the U.S. religious scene, and here too LGBT communities are no exception. LGBT people have joined a variety of new religious movements, although out LGBT people probably favor the more socially liberal of these movements; they have also founded movements of their own. Most notable are the Radical Faeries, founded in the 1970s by several gay men from Los Angeles, including Harry Hay, the Communist Party member who originally founded the Mattachine Society in the 1940s. Combining Neopaganism with a variety of appropriated Native American practices and doses of anarchism and 1960s counterculture, the mostly gay male Radical Faeries maintain an informal network of individual practitioners, urban ‘‘Faerie houses,’’ and rural communes.31 Both the Radical Faeries and the convert-oriented branches of Hinduism and Buddhism in the United States also gain a number of their members, though mostly temporarily, though seekerism. Robert Wuthnow,

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who described the shift from ‘‘dwelling’’ to ‘‘seeking’’ in U.S. spiritualities, has suggested that a spirituality of seeking is especially important for those whose life experiences place them outside the social norm.32 If so, then seekerism would be an especially prominent factor in the religious practices of LGBT communities.33 Seekerism may also allow some LGBT people to maintain contact with their religious heritage while avoiding a total reliance on that heritage for a spiritual sustenance that nonaffirming religious organizations may be unable to provide. Finally, parody may well be another way of grappling with religious life in the contemporary United States. If Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, a parody of national nightly news shows, seems to have become the main source of news for some people in the early twenty-first century, might a parody of religion likewise become a major source of spiritual practice? One organization raises that question quite seriously: the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Founded in the early 1980s in San Francisco, the Sisters quickly discovered that their combination of nuns’ habits and headdresses with drag-queen fashion were popular enough to bring in money. Rather than use their popularity to start yet another drag revue, however, the original Sisters started a charity organization. Initially they supported gay and lesbian Cuban refugees, but with the advent of AIDS they quickly focused their activities on supporting research, treatment, and prevention of the disease. The Sisters are not simply an AIDS organization like other AIDS organizations. The current motto of the San Francisco ‘‘house’’ (that is, chapter) of the Sisters is ‘‘Spreading joy, absolving guilt, and serving the community.’’34 Prospective members undergo a postulancy and a novitiate before becoming ‘‘fully professed nuns,’’ and in the Los Angeles house a number of the members connect their work with the Sisters to their own sense of spirituality.35 Significantly, the founding Sisters recruited new members at the first gathering of the Radical Faeries. Thus, while the Sisters themselves could hardly be considered a mainstream pattern in U.S. religiosity, through their literally religious parody they may in fact be one more example of an LGBT twist on a more widespread practice.

PRESSING FORWARD: CURRENT AND FUTURE GENERATIONS Like the current picture of LGBT issues in U.S. religion, the picture of the future is quite complex, influenced by a number of interacting factors. One potentially important source of change is both cultural and generational. Those currently in their teens and early twenties, known collectively as ‘‘Generation Y,’’ have spent most of their lives exposed to cultural figures who were out as gay men and lesbians—TV characters, music stars, politicians, and occasionally even religious leaders. They have come through high school in an era when ‘‘GSAs’’ (Gay-Straight Alliances) are widespread, and where even some religious colleges and universities have LGBT/ally organizations. Such exposure may make this generation more accepting of at least sexual diversity, and hopefully also gender diversity,

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than previous generations. As they move into religious leadership, the theologically liberal and moderate members of Generation Y may move all but the most conservative religious organizations increasingly in the direction of full religious inclusion, at least for gay men and lesbians and one can hope for bisexuals and transgendered people as well. The visibility of bisexual and transgender struggles for justice is another important question for the future. Even within some gay and lesbian activist circles, bi and trans people are marginalized: Widespread cultural stereotypes are such, the argument goes, that acknowledging the presence of bisexuals and transgendered people in the midst of gay and lesbian activism would feed the negative images fostered by those opposed to the movement and thus invite defeat. Such biased arguments kept lesbians marginalized in the early years of the women’s liberation movement; they are no more just or rational now. However, a broader cultural pattern seems to be developing beyond religious circles: Acceptance of gay men and lesbians is often followed by acceptance of bisexuals and eventually of transgendered people as well. As more and more satellite groups and some religious organizations (such as the Unitarian Universalist Association) take on bisexual and transgender issues at least in theory, there seems to be hope for progress on those fronts in practice as well. Also of importance on a national scale will be the changing role of evangelical Protestantism. This growing branch of the Protestant family has been accorded increasing political and social influence over the past decades; in fact, many liberal commentators blamed conservative evangelical morality, combined with the national controversy over same-sex marriage, for the 2004 defeat of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. If evangelical Protestantism continues to grow in both numbers and influence in the United States, one vision of the future could be quite pessimistic for LGBT rights, both secular and religious. However, if such growth occurs along with the possibly liberalizing influence of Generation Y and if LGBT people continue to blend into evangelical communities, at least in the megachurches, then even evangelical growth may not equate to a resurgence of conservatism toward LGBT people. On the Catholic front, tensions between the Vatican, the American Catholic church, and Dignity are likely to remain or even be exacerbated under the papacy of Benedict XVI. Prior to his elevation to Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; in this capacity, he authored the major Vatican statements on homosexuality, some of them quite repressive.36 The American church has managed to tone down some of these positions in its own statements, but has been forcefully corrected when it has overstepped its bounds. On the other hand, individual U.S. Catholics, both lay and religious, continue to practice their Catholicism with a heavy dose of religious individualism. Thus, there will continue to be out LGBT Catholics in Dignity as well as in officially recognized congregations, regardless of who holds office in the Vatican. The future of LGBT issues in the frozen religious mainstream is also open for debate. In this case, taking a cue from the mid-century debates

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over women’s ordination, it seems that the question is not whether these groups—Conservative Judaism, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Church, and so on—will fully accept LGBT people (or at least lesbians and gay men), but when. Generational issues may offer the key to this question, but the timing remains difficult to predict. Should same-sex marriage be legalized nationally, however, there is reason to believe that religious recognition in the mainstream would not be far behind, and having approved same-sex marriage, mainstream religious organizations would be hard put not to approve the ordination of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals. Beyond the mostly white mainstream, the picture becomes increasingly complex. Conservative religious organizations are fairly easy to predict: As with women’s ordination, they will refuse to follow the crowd on LGBT inclusion and will insist that expressions of sexual and gender diversity are disallowed by their teachings. Liberty University is not likely to have an LGBT student organization any time soon. Change is more likely in the historic black denominations, in large part because African American religious leaders beyond as well as within LGBT communities are speaking out about inclusion and justice for LGBT people. This has already started in the more liberal churches, some of which are openly accepting of their lesbian and gay members and some even of bisexual and transgendered congregants. As with other religious organizations, this change will not sweep far enough to affect a socially conservative black denomination like the Church of God in Christ, and acceptance in the pews will necessarily precede acceptance in the pulpit and acceptance at the altar. The changes may also be slow, especially in a time of increasing resistance to full racial equality, when African American congregations have many other tasks on their hands, but there is reason to be optimistic about the future of LGBT people in moderate and liberal black churches. Change within African American Muslim communities is another matter, as is change within all U.S. Muslim communities. Because of some of the overarching similarities among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there is a chance Muslim communities could follow a similar pattern to that of Judaism and Christianity. If this proves to be the case, then LGBT Muslims and their allies in the United States in the early twenty-first century are treading the path laid down by LGBT Jews and Christians in the late 1960s and early 1970s: They are organizing, they are beginning to produce alternative interpretations of sacred texts that challenge traditionally homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic interpretations, and they are starting to gain religious allies beyond LGBT circles. In newer immigrant Muslim communities, there may be a generational factor: The second and third generation may increasingly accept sexual and gender differences. Indeed, this is true for immigrant communities generally: Members of the first generation usually retain the values of the sending country, whether liberal or conservative on LGBT issues, the second generation overall falls somewhere between their parents’ values and those of their U.S. peers, and the third generation, on average, moves even closer to a value system resembling that of the rest of their age group in the United States. Since

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the strength of community cohesion, connections to the home culture, and subcultural immersion are complicating factors, a great deal of variation is possible and there is much to watch in contemporary immigrant religious communities. Buddhist and Hindu immigrant communities, while also ambivalent or sometimes thoroughly negative about their LGBT members, root their reactions more in cultural interpretations than in religious ones (considering lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities to be ‘‘Western’’ or ‘‘American’’ and not authentically a part of their own culture, rather than arguing that Hinduism or Buddhism forbids such identification). It is worth concluding by returning to the question in the chapter’s title: Is the story of LGBT issues in contemporary U.S. religion a story of queering the mainstream or one of mainstreaming people once deemed (and perhaps still self-identified as) ‘‘queer’’? The answer seems to be that it is some of both. Developing new movements and new political strategies in response to changes in U.S. culture, moving eventually into (and coming out within) mainstream U.S. religions, and taking part in broader changes in styles of religious practice and belief—thus ‘‘mainstreaming,’’ LGBT people simultaneously have profoundly influenced the shape of U.S. religiosity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—thus ‘‘queering’’ the mainstream. It seems likely that neither aspect of this intricate relationship is likely to change soon.

NOTES 1. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). For a more recent summary, see David Halperin, ‘‘Is There a History of Homosexuality?’’ in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Miche`le Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 416–31. 2. Indeed, even in the contemporary West this is true: Some may identify as bisexual, some as heterosexual, some as ‘‘questioning,’’ and even some as ‘‘heteroflexible.’’ 3. For some fairly complicated reasons, this is true as well of people who identify as transgender and transsexual. Most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators on the subject conflated gender-crossing and same-sex eroticism, considering the prime example of the homosexual to be the ‘‘invert’’ who was attracted to the ‘‘wrong’’ sex because of aberrations in her or his gender identity (though there were some few exceptions, most notably German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld). While contemporary transsexual and transgender identities are unrelated to sexual attraction, the concept of inversion laid the groundwork for understanding those identities, like sexual orientation, as innate. 4. Again because of the concept of inversion, bisexuality was generally not a topic of scientific discussion at this point—in fact, most uses of the term until the 1920s were synonymous with either ‘‘invert’’ or ‘‘hermaphrodite.’’ Additionally, it is important to note that the very construction of both heterosexuality and homosexuality (as well as bisexuality) rests on a binary conception of gender and sex. Nineteenth-century scientists were also interested in those they termed ‘‘hermaphrodites,’’ who today prefer the term ‘‘intersex’’—people whose bodies and, often, genes are not easily classified as either male or female. Intersexed bodies, like

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transgendered and transsexual bodies, deeply trouble the waters of contemporary Western concepts of sexual orientation because they trouble the binaries of sex and gender. This generates the discomfort and rejection that intersexed and transgendered people often experience from gay men and lesbians as well as heterosexuals. 5. D. Michael Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 6. The poet was Kate Thomas and the publication, the Young Women’s Journal. See Quinn, 116–17. See also Quinn, chap. 8, for three other such cases. The ‘‘open secrecy’’ of all of these cases revolves around the lingering acceptability of nonerotic romance among same-sex friends at the turn of the century; as with the writings of non-Mormons of the time (some of them, such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, quite well known), Mormons erotically attracted to members of the same sex could write openly about the romantic aspects of such attraction while also including turns of phrase familiar to those in gay and lesbians circles, thus subtly identifying themselves to those who knew enough to decode the references. 7. Cf. Quinn, 172–73. 8. See ibid., chap. 7. The study is Mildred J. Berryman, ‘‘The Psychological Phenomena of the Homosexual,’’ in the June Mazer Lesbian Collection, West Hollywood, CA. Details were published in Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, ‘‘Lesbianism in the 1920s and 1930s: A Newfound Study,’’ Signs 2 (1987): 896 (both cited in Quinn, 223). 9. Cf. Quinn, 375–83. 10. Harry Emerson Fosdick, On Being a Real Person (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943); Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1955); Robert W. Wood, Christ and the Homosexual (Some Observations) (New York: Vantage, 1960). The best overview of this history is the first chapter of Gary David Comstock’s Unrepentant, SelfAffirming, Practicing: Lesbian/Bisexual/Gay People within Organized Religion (New York: Continuum, 1996). On Fosdick and Riverside Church in New York, see also the brief article by Victor K. Jordan, the archivist for Maranatha: Riversiders for Lesbian/Gay Concerns, available online at http://www.lgbtran.org/ Profile.asp?A=J&ID=130 (last accessed June 10, 2005). 11. Comstock mentions the Eucharistic Catholic Church in passing. A more complete history is included in the entry ‘‘George Hyde’’ in the Pioneers’ Gallery of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives Network (available online: http://www.lgbtran.org/Profile.asp?A=H&ID=96), last accessed June 10, 2005. 12. See Comstock, 6–7; see also John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 13. A good source on this history is Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). See also D’Emilio, Sexual Politics. 14. Homosexuality did remain within the DSM, however, because the DSM recognizes that some people may experience mental distress as a result of their homosexuality, and that distress is still subject to treatment. 15. Cf. Phillip E. Hammond, With Liberty for All: Freedom of Religion in the United States (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998); and Phillip E. Hammond, David W. Machacek, and Eric Michael Mazur, Religion on Trial: How Supreme Court Trends Threaten Freedom of Conscience in America (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004). 16. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See especially chap. 1.

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17. One of the concerns raised by some observers of this shift was a fear that rising individualism meant an inevitable decline in the importance of community. While that may be true for some individual ‘‘seekers,’’ the major change may not have been a drop in the importance of community but a change in how community is practiced. Thus, the megachurches that have been so successful in the latter part of the twentieth century draw congregants in part because they offer a range of choices for spiritual practice. 18. See especially Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 19. Other organizations exist that have more than one congregation, but they refer to themselves as ‘‘movements’’ rather than ‘‘denominations.’’ 20. Troy D. Perry as told to Charles L. Lucas, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay (Los Angeles: Nash, 1972); Troy D. Perry with Thomas L.P. Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of Reverend Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990). 21. Cf. Gary David Comstock, A Whosoever Church: Welcoming Lesbians and Gay Men into African American Congregations (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001). 22. Although little scholarly work has been done on Dignity (except for several articles and a dissertation by anthropologist of religion Leonard Norman Primiano), the organization’s Web site has a detailed summary of its history. See http://www.dignityusa.org/archives/history.html (last accessed June 14, 2005). 23. BCC has not been the subject of any extended academic writing, to my knowledge. A brief history of the congregation is available online at http:// www.bcc-la.org/about.html (last accessed June 14, 2005). CBST is the focus of a study by anthropologist Moshe Shokeid, A Gay Synagogue in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 24. More often than not, mainstream religious organizations that grant acceptance to gay men and lesbians neglect to mention bisexuals and transgender people. Some of the changes that affect gay men and lesbians also impact bisexuals because sexual orientation–based restrictions often focus on actions rather than identities; thus, once a denomination decides to accept people who love those of the same sex, bisexuals are generally included in practice although generally not in the official statements. In other cases (and this holds for both Christian and Jewish cases), false stereotypes of bisexuals as promiscuous and nonmonogamous, as well as interpretations of homosexuality as innate and bisexuality as chosen, continue to prevail and impede full acceptance of bisexuals. Most religious organizations that are not LGBT-focused remain silent on transgender issues. 25. Though not focused on Exodus, Didi Herman’s The Anti-Gay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) does an excellent job of tracing this rhetorical shift in the broader ex-gay movement. Not much has been written on Exodus so far, although scholarship on ex-gays in general is on the rise. A clearly pro-gay but nonetheless somewhat balanced documentary on Exodus was released in 1993: One Nation Under God, directed by Teodoro Maniaci and Francine M. Rzeznik (New York: First Run Features). 26. See Mel White, Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 27. I know of no academic writing on Soulforce to date; as with many of the organizations mentioned in this chapter, the best sources are articles in magazines such as the Advocate and the Christian Century or in denominational newsletters,

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and the organization’s own Web site. The Soulforce mission statement can be found at http://www.soulforce.org/main/mission.shtml (last accessed June 14, 2005). 28. See http://www.al-fatiha.org (last accessed June 14, 2005). For a brief biography of Alam, see http://www.lgbtran.org/Profile.asp?A=A&ID=13 (last accessed June 14, 2005). 29. But see, for example, Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, ‘‘Sexuality, Diversity, and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims,’’ in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi (Oxford, Eng.: Oneworld, 2003), 190–233. 30. Scott Thumma, personal communication with the author. 31. On the Faeries, see Jay Hasbrouck, ‘‘Utopian Imaginaries and Faerie Practice: Mapping Routes of Relational Agency,’’ in Gay Religion, ed. Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2005), 239–58. 32. Wuthnow, 147. 33. Cf. Melissa M. Wilcox, ‘‘A Religion of One’s Own: Gender and LGBT Religiosities,’’ in Thumma and Gray, 203–20. 34. See http://www.thesisters.org (last accessed June 14, 2005). Once again, there is little written on the Sisters that they have not produced themselves. The only work of which I am aware is Cathy B. Glenn, ‘‘Queering the (Sacred) Body Politic: Considering the Performative Cultural Politics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,’’ Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003), np. Available online: http://muse. jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.1glenn.html (last accessed June 14, 2005). 35. See Wilcox, ‘‘A Religion of One’s Own’’ for background. Much of this information is contained in as-yet-unpublished research conducted by the author. 36. For an excellent discussion of these texts, see Chapters 2 and 3 of Mark D. Jordan’s admirable work, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Comstock, Gary David. Unrepentant, Self-Affirming, Practicing: Lesbian/Bisexual/ Gay People within Organized Religion. New York: Continuum, 1996. Comstock, Gary David. A Whosoever Church: Welcoming Lesbians and Gay Men into African American Congregations. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Jordan, Mark D. The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Moon, Dawne. God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Quinn, D. Michael. Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Shokeid, Moshe. A Gay Synagogue in New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Thumma, Scott, and Edward R. Gray, eds. Gay Religion. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2005. Wilcox, Melissa M. Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 7

Gender Matters: How Second-Wave Feminism Shaped and Reshaped American Religion Barbara Brown Zikmund

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ociologists and anthropologists repeatedly point out that women in all cultures are religious. Women nurture and educate children, support families and communities through religious faith and practices, tend the sick and the dying, and are generally more likely than men to attend religious ceremonies and services. Religious leadership may be male, but membership and regular grassroots involvement in religious practices around the world is predominantly female. This pattern is especially pronounced in the history of religion in North America. From the colonial period to the twenty-first century, women have been actively involved in thousands of local congregations/parishes and numerous religious movements. Women provided support and hospitality for men. Women traveled independently and with their husbands as itinerant evangelists and charismatic religious leaders. Women developed separate women’s groups within local communities of faith. Women established orders of deaconesses and sisters. Women kept churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples going. It is impossible to understand religion in American history without examining the role of women. During the colonial period, American settlers rejected many gendered European traditions, and women’s lives were governed by practical arrangements suited to the American context. In the early nineteenth century white Protestants, who dominated American society, had developed a distinctive way of defining women’s role and of explaining the special relationship between women and religion.

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THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY The twentieth-century historian Barbara Welter described this stance as the ‘‘cult of true womanhood,’’ or the ‘‘cult of domesticity.’’ Men and women believed that God gave women a ‘‘peculiar susceptibility’’ to religion. Four cardinal virtues found in women (religious piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity) were sources of women’s strength. Women were ‘‘chosen vessels’’ for religious values. Whereas men had to work in the public sphere and be involved in the dirty world, women could focus upon preserving Christian values in the home. Women needed men to keep them safe so that they could do God’s work to strengthen family and uphold society. Men needed women for their salvation. If a woman questioned this arrangement, or sought a ‘‘wider sphere of interest’’ she was condemned. The ‘‘image of true womanhood’’ was very powerful. Yet, even as it was affirmed, the ‘‘ideal’’ was doomed. Welter wrote in 1966: . . . while the women’s magazines and related literature encouraged this ideal of the perfect woman, forces were at work in the nineteenth century which impelled woman herself to change, to play a more creative role in society. The movements for social reform, westward migration, missionary activity, utopian communities, industrialism, the Civil War—all called forth responses from woman which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. For, if woman were so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things.1

As early as 1836 Angelina and Sarah Grimke´, two devout Quaker antislavery activists, challenged the ideal of true womanhood. They argued that men and women were both created in the image of God and therefore women as well as men needed to be actively engaged in the world to end the evil of slavery and other injustices.2 In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her Quaker friend Lucretia Mott convened a Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. The women who attended, many of them very religious, voiced their discontent. They passed a ‘‘Declaration of Sentiments,’’ lamenting how the power of men limited the freedoms of woman, keeping her subservient in the church and state, promoting two different moral codes for women and men, and usurping God’s power by defining women’s sphere of action instead of leaving it to ‘‘her conscience and her God.’’3 The most radical action of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention was to demand that women be granted the right to vote. Most men and many women were skeptical and even outraged at this idea. They honestly believed that female suffrage was incompatible with women’s obligations to family and church. Public life and politics were for men. Woman’s place was in the home. Yet after 1848, a persistent group of female reformers, later labeled the ‘‘first wave of feminism,’’ ignored many of the common assumptions

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about women’s role and worked for change. They became deeply involved in the campaign for abolition and women’s suffrage. When the Civil War ended, these activist women anticipated that both freed slaves and women would be granted the vote. Unfortunately, they were disappointed. New Constitutional amendments guaranteed suffrage only to African American men. The women were discouraged, but they did not give up. They reorganized their suffrage campaign to make changes in state rather than federal laws. In 1869 the state of Wyoming approved women’s suffrage, and in the next several decades other Western states did the same. In the 1870s a new organization, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), found a way to link traditional assumptions about women’s place in the home with voting and public political issues. Frances Willard, founder and leader of the WCTU, made the case that alcoholism destroyed families and hurt children. She argued that if women were enfranchised they would be able to vote for prohibition, supporting ‘‘hearth and home’’ and freeing women and their families from the dangers of ‘‘demon rum.’’ Willard’s argument was effective, but the logic of her case that giving women civic power would protect the home was a mixed blessing. By linking the crusade for suffrage to women’s private sphere as homemaker, many long-standing assumptions about women’s domestic role in society went unchallenged.4 In the end, the WCTU campaign for hearth and home carried the day, resulting in 1920 in the passage of a women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Simply because women had won the vote, however, did not change many traditional attitudes about gender roles. During the 1920s Christian fundamentalism reinforced the ‘‘cult of domesticity’’ by emphasizing the biblical arguments behind women’s primary obligation to her family. Economic pressures kept women at home during the Great Depression, further reinforcing the legacy of domesticity. By the 1950s, although many middle-class white married women did have jobs outside the home to earn extra money to make life more comfortable and secure for their families, social attitudes about how to be a good woman focused on being a good wife and mother. Of course, immigrant, black, and lower-class women always worked outside the home. Yet, the ideology around women’s sphere persisted. By the early 1960s many women of diverse races, classes, and religions were increasingly uncomfortable with the prevailing ideology behind gender roles in American society.

SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM In 1963 Betty Friedan published a book titled The Feminine Mystique. She documented the deep discontent of many middle-class, educated white women, and she touched a nerve. Women had legal rights: They could vote, they could work for wages, but they still felt powerless and secondclass. Even when women were highly educated and held jobs outside the home, they were still viewed primarily as wives and mothers, and they were

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often treated as sex objects. When they put all of their energies into traditional family life, they felt unhappy. One woman explained her situation: I love the kids and Bob and my home. There’s no problem that you can put a name to. But I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bed-maker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?5

Friedan wrote that this ‘‘problem-with-no-name’’ experienced by many women was produced by a ‘‘mystique,’’ an impossible ideal that women could not achieve and did not find fulfilling. Women, she wrote, are depressed by the ‘‘strange discrepancy’’ between their reality and this ideal. If they complain, they are told to ‘‘adjust’’ to the complexity of women’s roles and ‘‘accept themselves.’’ Betty Friedan objected. She argued that the problem was not with women, but with society. Assumptions about what women needed to be happy were distorted. She encouraged women to break away from the ‘‘mystique’’ or the ‘‘cult of domesticity’’ with its limitations on women’s freedom and identity to claim their freedom. Friedan’s analysis had a strong impact on educated white women. It gave them reasons to work for change and to stop thinking that there were no battles left to be fought for women. However some women disagreed. They felt that Friedan ignored the genuine satisfactions that many women did derive from homemaking and motherhood. Furthermore, Friedan’s advice was not always useful for immigrant, black, and lowerclass women because their problems were different. Nevertheless, by the late 1960s women of all classes and races began thinking about themselves and approaching issues of gender differently. Their discontent created what scholars now call the second wave of feminism in American history. It is difficult to explain exactly why this new feminism exploded in the late 1960s. Three factors are usually mentioned. First, by the mid-twentieth century, medical advancements were allowing women to live longer, independent, and healthy lives. Instead of spending most of their adult years pregnant or caring for children, women could anticipate thirty years of mature adult life after their child-rearing responsibilities were over. The tampon and the birth control pill (approved for use in 1961) gave modern women more control over their bodies and allowed them to plan their lives. Second, during World War II women had convinced themselves and proved to others that they could be effective workers in the marketplace. As family responsibilities declined, they had time and a growing desire to do more than earn money. They wanted careers. Of course, many lowerclass, immigrant, and African American women had no choice; they had to work outside the home to survive economically. Yet women in all classes became more aware that many policies and practices related to female employment were unfair and discriminatory. They became impatient. Third, in 1960 President Kennedy appointed Eleanor Roosevelt chair of a President’s Commission on the Status of Women. The commission’s

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1963 report was not radical. It argued that women needed more protection under the law. It supported an Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay for equal work, and the expansion of child care options. Soon thereafter the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave women more legal leverage to correct gender injustices by prohibiting all discrimination on the basis of both race and sex. One of the ironies of history is that the inclusion of gender discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a last-minute attempt by a Southern racist to defeat the law by adding the word ‘‘sex.’’ His strategy backfired, and the entire bill was passed as amended.6 During the 1960s, a new group of angry activist women, often disillusioned by their experiences in the student and civil rights movements, pressed for radical changes. They felt that government was not meeting its obligations to women, and they mistrusted existing women’s organizations. These new-style feminists formed small, loosely organized ‘‘consciousness-raising’’ groups and employed popular techniques of group therapy to help women recognize their oppression. In 1966 leaders of this more militant feminism came together to found a new organization patterned after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to work for social and political change on behalf of women. The National Organization of Women (NOW) was born. By the dawn of the twenty-first century the role of women in American society had undergone many changes. Two significant developments highlight the impact of second-wave feminism on American religion: (1) the social and institutional changes that led increasing numbers of women to exercise more direct leadership in religious organizations and (2) the transformation of religious thinking that produced new theologies and ways of using language among religious communities.

RELIGION AND FEMINISM Historically, ‘‘cult of domesticity’’ thinking had led to the creation of strong women’s auxiliary organizations in churches and synagogues. Women’s mission societies, sisterhoods, and fellowships stretched the original definition of women’s domestic sphere and obligations into the neighborhood and around the world. By the twentieth century Christian and Jewish women were deeply involved in public education, medical reform, social justice, and mission work. They did not hold formal power within their churches and synagogues as priests, pastors, or rabbis, but they wielded a great deal of informal influence, especially on issues related to children and family. During the 1970s, younger women, responding to the agenda stimulated by Betty Friedan and the radical ‘‘women’s liberation movement,’’ pressed for changes in churches and synagogues. These women had little interest in traditional religion, and they did not trust most women’s organizations in churches and synagogues. They were impatient with the slow acceptance of women’s leadership in religious groups, and some of them wanted to be ordained clergy.

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In the nineteenth century, advocates of women’s ordination focused on the abilities of a handful of women who felt ‘‘called’’ as clergy, on the idea that church and society needed the leadership talents of women, or on the practical demand for more religious leaders of any gender. The handful of women ordained before the 1870s did not demand equality with men; they simply wanted to do what they believed God was calling them to do. By the late nineteenth century, according to sociologist Mark Chaves, the rhetoric justifying the ordination of women began to shift to issues of gender equality. Writers supporting women’s ordination focused on biblical texts and wrote theological treatises upholding ‘‘women’s rights’’ and emphasizing the God-given equality of men and women. Arguments for the ordination of women and arguments against the ordination of women became part of a wider social conversation about gender. Denominational decisions to ordain women, or not to ordain women, ceased being driven by women asking to be ordained, by churches and synagogues encouraging women to seek ordination, or even by the need for more clergy. Decisions for or against the ordination of women rested upon how church membership and leadership embraced or resisted modern ideologies of gender equality and various religious interpretations of ‘‘modernity.’’7 The argument over women’s leadership in religious organizations changed for several reasons. First, in many religious organizations women became more active as laity, voting in local congregational meetings and being elected as delegates to wider church meetings. As lay women served in key leadership positions, many of them came to feel that institutional change was needed. Second, expanding religious vocations for women (as medical and educational missionaries, church musicians, and directors of religious education) provided professional leadership opportunities for women. Yet at the same time, women became increasingly aware that certain leadership options within religious organizations remained firmly off limits to women. Third, Roman Catholic women religious (nuns) modernized their orders and in 1974 the Leadership Conference of Women Religious spoke out favoring women’s ordination. As second-wave feminism raised awareness and expectations, young women rejected lay leadership alternatives, because to them lay leadership was still ‘‘separate and not equal.’’ They pressed for full gender equality in church and synagogue. Even among women who did not want to be ordained themselves, there was agreement that ordination needed to be open to women.

WOMEN’S ORDINATION IN DECENTRALIZED PROTESTANTISM Ordination is a ceremony rooted in scriptural tradition that ‘‘sets apart’’ or ‘‘recognizes’’ certain persons as religious leaders. The responsibilities of such religious leaders or clergy may focus upon leading sacramental and life cycle ceremonies (priests), teaching texts and traditions (preachers and rabbis), or representing God and community as caregivers (pastors). Within Jewish and Christian practice, for thousands of years clergy were

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almost universally male. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a few Christian Protestant women were ordained and assumptions about ordination began to change. By the late nineteenth century, a handful of Protestant denominations, where decision making takes place in local congregations (Congregationalists, Universalists, Unitarians, Northern Baptists, and Disciples), began ordaining women. The first ordination of a woman to the Christian ministry in an established denomination took place in 1853 in a small Congregational church in South Butler, New York. It caused little controversy because within congregationally organized Protestant churches each congregation is free to make ordination decisions on its own.8 The Universalists and the Unitarians were also strong advocates for women. By 1866 Universalists had ordained three women to the ministry. The American Unitarian Association, a liberal denomination that broke away from Congregationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, ordained its first woman in 1871. Ninety years later (1961) Unitarians joined with the Universalists, and by the late twentieth century the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) had one of the highest percentages of women clergy within Protestantism.9 Informal records indicate that Baptist women were evangelists/preachers during the numerous revivals on the nineteenth-century frontier. A handful of Baptist women were licensed to preach after the Civil War, even as Baptists continued to debate the propriety of women speaking in public. Finally, in 1894 a woman was ordained by the Northern Baptists (later known as the American Baptists), although no Southern Baptist woman was ordained until 1964. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) ordained a woman in 1888.10 Women in Protestant denominations with decentralized governance needed only the support of a local congregation to be ordained. And even when someone objected to their ordination, there was rarely any effort to undo what had been done. Church leaders simply asserted that within the Christian church there should be no distinction between slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female, because all were one in Jesus Christ. By 1910 the U.S. Census reported that 685 women identified their occupation as ‘‘clergy.’’ In 1920, this number climbed to 1,787; in 1930, it was reported as 3,276; and in 1950, the number reached 6,824.11

WOMEN’S ORDINATION IN CENTRALIZED PROTESTANTISM From the 1920s to the 1970s, more structured mainline denominations, where decision making occurs in representative synods and/or under the guidance of bishops (Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and some Lutherans), made a sequence of decisions that led to the acceptance of women as ‘‘full status clergy.’’ Although the formal authorization of female clergy occurred later in these denominations and was filled with more drama and controversy, the ordination of women in centralized Protestant denominations was institutionally significant.

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In the Presbyterian tradition, the question of women’s ordination was complicated by the fact that Reformed Protestantism has two ordinations: ordained clergy who teach and preach (known as ‘‘teaching elders’’) and ordained lay leaders who are responsible for church governance (known as ‘‘ruling elders’’). Among Presbyterians on the Western frontier during the 1880s and 1890s, a few women were elected as ‘‘ruling elders.’’ In 1889 the small Cumberland Presbyterian denomination actually ordained a woman as a ‘‘teaching elder.’’ Unfortunately this action was later revoked and not reinstated until 1921. The ordination of women among the major Presbyterian denominations came much later. In 1930 the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the major Northern Presbyterian denomination, approved the ordination of women as ‘‘ruling elders,’’ but not as ‘‘teaching elders.’’ Twenty-five years later (1955) that same denomination ordained its first female teaching elder. In 1958, when these Northern Presbyterians merged with the United Presbyterian Church, North America, to form the United Presbyterian Church, USA, women in United Presbyterian churches gained all types of ordination. Southern Presbyterians, however, resisted all forms of ordination for women. It was not until 1964, perhaps influenced by second-wave feminism, that the Southern Presbyterian church in the United States approved the ordination of women as deacons, ruling elders, and ministers all at once. In 1983, when Northern and Southern Presbyterians merged to form the Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA), the ordination of women was never questioned. Yet, reunited Presbyterians still say that resistance to female leadership continues to be stronger in Southern Presbyteries.12 The story of women’s ordination within Methodism is even more complex. During its history, American Methodism split into several different groups based on geography, on types of church government, and on theological issues. In 1880 two Methodist women who already held local preacher’s licenses sought ordination in the Northern Methodist Episcopal Church. Their request was denied and the earlier practice of granting women local licenses to preach was rescinded. One of those women was ordained a few years later in the Methodist Protestant Church. In 1924, the Methodist Episcopal Church reinstated women as local preachers, but it still refused to grant women full clergy status or annual conference membership. By 1939, in a three-way merger of Northern and Southern Methodist Episcopal Churches and the Methodist Protestant Church a compromise was worked out. Southern Methodists, who had never licensed women, had to accept women as local preachers, Northern Methodists who ordained women as local preachers continued to deny them conference membership, and Methodist Protestant women who were already ordained were allowed to keep their conference membership, with the understanding that no new women would be granted full status. Finally, in 1956 the Methodist church voted to approve full status/local conference membership for all ordained women.13 Two other developments within Methodism are important. First, in 1968 when the Methodist church joined with the Evangelical and United

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Brethren denomination (EUB) to become the United Methodist Church (UMC), the question of women’s ordination was revisited. The United Brethren (UB) had ordained women as far back as 1889, but the Evangelical Church and its predecessor bodies had never licensed or ordained women. In 1947, when the EUB Church was formed, it formally denied women ordination. Yet, women already ordained in the UB Church were allowed to continue to serve and UB bishops actually ordained a few more women. When the United Methodist Church (UMC) was formed in 1968, these irregularities were corrected.14 Second, during the nineteenth century some Wesleyan groups broke away from Methodism to form ‘‘Holiness’’ denominations such as the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), and the Church of the Nazarene. Focusing on the power of the Holy Spirit to call both men and women to ministry, they had no problem with the ordination of women. Women were first ordained in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1891, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) in 1895, and in the Church of the Nazarene in 1908. Unfortunately, after 1920 the ranks of women pastors in Holiness churches steadily declined as Holiness denominations became more focused upon local congregational ministry, embraced conservative social attitudes, and accepted an anti-woman mentality based upon literal readings of scripture. In the 1980s second-wave feminist Holiness leaders began retrieving the traditions of the Holiness movement, pointing out the irony of their official acceptance of women’s ordination and the declining numbers of women clergy. Holiness feminist historian Susie Stanley wrote: Wesleyan/Holiness advocates of women clergy are challenging fundamentalist leavening and cultural accommodation with biblical defenses first articulated in the early years of their churches’ history. By recovering their heritage, Wesleyan/Holiness groups are appropriating a usable past in their efforts to crack the stained-glass ceiling.15

White mainline Protestant denominations sometimes claim that the story of ordained women is their story. Yet over 50 percent of all women ordained since 1853 have been in Holiness, Pentecostal, evangelical, and para-military denominations. From its founding in 1870, the Salvation Army ordained women. Even as recently as 1977, only 17 percent of women clergy were serving in the top ten major Protestant denominations.16 The movement of women into ordained leadership in the Episcopal Church was more directly influenced by second-wave feminism than it was among the Congregationalists, Universalists, Unitarians, Baptists, Presbyterians, or Methodists. As part of the Church of England during the colonial period, the Episcopal Church defined ordination and priestly orders in terms of ‘‘apostolic succession,’’ the idea that clergy authority is derived from a formal unbroken succession of priestly leaders stretching from Jesus Christ to the present. In the nineteenth century, a few women had been designated as Episcopal ‘‘deaconesses,’’ but the relationship of deaconesses to priesthood

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remained ambiguous. In 1920, Anglican bishops from around the world ruled that the ‘‘ordination of a deaconess confers on her holy orders,’’ but ten years later they reversed their ruling. Finally, in 1935 the bishops stated that although there was no theological reason to deny women ordination, an all-male priesthood was preferable. For the American Episcopal Church the question of women’s ordination grew in intensity during the 1960s. In 1964 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church affirmed its understanding that deaconesses were ‘‘ordered,’’ and one year later an American woman was ordained as a deacon. In the early 1970s, as second-wave feminism matured, Episcopalians continued to debate the issue of women’s ordination. In the 1972 General Convention the house of bishops voted to support women’s ordination to the priesthood, but the laity voted against the idea. After the convention, fifty-six bishops issued a statement criticizing the actions of the church’s lay leadership. Soon thereafter people began to plan for an ‘‘irregular’’ ordination. On July 29, 1974 in Philadelphia, two retired bishops and one resigned bishop ordained eleven female deacons to the Episcopal priesthood. How to deal with the ‘‘Philadelphia eleven’’ and the ‘‘renegade bishops’’ was hotly debated for several years. Yet in 1976, the General Convention (both bishops and laity) agreed to regularize the irregular ordinations and to approve future ordinations of women to priesthood. For those bishops who still rejected the idea, the church made provision that they would not be required to ordain or oversee women priests. Concern over the legitimacy of women’s leadership among Anglicans around the world continued. American Episcopalians did not want to offend the global Anglican family, but recognizing the importance of bishops in the Episcopal system, they argued that full equality for female leadership in the church would not be legitimate until there was a woman bishop. That day finally arrived in 1988 when the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts elected a woman as its suffragan bishop, and five years later the Diocese of Vermont elected a female as its bishop. A small handful of bishops continued to be outspoken opponents of female priests, but in 1997 the General Convention ruled that by 2003 all bishops needed to be in full compliance with church policy.17 Lutheran approaches to the ordination of women ranged from progressive acceptance to complete rejection. During much of American history, Lutherans were divided into ethnic and cultural enclaves shaped by immigration from various parts of Germany and Scandinavia. They were aware that some European Lutherans endorsed women’s ordination in the 1930s and 1940s, but as American Lutherans they did not address the female ordination issue until the 1960s. At that time three Lutheran bodies, the American Lutheran Church (ALC), the Lutheran Church in America (LCA), and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) held an ‘‘Inter-Lutheran Consultation on the Ordination of Women.’’ Unfortunately, they could not agree, and so another study was launched. In 1970, when that study committee reported that it could ‘‘find no objections to the ordination of women,’’

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the report was received positively by the ALC and the LCA, but rejected by the LCMS. At about the same time, several Lutheran women graduated from seminary, and groups of Lutheran lay women began active campaigning for women’s ordination quoting biblical, theological, sociological, and feminist sources. Their efforts paid off. In July 1970, the LCA approved the ordination of women, and a few months later the ALC did the same. They said ‘‘there was nothing in the exercise of the ordained ministry as a functional office that would exclude a woman because of her sex’’ and that it was ‘‘common sense’’ because scripture gave no clear word on the issue. The leadership of Missouri Synod Lutherans (LCMS) did not agree. Yet, a minority within the LCMS (students and faculty at its Concordia Theological Seminary) continued to argue for women’s ordination, debating the authority of scripture and basic understandings of biblical interpretation. Unable to change Concordia Theological Seminary, they eventually formed a Seminary in Exile (Seminex) and by 1977 left the LCMS to form a new denomination, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC). By the end of the 1970s, in the flush of second-wave feminism the majority of American Lutherans affirmed the ordination of women. The dissenting LCMS allowed its lay women to vote and hold office in local congregations (as long as male members approved), but it continued to insist that the biblical order of creation gave no authority for women’s ordination. In 1985 the LCMS formally reiterated its position. Two years later in 1987, the three Lutheran denominations that did ordain women merged to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).18 Throughout the 1970s advocates for women’s ordination in mainstream Protestant denominations had reexamined scripture and tradition and effectively set forth their conviction that Christianity contained messages of liberation for all humanity. They rejected gender stereotypes as cultural habits that needed to be overcome in church structures and in religious thinking. They insisted that patterns of patriarchy damaged women and did not flow from the essence of religious truth. They rejected long-standing assumptions that only males should be ordained. Thus, between the 1950s and the 1970s, more and more women were ordained to the Christian ministry.

WOMEN’S ORDINATION IN JUDAISM Within Judaism leadership changes came a bit later, but they were very similar.19 Male rabbis dominated American synagogues and temples until the 1970s. In response to second-wave feminism, Jewish women became more active in their local congregations, and a few Jewish women began to think seriously about becoming rabbis. Historically, American Judaism has consisted of three branches: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. In the 1960s, Reconstructionists, who responded to the egalitarian thinking of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, became a fourth form of Judaism. A Reconstructionist rabbinical college, founded in 1968 in the midst of second-wave feminism, admitted both women and

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men from its beginning. Reform Judaism ordained its first female rabbi in 1972, and the first female Reconstructionist rabbi was ordained two years later in 1974. These events led a group of Conservative Jewish women to press not only for women’s ordination, but for more equal treatment of women in Conservative synagogues. The Conservative movement in American Judaism sought to walk a middle way between orthodox Jewish law and modernity. Therefore, issues raised by second-wave feminism were fundamental to its identity. Initially, Conservative Jews rejected the idea of female rabbis, but made some important changes related to women’s role in congregations and in its interpretation of Jewish law. In 1977, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly appointed a study commission to examine the issue of women’s ordination. Two years later the commission recommended that Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, where all Conservative rabbis were educated, admit women to its rabbinical program. At first the seminary faculty resisted, but eventually women were admitted and the first female Conservative rabbi was ordained in 1985. Not all Jewish women went along with these changes. Some Jewish women rejected what they felt were the patriarchal patterns of Jewish faith and practice and became ‘‘secularized Jews.’’ Other Jewish women joined with discontented Christian women to explore alternative primal religious traditions rooted in the cycles of nature, mother earth, and the great goddess. Orthodox Jewish women resisted the pressures of second-wave feminism completely, reaffirming traditional roles for women with new zeal. Second-wave feminism expanded Christian and Jewish understandings of leadership by promoting women’s leadership where men had dominated for centuries. After 1970, as more and more women enrolled in theological seminaries, gendered assumptions about religious leadership within American churches and synagogues changed. By the 2000 United States Census 14 percent of all clergy were reported as female, and among liberal and moderate Christian and Jewish groups the percentage reached as high as 30 percent.20

RESISTANCE TO WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP Arguments to increase female leadership were not always well received. In spite of the growing numbers of female clergy in progressive Protestant and Jewish organizations, gender role assumptions among Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians actually became more traditional. The story of Orthodox Judaism is illustrative. Orthodox Judaism grew in America as the result of early-twentiethcentury immigration from Eastern Europe. Enclaves of Jews fled antiSemitic persecution and settled in neighborhood ghettos in American cities. There they preserved Yiddish culture and upheld orthodox Jewish practices. By the mid-twentieth century, Orthodox Jews began to worry about the impact of assimilation and the survival of the Jewish people. Many American Jews had few children and intermarried with non-Jews. After the

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Nazi Holocaust, Orthodox Jews felt a responsibility for the future of Judaism. They discouraged intermarriage and promoted observant Jewish families. Jewish women responded to these developments in various ways. As already noted, some of them left Orthodoxy and became Reform, Reconstructionist, or Conservative Jews to take advantage of expanding opportunities for Jewish women. Other Orthodox Jewish women, however, actually became stronger in their zeal to maintain and defend Orthodox traditions. They liked the way in which Orthodox Judaism affirmed a woman’s clear connection with tradition and her distinct role in the family. Instead of feeling oppressed by masculine power, Orthodox Jewish women aggressively affirmed that separate was not unequal and that gender differences were essential for the future of Judaism.21 Conservative Protestants had even more diverse responses to secondwave feminism. During the 1960s and 1970s as progressive Protestants changed traditions and ordained more and more women, conservative Christians or ‘‘evangelicals’’ became defensive. They resented feminist assumptions that traditional family life was not important. In the nineteenth century, the word ‘‘evangelical’’ had described most of American Protestantism. By the 1920s, however, evangelical Protestants were defined as those Christians holding conservative and even narrow literal understandings of the Bible. Extremely conservative evangelicals, called ‘‘fundamentalists,’’ insisted that Christian faith and practice was tied to biblical fundamentals, rejecting modernist biblical scholarship, and denying all arguments for expanding women’s role in church and society. Initially, a few moderates among the evangelical conservative Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in America, supported new leadership opportunities for women in the name of ‘‘Baptist freedom.’’ By the 1980s, however, the climate changed. A power struggle within the Southern Baptist Convention led to schism and a formal declaration that the ordination of women was unscriptural. Southern Baptist women and men firmly rejected the assertions of second-wave feminism with these words: Therefore be it Resolved, That we not decide concerns of Christian doctrine and practice by modern cultural, sociological, and ecclesiastical trends or by emotional factors; that we remind ourselves of the dearly bought Baptist principle of the final authority of Scripture in matters of faith and conduct; and that we encourage the service of women in all aspects of church life and work other than pastoral functions and leadership roles entailing ordination.22

The impact of conservative evangelical Protestantism spread, leading some Holiness and Pentecostal groups to question their historic openness to women’s leadership. Holiness and Pentecostal Christians had always treated the Bible with great respect, but they defined their primary understanding of God as Spirit. When the Spirit affirmed the leadership of women they ordained those women. Unfortunately, under the influence of

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fundamentalists, Holiness and Pentecostal groups became more concerned about biblical authority and began questioning the power of the Spirit to affirm the leadership of women. As already mentioned, in the 1970s, second-wave feminism helped Holiness and Pentecostal women retrieve the legitimacy of women’s leadership grounded in the Holy Spirit. Initially, second-wave feminism did not have much impact on the historically black Protestant denominations (Methodists, Baptists, and Church of God in Christ). Those denominations were led by strong male pastors, with women exercising indirect leadership behind the scenes. Female ordination, or authorizing women to be ‘‘on the pulpit,’’ was rare. Black women did not want to undermine the authority of black men in white society and often refused to choose between racial and gender justice. Slowly, however, things began to change.23 The stance of one other group must be examined because of its growing presence in American society. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons, encourages large, traditionally ordered families and holds very conservative views on gender. It resists new roles for women because in Mormon doctrine gender roles are for eternity, with the highest level of eternal life reserved for married men and women. Although a few Mormon women have pressed for changes in their church, the majority of Mormon women remain comfortable with its emphasis on male headship. Mormon church leadership is exclusively male.24 Finally, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity continued their firm stance against expanded roles for women in the leadership of the church. Their resistance was not grounded in gender assumptions embedded in the Bible, but in their high sacramental views of clerical authority. In the 1960s, second-wave feminism and the Second Vatican Council emerged at the same time. Roman Catholic women were encouraged by church statements affirming women’s equality in marriage and society. Roman Catholic sisters modernized dramatically, removing their habits and actively engaging the world beyond their cloisters. Some Roman Catholic women actually enrolled in seminaries, anticipating that priesthood for women might be possible in their lifetime. In 1975, a large Women’s Ordination Conference was held in Detroit, Michigan. The response of the Vatican was slow, but firm. In 1976 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a formal ‘‘Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood.’’ The declaration insisted that ordination was not a woman’s right. It stated that tradition and the fact that a priest needs to have a ‘‘natural resemblance’’ to Christ made female priesthood impossible. In 1994 the Vatican restated this position, with an admonition against debating the issue. American Roman Catholics, however, continued to debate the issue of women’s leadership in the church, and surveys of laity showed growing support for women priests. The Women’s Ordination Conference became an ongoing support organization for Roman Catholic women who felt called to priesthood. After a group of European women were irregularly ordained in Europe in 2002, in 2005 nine North American women held a

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similar rite on a chartered boat on the St. Lawrence River. The women insisted that they were not breaking away from the church, but ‘‘doing ecclesiastical disobedience.’’ The Vatican excommunicated the women involved in 2002 and ignored the 2005 ceremony.25 The influence of second-wave feminism on Eastern Orthodox Christianity was very limited. When the issue of female priests was raised, church leadership responded that there was no precedent in tradition and that the order of creation could not be changed. Orthodox understandings of the church as the body of Christ and its belief that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the human face of salvation implied that inclusive spirituality must be addressed through devotion to Mary. Since 1970 more Orthodox Christian women have been educated as theologians, but female priestly leadership has not been imagined or sought.26

THE IMPACT OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES After the 1970s, the numbers of ordained women in American religious groups increased dramatically. In some mainline Protestant denominations by 2000 women clergy had become over a quarter of their clergy. Female seminary enrollments in the seminaries serving those denominations rose steadily and became between 50 and 80 percent of total student enrollments. Although female graduates usually had no difficulty finding opportunities to serve as entry-level assistant or associate pastors and rabbis, their career advancement remained slow. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century relatively few ordained women leaders served prestige congregations and many complained that a ‘‘stained-glass ceiling’’ continued to keep female salaries and opportunities unequal.27 Officially there were no female Roman Catholic priests. Yet many Roman Catholic women began meeting together as ‘‘Women-Church’’ to provide support to feminist Catholics.28 Furthermore, because of the severe shortage of male priests in many American Roman Catholic parishes, lay women, often religious sisters, took on new administrative and pastoral responsibilities. Sociologist Ruth Wallace did a study of these ‘‘priestess parishes’’ in the early 1990s, reporting that ‘‘because Catholic parishioners share membership in the laity with their woman pastor, they are also keenly aware of the limitations placed upon her authority, and they are beginning to question this inequity.’’ Institutional constraints caused by the shortage of priests have ended up actually reinforcing positive attitudes about women priests.29 Observers of these changes in American religion have mixed views. Progressive leaders celebrate the advancement of women and continue to invite churches and synagogues to benefit from female leadership. Others lament these changes, complaining that the status of ‘‘clergy’’ has declined because of feminism and that churches and synagogues have become feminized. ‘‘Good men,’’ they say, are no longer attracted to ordained ministry and therefore religious institutions have lost power in modern society. They assert that feminist ideas destroy basic family values and promote selfish career women and promiscuous lifestyles. They worry about their

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children and family life. They are convinced that the movement of women into religious leadership undermines the power of biblical authority and the capacity of religious people to protect their faith, their homes, their churches, their synagogues, and their American way of life from the corruption of modern secularism. Second-wave feminism has changed historic patterns of religious leadership in American religion. Some denominations and groups have changed, welcoming female leaders in settings where exclusively male leadership prevailed for centuries. Other denominations have not moved to ordain women, but have expanded leadership opportunities for lay women. Still other denominations and groups have resisted efforts to endorse female leaders out of their respect for tradition and scripture. Second-wave feminism has caused some women (and men) to reexamine gender roles in their churches and synagogues and actually reaffirm historic unequal gender roles with newfound zeal and pride.

NEW WAYS OF RELIGIOUS THINKING The most complex and lasting impact of second-wave feminism on American religion, however, is not its influence on gender patterns in leadership (as important as that is), but the ways in which feminism has challenged and slowly reshaped the religious thinking of many religious Americans. This challenge to religious thinking begins with the feminist critique of scripture and tradition. When women sought ordination and questioned prohibitions against female leadership, Christian and Jewish feminist scholars asked why women had been excluded from leadership. They set about answering this question by reexamining scripture, exploring hidden and overlooked traditions, and taking the experiences of women seriously. They concluded that a pattern of hierarchy or patriarchy was deeply embedded in Jewish and Christian scriptures and history and that hierarchy and patriarchy had denied women full religious equality.30 Scholars of religious studies began to describe two different ways that feminist thinkers responded to this assessment: (1) radical feminism and (2) reformist feminism.31 Both groups approached theology and religious traditions with what they called a ‘‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’’ taking nothing for granted. Biblical, theological, and cultural texts could not be trusted. Why? Because they believed that most religious texts and traditions (norms) that survived history had been written by winners.32 Radical feminists, starting with the ‘‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’’ uncovered the injustice of patriarchy. They deplored the ways in which hierarchy and patriarchy denied women’s religious experience and distorted God’s creation. They affirmed women as religious leaders, but they were extremely wary of religious institutions. For radical feminists, the old texts, traditions, ceremonies, and organizations were deeply flawed. Radical feminists condemned many of the ways white men had defined beliefs and affirmed traditions. They questioned long-standing assumptions and celebrated previously ignored religious experiences of women. Radical

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feminists had no patience with existing institutions. They called for revolution rather than reform. To them Judaism and Christianity were corrupt and dangerous for women. The only solution was for modern women to escape from their power. Some of these radical feminists were so angry and wounded by their experience with long-established religious teachings and practices that they rejected anything and everything related to religion. They became secular feminists, finding satisfaction in social and political activism. Other radical feminists could not give up religion completely, and so they looked for alternatives. Some of them responded to New Age religious thinking, exploring ancient goddess traditions, and cultivating new forms of spirituality linked to the environmental movement. Others found peace in the ancient traditions of Eastern religions that appeared to be free of sexism. Still others rejected hierarchy and patriarchy by exploring homosexuality and alternative family structures. Radical feminists affirmed female images of the Divine and glorified women’s power. Radical feminists created new rituals and ceremonies led by female religious leaders in female sacred spaces. Radical feminists insisted that women’s ways of knowing were different and that equating male experience with human experience was unacceptable. Radical feminists resisted all forms of institutionalization and glorified the organic cycles of nature.33 Unfortunately, radical feminist thinking went too far for most Christians and Jews. As might be expected, the media hype and the selfrighteousness of radical feminism created a backlash among ordinary religious people. Christian evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Holiness Christians, alongside Orthodox Jews and many Roman Catholics, were dismayed and fearful. They saw no need to redress gender imbalances in their traditions. They reaffirmed the importance of male headship in the family. They resisted change. Reformist feminists were more moderate. They used the ‘‘hermeneutic of suspicion’’ to reinterpret scripture and retrieve hidden or lost aspects of religious traditions. They knew that much of Christian and Jewish history and theology was written by white males. Although those men may not have intended ill of women, their insights and ways of thought were grounded in male worlds. Reformist feminists searched for original meanings, seeking a ‘‘usable past’’ that would allow women to escape from dominant masculine standards and normative masculine assumptions about God and religious practices. Reformist feminists believed that it was possible to change the way men and women thought about their faith within existing religious institutions. Reformist feminists supported ‘‘women’s ordination,’’ but also envisioned new kinds of churches and synagogues that someday might function without hierarchy and maybe even without ordained leadership itself. They did not want simply to replace men with women; they wanted to transform the system. Reformist feminists worked to bring about change in many ways, and they were practical and patient. They knew that thousands of years of patriarchal habits and institutions would not be changed overnight.34

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As reformist feminist thinking developed two things happened: First reformist feminism subdivided into several subgroups sensitive to the particular experiences of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and lesbians. Second, reformist feminism focused upon the power of language to shape and reshape religious thinking. Second-wave feminism was initially dominated by educated white women. Many women of color did not identify with their agenda. Black feminists recognized that the concerns of white feminists were important. However, they criticized the ways that white feminists assumed that their perspective was normative and failed to honor the experiences of women of color. They wrote about what they called ‘‘womanist’’ theology, new religious thinking grounded in the distinctive experiences of black women. Womanist theology noted that there were different understandings of gender in black families and churches; that race, class, and gender were connected; that blacks gave special attention to biblical themes of liberation and survival; and that God’s relationship with the oppressed and the human response to the poor stood at the heart of black Christianity.35 Hispanic feminists, Asian feminists, Korean feminists, and lesbian feminists promoted thinking grounded in their distinctive cultural contexts. Second-wave feminism got everyone thinking that traditions of patriarchy were not normative and that women’s experiences in diverse settings were legitimate. The second way in which reformist feminism influenced American religion revolved around issues of language. Reformist feminists were not simply working to get more women in organizations where men had been before. Reformist feminists sought to change hierarchical and patriarchal patterns of thought in American religion. They believed that how we speak is closely related to how we think. Therefore, in order to help people think differently about religion, language patterns needed to change. In the English language, gender is a problem. Although the English language does not give a gender to each word (as many languages do), its use of pronouns is ambiguous. If we say ‘‘everyone does his duty,’’ or ‘‘everyone takes his turn,’’ we mean that all males and females should do their duty or take their turn. In a general or generic sense the pronoun ‘‘his’’ refers to both males and females. If we say ‘‘the ruler must treat his countrymen well’’ we are using male words to speak about both men and women. Not all rulers are male, not all of the people in the country are male. The problem is that when male pronouns are used to describe people of both genders, there is a subtle, unconscious message that male is privileged or better. We discover this because it is not proper to say ‘‘the ruler must treat her countrywomen well.’’ The ruler could be female, but all of the people in the country are not female and ‘‘countrywoman’’ is not understood to mean both genders. Educators have tested these language patterns and discovered that young children sometimes develop limited and hierarchical ideas of gender when ‘‘he, him, man, mankind, or brotherhood’’ are used to speak of everyone, while ‘‘she, her, and woman’’ refer only to females. They call

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this ‘‘sexist language.’’ In recent years school textbooks, the media, and many public speakers have moved away from sexist language to what they call ‘‘inclusive language.’’ They try to use words that do not exclude, judge, or classify people on the basis of gender. Reformist feminists are pleased when people do not always assume that all clergy are men. They take care to use generic words like firefighter instead of fireman, police officer instead of policeman, server instead of waiter or waitress, citizens instead of countrymen. Over time they hope that gender neutral labels will change gender stereotypes and biases.36 Religious language, however, presents problems. If reformist feminists want to overcome and replace some of the patriarchal thinking produced by religious texts and traditions that have treated women as secondary and emphasized male headship, religious language needs to change. When religious language always speaks of humanity as ‘‘mankind’’ and ‘‘sons of God,’’ patriarchal thinking is reinforced. When religious language always speaks of God as ‘‘he’’ or ‘‘father,’’ patriarchal thinking is reinforced. Language about people is not too difficult to change. If care is taken to speak about ‘‘persons’’ instead of ‘‘men,’’ ‘‘humankind’’ instead of ‘‘mankind,’’ ‘‘community’’ instead of ‘‘brotherhood,’’ and ‘‘he or she’’ instead of ‘‘he,’’ in situations describing women and men, thinking begins to change. God language, however, is very difficult to change. First, many scripture texts use language that is not inclusive. In fact, the Bible emphasizes that Jesus called God ‘‘father’’ and that Christians should do the same. Jesus did speak of God as ‘‘his heavenly father,’’ but feminists say that ‘‘father’’ and other masculine words like ‘‘Lord,’’ and ‘‘King’’ are overused. Scripture was written for a different cultural context. To preserve accurate ideas about God, masculine nouns and pronouns should be avoided. Changing and reinterpreting scripture texts has been going on for centuries and needs to continue. For example, the Bible assumes that slavery is acceptable. Slaves are told to be obedient to their masters. Yet today Christians reject that thinking and that language. Texts that reinforce the idea of slavery are condemned and ignored. Feminists argue that Christians and Jews should do the same with some texts that speak about gender. If the message of the Bible is liberation and justice, based on the idea that both genders (male and female) are created in the image of God, continuing to use language that reinforces hierarchy and injustice is unacceptable. Other metaphors need to be used when talking to and about God. Second, feminist scholars also discovered that some English translations of the Bible are not accurate. After examining the original Hebrew and Greek they found that many original words were not gender specific. Unfortunately, biblical translators used masculine pronouns to translate words that had no gender. Thousands of masculine gender references were added to biblical texts that originally had no gender. Whether this was done intentionally or unconsciously, feminists insist that it must be changed.

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Third, God is beyond language. There are no human words that can capture the idea of God. Therefore, people need to be careful not to make idols of words. All words about God are metaphors. Feminists invite believers to become more flexible about language. After all, the meaning of the words is what is important and we will always struggle when we try to use human words to describe or address God or the Divine. Religious people, feminists suggest, ought to be more humble about religious language. All parties, even the most conservative, agree that God is not a male. God is above gender. Feminists remind people that religious texts and traditions speak of God as spirit, light, rock, wind, mother hen, eagle, etc. They suggest that more of these words should be used to speak and write about God. Unfortunately, there is still a problem. Biblical thinking asserts that God is personal, not simply an impersonal force or part of nature. Christians and Jews relate to God as person, but human beings have never met any ‘‘persons’’ who are not gendered (male or female). How can anyone speak about or to a personal God without using gender? It is impossible to have a personal relationship with a God who is a rock, or the wind, or a chicken. For this reason, feminists sometimes say that humans need to use both pronouns when they speak about God. God is above gender. God includes all genders. God is ‘‘he’’ and ‘‘she.’’ Unfortunately, when feminists invite people to use pronouns in various new ways to speak about God, people are not happy. They get angry and outraged. It is as if someone tells a child to call his or her father ‘‘Mommy,’’ or ‘‘Mrs. Jones.’’ Such language destroys relationships. People simply refuse to do it. Christians and Jews get very emotional about God language. If they have been reading their Bible for years and someone changes words in a familiar text, they feel attacked. If they have been singing a hymn or saying a prayer one way since they were children and someone changes the words, they get upset. They may even ‘‘understand’’ the problem when it is explained, but changing gender language about God is too personal. People have deep emotional attachments to certain words and suggesting new words is not simple. It calls for new ways of thinking. Reformist feminists are right about the problem: Words do shape thinking. But reformist feminists are not always very realistic about how to solve the problem.37 Within Christianity the inclusive language debate gets even more complex when Christians examine trinitarian language. Christians believe in a God that has three attributes in one Being, a triune God. The concept of the trinity does not appear in the Bible, but is a traditional mysterious way in which early Christian leaders explained their conviction that God engages humanity in three different ways. First, God is creator. Humans are created male and female in God’s image. Second, God is Jesus the Christ or Messiah, who deepened Christian understandings of God by becoming human and overcoming all things, even death. Third, God is an ongoing spiritual force and presence, the Holy Spirit.

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Trinitarian language says that God is one and God is three. God is relational. The meaning of Trinity cannot be captured in words, yet feminists argue that some of the words used to explain the trinity need to be examined, changed, and maybe expanded in order to prevent sexist hierarchical meanings.38 Two problems dominate Christian conversation about the trinity and inclusive language: (1) the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was male, and (2) the fact that ‘‘spirit’’ language is often female. First, the classic way of speaking about trinity is ‘‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit.’’ Jesus of Nazareth was a man who lived in first-century Palestine. Trinitarian language calls Jesus the ‘‘Christ,’’ ‘‘Lord,’’ and ‘‘Son of God.’’ Many of the words used to speak about him as the second person of the Trinity, especially the word ‘‘son,’’ are masculine words. Feminists do not deny that Jesus of Nazareth was male, but they question the importance of his ‘‘maleness.’’ Jesus is savior, they say, because in his humanity (not in his maleness) we encounter God. More traditional Christians, however, refuse to change masculine language about Jesus because they believe that the fact that God became incarnate in a male cannot be ignored.39 Second, while some feminists try to escape from the maleness of Jesus in the trinity, others use the trinity to explore female metaphors about God. The Greek word associated with Spirit is ‘‘Sophia’’ or Divine Wisdom. Reformist feminists retrieve the Wisdom tradition in Hebrew and Greek literature and explore female imagery to enrich their understandings of God. They sometimes advocate for separate forms of ‘‘Women Church’’ where women can get in touch with female aspects of the Divine. In 1993 a ‘‘Re-Imagining Conference,’’ called to celebrate the midpoint of the ‘‘World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women,’’ included liturgy that named God as ‘‘Sophia’’ and used sensual language to image women. Many Christians were outraged at this and reformist feminists argued among themselves about the danger of inventing a ‘‘female God’’ and calling her Christian.40 Reformist feminists continue to explore ways to promote inclusive language. Liturgies and hymnals have been rewritten. Hundreds of books, articles, and sermons invite people to rethink language about humanity, about God, about Jesus, and about the Holy Spirit. Children hear different Bible stories. Reformist feminists agree that dualistic and hierarchical patterns of thinking in Jewish and Christian traditions are not good for women. They do not always agree about the remedy, but through their increased visibility as institutional leaders and their ongoing efforts to find more gender-neutral religious language they illustrate how second-wave feminism is shaping and reshaping American religion.

RELIGIOUS FEMINISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY If you ask twenty-first-century women in the United States if they are ‘‘feminists,’’ many of them will say ‘‘no.’’ Yet when you talk with them about women’s roles and the issues they care about, many of them hold

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feminist views. Unfortunately, contemporary women and men associate feminism only with radical feminists who make extreme statements, reject tradition, and seem to undermine home and family. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, second-wave feminism changed American religion. Statistics show that there has been a steady increase in women’s leadership in American religious communities. Women are pastors in local congregations, professors in theological seminaries, and authors of significant theological works. Although members of religious congregations think that they will not like a female pastor or rabbi, when they meet one they often change their opinion. Hundreds of female priests, pastors, and rabbis provide effective and inspiring leadership for a wide spectrum of religious communities. As American religion becomes more diverse with the domestic growth of world religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, the impact of American feminism will expand further. Muslim women, Hindu women, and Buddhist women are already challenging and transforming their religious traditions and practices as they accommodate to life in the United States. The most important impact of second-wave feminism on American religion, however, is not simply that there are more female leaders. American religion has deep roots in Western patriarchal and hierarchal patterns of thought. Texts and doctrines build upon long-standing gender assumptions. Since 1970, language patterns, especially those about humanity, have changed. New translations of the Bible speak of ‘‘humanity’’ and ‘‘she’’ alongside ‘‘he.’’ Although debates about God-language continue, ordinary people ‘‘think’’ in new ways about God even when they use traditional sexist words. Why has second-wave feminism had such a significant impact on American religion? The answer to this question is not yet clear, but it may be that the historical American political and religious climate, with its incredible diversity and its desire to keep government and any particular religion from dominating or limiting personal religious freedom, has enabled women as well as men to aspire to new roles and to think beyond tradition. Second-wave feminism has shaped and reshaped American religion in lasting and significant ways by affirming new forms of female leadership and replacing unexamined thought patterns with new inclusive forms of language and theology.

NOTES 1. Barbara Welter, ‘‘The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,’’ American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151–74. There are various critiques and interpretations of this analysis, but the concept that women have a special relationship to religion is deeply embedded in American culture. 2. Sarah Grimke´, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (New York: Source Book Press, [1838] 1970). 3. Declaration of Sentiments passed by the 1848 Seneca Falls (NY) Women’s Rights Convention is found in many places, including http://www.closeup.org/ sentimnt.htm, accessed December 22, 2005.

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4. Carol Hymonwitz and Michaele Weissman, A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), 328. 5. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 16–17. 6. Lois W. Banner, Women in Modern America: A Brief History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 223–32. 7. Mark Chaves, Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 127–29. 8. See Barbara Brown Zikmund, ‘‘Women’s Ministries Within the United Church of Christ,’’ in Catherine Wessinger, ed., Religious Institutions and Women’s Leadership: New Roles Inside the Mainstream (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 58–78. 9. See Cynthia Grant Tucker, ‘‘Women and the Unitarian-Universalist Ministry,’’ in Wessinger, ed., 79–100. 10. See Carolyn DeArmond Blevins, ‘‘Women and the Baptist Experience,’’ in Wessinger, ed., 158–79. 11. Quoted in Barbara Brown Zikmund, Adair Lummis, and Patricia Mei Yin Chang, Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 5. 12. See Rebecca B. Prichard, ‘‘Grandes Dames, Femmes Fortes, and Matrones: Reformed Women Ministering,’’ in Wessinger, ed., 39–57. 13. See Rosemary Skinner Keller, ‘‘Conversions and Their Consequences: Women’s Ministry and Leadership in the United Methodist Tradition,’’ in Wessinger, ed., 39–57, and Barbara Brown Zikmund, ‘‘Winning Ordination in Mainstream Protestantism, 1900–1965,’’ in Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds. Women and Religion in America, vol. 3: The Twentieth Century (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 339–83. 14. James E. Will, ‘‘Ordination of Women: The Issue in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ,’’ in Rosemary Skinner Keller, Louise L. Queen, and Hilah F. Thomas, eds., Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition. vol. 2 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1982), 290–99. 15. Susie C. Stanley, ‘‘The Promise Fulfilled: Women’s Ministries in the Wesleyan/Holiness Movement,’’ in Wessinger, ed., 101–23, 139–57. Quote from p. 152. 16. Constant H. Jacquet, Jr., ‘‘Women Ministers in 1986 and 1977: A Ten Year View,’’ in Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (New York: National Council of Churches of Christ, 1989), 261–66. 17. See Susan Radley Hiatt, ‘‘Women’s Ordination in the Anglican Communion: Can This Church Be Saved?’’ in Wessinger, ed., 211–30. For historical background, see Mary Sudman Donovan, A Different Call: Women’s Ministries in the Episcopal Church, 1850–1920 (Wilton, CT: Morehouse Barlow, 1986). 18. Gracia Grindal, ‘‘Women in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,’’ in Wessinger, ed., 180–210; and Gloria E. Bengston, ed., Lutheran Women in Ordained Ministry, 1970–1995 (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1995). 19. See Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889–1985 (Boston: Beacon, 1998). 20. Quoted in Larry A. Witham, Who Shall Lead Them? The Future of Ministry in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 41. 21. Debra Renee Kaufman, Rachel’s Daughters: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); and Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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22. J. Gordon Melton, ed., The Churches Speak On: Women’s Ordination (Detroit: Gale, 1991), 236. 23. See Theressa Hoover, ‘‘Black Women and the Churches: Triple Jeopardy,’’ in James Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), 377–88. 24. For the story of one Mormon feminist who tried unsuccessfully to press for changes in her church, see Sonia Johnson, From Housewife to Heretic (New York: Doubleday, 1981). 25. A copy of the Declaration appears as an appendix in Carroll Stuhlmueller, ed., Women and Priesthood: Future Directions (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1978), 212–25. Proceedings of the Detroit Conference are found in Anne Marie Gardiner, ed., Women and Catholic Priesthood: An Expanded Vision—Proceedings of the Detroit Ordination Conference (New York: Paulist, 1978). See also Doug Struck, ‘‘Nine Defy Vatican’s Ban on Ordination of Women,’’ Washington Post, July 7, 2005, A15. 26. See Thomas Hopko, ed., Women and the Priesthood (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983). 27. Seminary enrollment figures are available at the Web site of the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada: http://www.ats.edu. See also Zikmund, Lummis, and Chang, Clergy Women. 28. Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘‘The Women-Church Movement in Contemporary Christianity,’’ in Catherine Wessinger, ed., Women’s Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 29. Ruth Wallace, They Call Her Pastor: A New Role for Catholic Women (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 171. 30. Several early expressions of feminist theological thinking emerged in the writings of Roman Catholic scholar Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), and ‘‘After the Death of God the Father,’’ Commonweal (March 12, 1971). 31. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979; New York: Harper Collins, 1992). 32. A good systematic treatment of feminist theology is Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983). 33. See Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson, eds., Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996). 34. Ibid. 35. See Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), and Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). 36. Early treatments of the generic language issue are Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Words and Women: New Language in New Times (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1976), and Robin Lakoff, Language and Women’s Place (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975). 37. Concerns about religious language in scripture and in worship are discussed in Letty M. Russell, ed., The Liberating Word: A Guide to Nonsexist Interpretation of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976); Sharon Neufer Emswiler and Thomas Neufer Emswiler, Women and Worship: A Guide to Non-Sexist Hymns, Prayers and Liturgies (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); and Nancy A. Hardesty, Inclusive Language in the Church (Atlanta: John Knox, 1987).

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38. Barbara Brown Zikmund, ‘‘The Trinity and Women’s Experience,’’ Christian Century, 104 (April 15, 1987): 354–56. 39. See Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet (New York: Continuum, 1994). 40. Presentations from the Re-Imagining Conference are found in Nancy Berneking and Pamela Carter Joern, eds., Re-Membering and Re-Imagining (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1995).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Braude, Ann, ed. Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Lindley, Susan Hill. ‘‘You Have Stept Out of Your Place’’: A History of Women and Religion in America. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996. Russell, Letty M., and J. Shannon Clarkson, eds. Dictionary of Feminist Theologies. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996. Wessinger, Catherine, ed. Religious Institutions and Women’s Leadership: New Roles Inside the Mainstream. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Zikmund, Barbara Brown, Adair Lummis, and Patricia Mei Yin Chang. Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998.

CHAPTER 8

A Baby or a Fetus? The Abortion Debate in America Deborah L. Vess

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n January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing a woman’s right to an abortion. Following this decision, the number of abortions in America escalated until the 1980s. That number has declined dramatically since 1989, but the debate over the morality of abortion has not. As Kristen Luker notes, the combatants often talk past each other, using terms that reveal fundamentally different worldviews and values.1 Laurence Tribe has referred to this standoff as a ‘‘clash of absolutes,’’ a clash of extremes that allows for no middle ground.2 Abortion remains a question with great power to provoke a ‘‘moral veto,’’3 for it involves a complex web of moral, religious, social, political, legal, and economic issues. Although social activists and even legal scholars have found much to criticize in Roe v. Wade, others believe it restored the balanced approach present before the states implemented anti-abortion laws in the nineteenth century. Yet pro-choice advocates have seen in the court’s retreat from Roe a lack of balance for the poor, for minors, and often for African Americans. Moral concerns were not the foundation of the nation’s anti-abortion laws, but Roe transformed the debate into one of the most volatile contemporary moral issues, uniting Protestants, Catholics, and even some Jews in the belief that a fetus is a person worthy of protection under the law. In the nineteenth century, abortion was at least as common as it is today.4 Medical knowledge was inadequate to determine whether a woman was pregnant until there was visible evidence or at the point of quickening, when the woman felt the child moving. Women often visited their doctors, who treated them for ‘‘menstrual blockage.’’5 Both knew that the treatment might abort a pregnancy in its early stages. Many abortion providers lacked medical training, but offered abortion services, anyway. For

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example, Ann Trow Lohman, more well-known by her infamous pseudonym Madame Restell, advertised in major newspapers, dispensed ‘‘remedies’’ for home use through traveling salesmen, and had clinics in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.6 Wealthy socialites paid her as much as $2,000 per abortion, compared to the $10 charged by most others. Moreover, women used a variety of herbal remedies, such as pennyroyal, to effect abortion. Although one-third of all colonial brides was pregnant at marriage,7 suggesting more liberal views of sexuality than prevailed earlier, in the nineteenth century the birth rate declined by almost half, indicating that abortions were widespread—as many as one abortion for every five live births.8 Childbirth was dangerous, but abortion was equally if not more so. Without penicillin, abortions often resulted in infection and eventual death.9 Newspapers presented a negative view of abortion,10 but surprisingly, opposition to abortion first emerged primarily from the medical profession, not from religious quarters. Although in the nineteenth century the Presbyterian Church officially condemned abortion, many Presbyterian clergymen defended abortion as preferable to cursing children ‘‘with an unwanted existence.’’11 Protestants arguably accounted for the majority of abortions, and what little opposition Protestant clergy expressed to abortion arose from fears of being overwhelmed by growing numbers of Catholic immigrants.12 Protestants did not become significantly involved in the anti-abortion movement until well after Roe v. Wade. Changes in English law and the movement to organize the American medical profession prompted reform in the United States. In 1803, Lord Ellenborough’s Act made abortion through poisons illegal both before and after quickening. It did not prohibit abortions after quickening with instruments, but Lord Lansdowne’s Act in 1828 did and also made counseling abortion or helping any woman to obtain one, both before and after quickening, a felony. The first state to pass anti-abortion legislation was Connecticut in 1821, which outlawed the use of poisons after quickening and sentenced the abortionist to life in prison. Connecticut did not make abortion before quickening a crime until 1860. New York’s law in 1828 was the first to take account of the Lansdowne Act, prohibiting abortion by any means before and after quickening. In order to bring charges, however, the law demanded the death of the woman or her unborn child. New York also added an exemption for cases where the mother’s life was at risk or two physicians deemed the procedure necessary to save her life. By 1840, only eight states had enacted anti-abortion legislation. Developments in the medical profession also played a role in anti-abortion legislation. Doctors were often no more effective than Madame Restell, but the desires of physicians to organize and regulate their profession, to ensure quality patient care, and also to limit competition from unqualified practitioners drove much nineteenth-century anti-abortion legislation.13 James C. Mohr argues that the 1821 Connecticut law was only incidentally about abortion and reflected more a concern to keep pregnant women from being poisoned.14 The laws changed only because physicians like Horatio Storer mobilized the medical profession and public opinion. By 1859, two years

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after Storer began his campaign, the American Medical Association condemned abortion, as the child was alive both before and after quickening, and called for its ‘‘general suppression.’’15 The physicians’ campaign played on fears about the disintegration of the family as women entered the workforce during the Industrial Revolution and used the declining Protestant birth rates to fuel fears of race suicide. According to the 1871 report by the American Medical Association, a woman seeking an abortion was selfish and ‘‘unmindful of the course marked out for her by Providence.’’16 The Comstock Act (1873) reflected these attitudes and made it illegal to send through the mail items used to prevent conception or to effect an abortion. Although largely silent on the issue of abortion, Protestants led the fight against birth control, largely based on anti-Catholic sentiments.17 Anthony Comstock, a Protestant, vigorously prosecuted violations, including the infamous Madame Restell. Comstock bragged in an interview with Harper’s Weekly that his convicts could fill a sixty-car passenger train.18 Margaret Sanger later became the crown jewel. Connecticut again took the lead in enacting the nation’s most restrictive law banning use of contraceptives, forbidding physicians to dispense them or to provide information even to married couples. This law later formed the basis of one of the early court cases to challenge restrictive contraceptive laws. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with Comstock’s moral policing of the American mail,19 in just over two decades after Storer began his campaign to outlaw abortion, over forty anti-abortion statutes had been passed in the United States. Unlike earlier laws, these abolished quickening as a dividing point, outlawing abortion at all times by any method. Twenty-five states provided for therapeutic abortions judged necessary for a woman’s health,20 with the decision left to physicians—many states requiring two physicians to concur. The physicians had won their battle by the late nineteenth century, beginning what Luker has called ‘‘the century of silence’’ on abortion. By the early twentieth century, ‘‘legalized abortion was not supported by any groups within the American political system,’’21 despite the early birth control movement, which actually strengthened physicians’ control over a woman’s reproductive process. Margaret Sanger fought for physician control of contraceptive materials, contrary to Mary Ware Dennett, who wanted women to be in control of their own bodies.22 Because nineteenth-century physicians focused public opinion on medical problems associated with abortions, moral issues concerning the status of the fetus or the issue of a woman’s right to control her own body never arose. According to Gene Burns, the physicians’ campaign was a triumph of question framing.23

THE EVOLUTION OF CATHOLIC VIEWS ON ABORTION THROUGH THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY Catholic approaches differed. In 1869, in Apostolicae sedis moderationi, Pius IX imposed a penalty of excommunication for all abortions, whether

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before or after the fetus was animated or ‘‘ensouled.’’ Catholics had always opposed abortion, but this proclamation proved decisive in the Catholic debate, even if consistent with church prohibitions on contraception. The extent to which Pius IX departed from prior pronouncements can be seen only in the context of earlier pagan and Catholic treatments of abortion. Many of the positions articulated by Catholic theologians were surprisingly similar to those today allowing for abortions to preserve the health of the mother. The Catholic position on abortion logically follows from teachings on the role of sex within marriage and on birth control in general. Despite the clear prohibition of abortion in the Didache (or Teachings of the Apostles) and the consistent veneration of life in the Jewish and Christian traditions,24 few passages in the canonical scriptures directly concern abortion, and scholars are divided as to their interpretation. The Pauline condemnation of pharmakeia (Galatians 3:1–6), or the dispensing of poisons to achieve an ill effect, is the only New Testament passage that might be taken as a commentary on abortion. A Roman law, Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis, condemned pharmakeia in its Qui abortionis clause, but not until the second and third centuries after Christ did Roman commentators connect this clause to abortion.25 Paul’s condemnation of pharmakeia could embrace abortion through poisons, but not through other means.26 Given the status of Roman law at the time, Paul was unlikely to be thinking along these lines. Augustine of Hippo, however, argued that marital sex for pleasure without openness to conception and child bearing was perverse. Marriage was synonymous with procreation. His prohibition of contraception is often referred to as Aliquando, and by extension it included abortion. Augustine made no statement about the ontological nature of the fetus, but only about the nature of marriage and sexual union. The ‘‘perversity’’ explanation became the foundation of Catholic discourse on abortion.27 In the tenth century, a canon of the Libri synodales (ca. 906 C.E.), Si aliquis, proclaimed a murderer anyone used a poison to prevent a person from conceiving and having children. The penalty was death. Though Si aliquis directly concerns sterilization, it could include abortion. As a result, both Gratian and Ivo of Chartres included Aliquando in their Decreta, and by the thirteenth century Augustinian teachings reigned supreme. Despite this history, American Catholics played little role in the passage of the Comstock laws, and Pope Leo XIII failed to mention birth control in an 1880 encyclical on Christian marriage.28 By contrast, the Anglican church openly condemned the ‘‘awful heresy’’ of contraception in the 1880s, inaugurating an age of social activism against it.29 The American Catholic bishops issued no formal statement on birth control until 1919, and many Catholics probably used birth control in the late nineteenth century.30 After the Catholic church began to take a more active public stance on its age-old prohibition against birth control, it tacitly allowed use of the rhythm method in the nineteenth century. Pius XII formally approved it in Casti Connubii (1951), largely because medical research had proved the rhythm method effective in 1930.31 The church emphasized that only

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those with serious health issues or great temptation to use artificial contraceptives should employ it.32 Only after this point did the church in America begin to protest attempts to overturn the Comstock laws, enjoying particular success in the 1940s in Connecticut and Massachusetts where the church dominated religious life. Catholic teachings on abortion are also a consequence of ontological views of the fetus and this is both more philosophically problematic and inconsistent with earlier teachings. The issue here actually had roots in pagan and Jewish texts. In Book VII, chapter 16 of the Politics, Aristotle permitted abortion before there was ‘‘sense and life’’ for couples who had an ‘‘excess of children.’’ In the History of Animals, he put this time around forty days after conception for males and eighty for females. According to the Septuagint, the third-century B.C.E. Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, if a woman suffers a miscarriage as an unintended consequence of an argument between two men, a fine is levied if the fetus is unformed, but the Lex talionis (‘‘eye for eye’’) applies if the fetus is perfectly formed. This translation substantially modified the Hebrew version of Exodus 21:22–25, which did not distinguish between the formed and unformed fetus.33 The Septuagint’s version more profoundly influenced the development of Christian views. Augustine professed ignorance as to when life began for a fetus, but wrote that the unformed fetus ‘‘perishes like a seed that has never been fructified’’ if aborted and resurrection was not likely without a remedy for the defect in its form.34 Without universal agreement on this issue, theologians often placed the time of formation very near to or even simultaneously with the infusion of the human soul, or ‘‘animation.’’ Aquinas held a hylomorphic view of the human being, according to which the soul is the form of the human body. He believed that it was impossible to have a human soul before one has a human body and they were inseparably bound. Since an embryo lacked a human body, it had only a vegetative soul; as its body developed, it later acquired an animal soul and finally, a rational or human soul. The Council of Vienne (1312) even prohibited the baptism of those born prematurely, a teaching enforced until 1895. In these respects, the church had much in common with medieval Islamic commentators, who distinguished between abortions before 120 days and those after on the basis that the fetus was not fully human and had not received a soul before this point.35 Although the Catholic church considered abortion at any stage a serious matter, the penalty for early abortions was never as severe as that for homicide. The canons of the Council of Ancyra (314), for example, imposed ten years of public penance for an abortion, but did not re-admit to communion those guilty of homicides until the end of their lives. Private penance, which arose in Ireland and England, was different. Penance was done primarily through fasting and abstinence; there was no exclusion from communion. The penance for abortions before forty days was considerably lighter than for those after forty days, for once the fetus had a soul, abortion was homicide.36 Even after canonists moved away from the tradition of private penance towards renewed emphasis on public penance,

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Ivo of Chartres considered abortions only after animation homicides. Theologians gradually relaxed penalties for abortion; during the Renaissance, scholars even challenged the death penalty in civil law for abortions after animation. In cases where one must weigh the life of the unanimated fetus against the welfare of the mother, theologians almost always defended the mother’s right to survive. The fourteenth-century archbishop of Florence, Antoninus, approved the abortion of an unanimated fetus to save the life of the mother. He did not see this as causing the death of a human being.37 If both mother and child would die without intervention, Antonius de Corduba allowed for procedures aimed at saving the mother’s life that might unintentionally abort even an animated fetus. For Corduba, the mother had a prior right (ius potius) to life, since the fetus was dependent on the mother. The theory of double effect, introduced by Aquinas, helped determine when theologians permitted such indirect abortions. The immediate effect of treatment—preservation of the mother’s life—had to be good itself. All effort must be made to avoid unintended evil effects, including harm to the fetus. Corduba refused to permit direct abortions, therapy whose primary intent was to abort the fetus.38 On this point, the church has never wavered. The emphasis was clearly on the mother, unless the fetus could survive alone outside the womb. Aquinas refused to allow a woman’s womb to be opened, virtually ensuring her death, in order to baptize a fetus in danger of dying before birth. Even though baptism effected the eternal salvation of the fetus, Aquinas considered it immoral to commit one evil to bring about some ultimate good. Catholic theologians again agreed with their Muslim counterparts, who also placed greater emphasis on the mother’s welfare.39 In the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIV imposed excommunication for abortions of animated fetuses only. Scientific developments in the seventeenth century, however, had an impact on church teaching. The debate over animation was largely resolved through belief in immediate hominization that relied on an understanding of fetal formation called preformationism. In this view, a complete version of a living thing was fully present even in an egg (ovism), or in the case of humans, a spermatozoa (animalculism). This small, but complete person, a homunculus, had only to enlarge to grow into an adult. If a fully formed body was present, even in miniature form, then hylomorphism presented no barrier to the presence of a fully human soul. Consequently, the distinction between the unanimated and animated fetus largely disappeared. The proclamation of the Immaculate Conception (1854) also influenced church teaching on abortion. According to Pope Pius IX, the Virgin Mary’s soul was free from sin from the ‘‘moment of conception.’’ Many scholars mistakenly believe that this dogma pushed the church towards a theory of immediate animation. The Immaculate Conception proclaims only that when Mary was ‘‘conceived,’’ that is at whatever point her body was animated with a soul, she was without sin. Augustine confessed ignorance on the time of animation, and no pope or church council has ever

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presumed to go further.40 Since the church venerated Mary’s role as the mother of Christ just as women entered the workforce in large numbers, the doctrine elevated the status of all mothers. Pius IX’s decree on abortion soon followed. Difficult cases where pregnancy endangered the mother’s life continued to trouble theologians. In the nineteenth century, a case came before the Holy See about a woman named Julia, probably from the United States. Julia could not undergo a normal delivery and would surely die as a result of childbirth. The question was whether it was morally permissible to perform an embryotomy or to dismember the child while still alive to spare the mother. The Holy See issued no definitive answer, but urged physicians and theologians to consult authoritative texts. A number soon argued that in such a circumstance, embryotomy was morally permissible. Other authors argued in favor of craniotomy to save the life of the mother, such as an editor of the Vatican’s Acta sanctae sedis, who was likely Pietro Avanzini. Avanzini claimed that since the fetus would die anyway, it had lost its right to life and had no intrinsic right to choose a method of dying that included the death of its mother.41 Theologians had often defended the morality of killing an ‘‘unjust aggressor,’’ but here the fetus was a direct, material aggressor. Since the intent was to save the life of the mother and only indirectly to take the life of the fetus, craniotomy was permissible. In both 1884 and 1889, the Holy See pronounced on this issue, saying that the church could not safely teach craniotomy ‘‘or any surgical procedure which is directly destructive of the life of the mother or the fetus.’’42 The church thus taught that it was better to let nature take its course, allowing both to die, than deliberately to bring about a death. In 1895 the church forbade cases where doctors might cause a nonviable fetus to be born early to save the mother and in 1902 also forbade ending ectopic pregnancies before the sixth month or fetal viability. In 1917, the church applied the penalty of excommunication to mothers who sought abortions, and by 1931, the church banned all direct abortion. These teachings were consonant with tradition, which always condemned direct abortions. The church allows for cases where ‘‘indirect’’ abortions may result, provided the principle of ‘‘double effect’’ is not violated. Since there is often a fine line between direct and indirect abortions, debate continues over the permissibility of treating difficult cases like uterine cancer. The primary intent may be to save the life of the mother by removing the cancerous organ without intending harm to the fetus, which might be an indirect abortion. Yet removing the cancerous womb is the equivalent of a death sentence for a nonviable fetus, causing a direct abortion. That a pregnancy may result from rape or incest, for example, is irrelevant; direct abortion is always immoral, circumstances aside. Pius IX’s decree on excommunication, although a departure from earlier decrees, was also arguably more consistent with the belief that only God knows when the soul enters the body. To enforce excommunication only for animated fetuses begged the question of time of animation. The church moved away from a morally complex position that intuitively

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recognized differences between an embryo in the early stages of pregnancy and a fetus in the later stages of pregnancy. In so doing, it overturned centuries of more balanced debate and moved towards a more rigid, antiabortion stance that shed its emphasis on the mother’s welfare that was present as early as the Hebrew Torah. It carried this position into the twenty-first century, maintaining it amid intense calls for reform.

ABORTION REFORM PRIOR TO ROE V. WADE In the nineteenth century when states passed anti-abortion laws, one could argue that they were necessary to protect a woman’s safety. Physicians had complete control of abortion, but until the post–World War II era, it was relatively easy especially for a privileged woman to obtain one, and a number of medical reasons enabled physicians to justify the procedure.43 Poverty was such a reason. Although abortions terminated perhaps one in three pregnancies in the twentieth century prior to 1950, there were few prosecutions for violations of the laws. In practice, it was difficult to prove that therapeutic reasons had not justified an abortion, and physicians often resisted attempts to legislate restrictions.44 Usually prosecutions occurred only when abortions resulted in complications. Ten states had laws requiring the consent of two physicians, but since physicians did not always agree, by the 1940s, they sought greater protection for themselves by creating hospital boards.45 By the 1950s, pregnancy was safer, and doctors denied abortions they previously would have approved. Women progressively came to be treated as ‘‘uteruses that housed a child,’’46 and review boards arbitrarily limited abortions for reasons unrelated to health concerns. Physicians subjected women to interviews and examinations that were often humiliating and often saw women requesting abortions as psychologically unstable, depraved, or lesser females.47 More than 40 percent of all U.S. hospitals that performed abortions forced women to consent to simultaneous sterilization.48 This was particularly true for poor African American women, especially unwed mothers, whom whites blamed for juvenile delinquency, poverty, and other social ills. Politicians blamed them for inflating the welfare rolls.49 As the birth control movement gained ground, fears were rampant that a widespread increase in the African American population would overwhelm white America.50 Although white women accounted for the majority of those who used birth control, the white population was actually growing much more rapidly than was the black population from 1870–1910. By 1950, the rate of population growth had been cut in half for African Americans. African American women sought abortion in great numbers,51 largely to avoid bringing children into the miserable social conditions their mothers already experienced.52 If they could not obtain legal abortions, they got them illegally. According to an article in Ebony, 700,000 abortions were performed every year, with 8,000 resulting in deaths.53 As Kristen Luker has noted, however, ‘‘Until the end of the 1950s . . . no one seems to have paid much attention to the philosophical issues involved. Medical abortions took place with little or no public overview;

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and public interest in the issue was limited to the occasional news report detailing the arrest of an illegal abortion ring.’’54 In 1959, the American Law Institute signaled the beginnings of reform in its revised Model Penal Code that reclassified abortion from a homicide to an ‘‘offense against the family’’ and specified three acceptable defenses to criminal abortion charges. Physicians led the movement to reform the laws they helped to create. In 1962 the case of Sherry Finkbine, host of the popular children’s show Romper Room, spurred the physicians’ drive towards reform. Finkbine, mother of four, was pregnant with her fifth child. She had taken headache tablets with thalidomide that her husband had brought from Europe. American doctors routinely administered the drug for morning sickness until its horrific side effects, including babies born with flippers instead of normal limbs, became apparent. Finkbine learned of these and sought an abortion, but she also gave an interview that brought national attention to her dilemma. Her hospital then refused to proceed without judicial approval, even though physicians routinely counseled abortions in such cases. Finkbine eventually fled to Sweden for an abortion. The Vatican, meanwhile, denounced Finkbine’s abortion as murder, despite the doctors’ report that the fetus was so horribly deformed it would not have survived. Public opinion, on the other hand, supported Finkbine by a wide margin, perhaps because there were as many as 1,200,000 illegal abortions every year by the late 1960s, nearly one a minute.55 An epidemic of German measles from 1962–1965 also resulted in 15,000 babies born with birth defects. Physicians were ever more frustrated by unduly restrictive abortion laws, especially because the dangers of childbirth now outweighed the risks of abortion.56 Sociological factors also informed the public debate. Concern over the global population explosion after the World Wars shifted opinion on birth control. The number of women who entered the workforce skyrocketed. Women married later, and the fertility rate dropped.57 From 1967–1973, twelve states passed abortion reform laws, largely modeled on Colorado’s law. Several inserted exceptions for rape or incest, the health of the mothers, and severe deformities of the fetus. Ironically, given later politics, Southern states were most likely to pass reform bills, generally without public controversy. The net result was not always positive; Georgia’s law required a woman to obtain approval from three doctors and a hospital review board. Georgia and other states also wanted to prevent ‘‘abortion tourism’’ and inserted residency requirements.58 Humanitarian desires to make abortion accessible within reasonable limitations, not moral convictions, drove the reform movement. Legislators did not vote along liberal or conservative lines on these issues, nor was race decisive. Lack of controversy allowed first-term legislators to introduce many bills, primarily because they framed them as medical issues. In states where the issue centered around morality, such as Maine and New Jersey, reform bills failed.59 Nor was the Catholic hierarchy, once generally silent on birth control issues, silent now. In states such as Georgia, where measures easily passed, Catholics made up a small percent of the

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population, and legislators perceived them as a fringe group. Generally speaking, no large, well-organized, active pro-life groups appeared in the South during this period.60 In Georgia, the thirty-two denominations of the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta supported the bill.61 Similarly, mainline Protestant denominations supported the California reform bill. If Protestants had led the fight against birth control, many mainline Protestant groups now supported abortion reform and the later repeal movement. Twenty-one members of the clergy even formed the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, providing referrals for abortions to women in need.62 Pro-life movements in this era, such as existed, were Catholic. Despite the modernization of the Catholic church in Vatican II, Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968) defended the sanctity of life and condemned direct abortion as ‘‘an end or a means.’’ In harmony with Gaudiam et spes (1965), Paul VI called sex an expression of love within marriage, reminding Catholics of the ‘‘indissoluable nexus established by God between the significance of union and the significance of procreation which inhere together in the conjugal act.’’63 Although many Catholics rejected church teaching on birth control, these two encyclicals were the basis for activism against abortion reform. Consequently, in areas with larger percentages of Catholics, such as New England, no reform bills passed. However, some states with larger percentages of Catholics than the national average, such as Hawaii, passed repeal bills, but there the issues never became moral debates. Four states (New York, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii) passed repeal laws in 1970. Florida followed in 1972, after its supreme court ruled against its abortion law. In Alaska, repeal passed over the veto of Governor Keith Miller, whose wife was a devout Catholic. In New York, though, the key vote came from a Catholic legislator, George Michaels, whose constituency was predominantly Catholic. The vote ended his career. The Catholic governor of Hawaii took a different path, allowing the measure to pass without his signature. Several Catholic legislators found that they could support repeal but not reform because repeal laws removed the government from the decision and did not single out particular cases, such as deformed fetuses, as targets of abortion.64 The situation had become morally volatile; any further progress in state legislatures was doomed to fail. The reform/repeal process came to a halt largely because it was an elite movement whose limited focus on medical issues kept it from appealing to the masses. The emergence of a more organized pro-life movement also played a role, thwarting repeal in Michigan, for example, despite polls showing a repeal measure would win. Consequently, more radical movements arose, especially among feminists. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966, and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) arose in 1969. Underground abortion providers abounded, such as Jane (The Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation), whose members trained themselves to perform safe abortions, especially for poor women.65 Doctors regularly referred patients to Ruth Barnett. Known as ‘‘the

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abortionist,’’ she performed more than 40,000 abortions in a forty-five year period.66 Physicians like Minnesota’s Jane Hodgson grew more radical; in 1970 she became the only doctor ever convicted for performing an abortion in a hospital. Her patient was a twenty-three-year-old pregnant woman who had contracted German measles, but her case did not meet the state’s requirements for a therapeutic abortion. Hodgson’s conviction was later overturned by Roe v. Wade.

THE COURTS STEP IN By 1973, the courts took the lead. Although scholars argue over whether the courts ended a process of evolution and created a more polarized debate, only four state legislatures had passed repeal laws by 1973— by slim margins. The courts had entered the picture as early as 1965, when Griswold v. Connecticut overturned the conviction of a doctor and the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut for distributing medical information about contraceptives to married couples in violation of Connecticut’s Comstock laws. Justice William O. Douglas, in the majority opinion, wrote that the ‘‘specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras formed by emanations that help give them life and substance.’’ One of the penumbras was the right to privacy, created by the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. Not everyone agreed. Justice Hugo Black argued that the court had adopted ‘‘loose, flexible, uncontrolled standards for holding a law unconstitutional,’’ amounting to a ‘‘great unconstitutional shifting of power to the courts.’’ But this decision overturned the Comstock laws, paving the way for Roe v. Wade in 1973. Jane Roe was a pseudonym for Norma McCorvey. Texas had denied her an abortion on the grounds of economic hardship. She already had children and claimed to have been gang-raped. Prior to the trial, the public learned she was a lesbian and that the pregnancy resulted from a brief liaison, not a rape. McCorvey never had the abortion, but gave birth before the case came before the court. Her attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffey, were only recently out of law school. Weddington later admitted that had she known the truth about McCorvey, she would not have brought the case to trial. Weddington’s case before the Supreme Court lacked a constitutional foundation, but the court tentatively agreed with her arguments. Over the objections of several justices, Chief Justice Warren Burger assigned the majority decision to Justice Harry Blackmun. When his legal reasoning failed to convince his colleagues, the court asked Weddington to reargue her case, this time against a more formidable opponent representing the state of Texas, Robert Flowers. Blackmun based the majority decision on both Douglas’s penumbra of privacy and the due process clause from the Fourteenth Amendment. He found that ‘‘while the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision . . . this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.’’ Roe granted a pregnant woman in the first trimester of pregnancy the unqualified right to an abortion in

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consultation with her doctor. The court also claimed that the state ‘‘has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life.’’ These interests grew and reached a ‘‘compelling’’ point as the pregnancy progressed. The state had the right to regulate but not prohibit abortion in the second trimester; in the third trimester and after fetal viability, the state could proscribe abortion except when the mother’s life was in danger. The court subjected state restrictions on abortion in the last two trimesters to a standard of ‘‘strict scrutiny,’’ but allowed states to require that licensed physicians perform abortions. In a controversial portion of the decision, the court declared that the fetus was not a person before birth and therefore did not have legal rights that superseded those of the mother, at least before viability. The decision had an impact on abortion laws in forty-six states and produced a storm of controversy. Justice Byron White argued that the decision represented ‘‘raw judicial power’’ and that the court, ‘‘with scarcely any reason or authority for its actions,’’ created a ‘‘new constitutional right for pregnant mothers’’ sufficient to override state legislation. Some legal scholars argue that the court must interpret the Constitution to include rights not explicitly specified.67 Critics pointed out that the court issued not one ruling but three, since different considerations governed each of the trimesters.68 As Justice William H. Rehnquist put it, the decision left matters more confused than they were before the decision, overturning a Texas law prohibiting abortion but allowing states to prohibit it in certain trimesters under certain conditions. Sandra Day O’Connor, not yet on the bench, later described Roe as ‘‘on a collision with itself.’’69 Catholics objected to Roe as ‘‘garbled and the history . . . misused’’ but, in fact, the trimester system recalled earlier Catholic debates about fetal formation and animation.70 Another decision handed down that same day, Doe v. Bolton, further complicated matters. Doe, a Georgia woman, sued when denied a therapeutic abortion under Georgia’s reformed abortion law, claiming economic hardship and previous mental illness as reasons she could not have another child. In Doe, the court made clear that Roe did not provide women ‘‘an absolute constitutional right to abortion on her demand.’’ Rather, physicians were still involved, even in first trimester abortions, but the court interpreted permissible health reasons as encompassing ‘‘physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age,’’ and even economic hardship. Doe also struck down as too restrictive Georgia’s residency requirement and reliance on a board of doctors where one would suffice. In later cases, the court ruled on state restrictions. Only two years after Roe and Doe, in Menillo v. Connecticut, the court proved that physicians still controlled abortion in America, upholding the conviction of a nonphysician for performing an abortion. The court upheld Roe by a slim margin in Planned Parenthood v. Danforth (1976) when it struck down Missouri’s spousal and parental consent laws. The court did allow mandatory prior written consent. In later decisions, such as Belotti v. Baird (1979) and Planned Parenthood of Kansas City v. Ashcroft (1983), the

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court reversed itself on parental consent laws for minors, allowing them to stand as long as authorities provided an alternative, such as judicial approval. Pro-choice activists reacted negatively, citing evidence that such laws harmed children. In Akron v. Akron Center (1983), the court overturned Akron’s hospitalization requirement, which kept women from seeking cheaper services in clinics; a twenty-four-hour waiting period, which also created financial strains for women who had to travel for abortions; and what it saw as an overly restrictive informed consent requirement.71 These restrictions governed the second trimester and subsequent trimesters. Justice O’Connor pointed out in a dissenting opinion that the court had invalidated a major plank of Roe that allowed states to regulate abortions after the first trimester. In her dissent to Planned Parenthood v. Ashcroft, O’Connor advocated an ‘‘undue burden’’ standard for determining when states had violated the spirit of Roe. Critics claimed that the court’s decisions clouded the issues rather than clarified them. To the alarm of pro-choice activists, the court eventually retreated from the positions articulated in 1973. Following the 1973 decisions, pro-choice groups such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL mobilized to make abortion accessible through public clinics. Safety rates for abortions increased; deaths were ten times lower from legal abortions than from illegal ones, and five times lower than the death rate of women who gave birth.72 Abortion, however, often remained inaccessible to many poor and rural women, and to minors constrained by parental consent laws. Abortion became even more inaccessible in 1973 when Congress passed its ‘‘conscience clause bill,’’ allowing hospitals to refuse to perform abortions. Only 17 percent of public hospitals in 1975 performed abortions, while 28 percent of non-Catholic private hospitals offered them. Consequently, more than 500,000 American women had to seek abortions outside of their states.73

PRO-LIFE ISSUES IN THE POLITICAL ARENA As predicted, Roe sparked outrage among Catholics. Bishops called for homilies against abortion the following Sunday at masses across the country; others reminded Catholics of the threat of excommunication for having an abortion or assisting anyone to have one. Priests even denied baptism for a child whose mother supported the right to choose in a local paper. In California, priests banned NOW members from receiving the Eucharist or serving as lay readers.74 In 1973, Catholics formed and funded the National Right to Life Committee and still comprise more than 72 percent of its membership. Catholic pro-lifers tend to have previously participated in social activism and to join through religious organizations. In 1973, the church benefited from a wellorganized structure and spent $4 million to lobby Congress for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, a quest that ultimately failed. The church also failed to defeat several pro-choice candidates. Even in a mostly Catholic district of Ohio where the pro-life candidate won in 1974, only 5 percent of voters said abortion was a motivating issue for them.

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The 1976 election proved to be important for the pro-life movement. Candidates in the presidential primaries had to contend with the issue of abortion and, for the first time, Protestant involvement became more visible. Pro-life groups favored Ronald Reagan, despite his refusal to veto California’s reform bill in 1967. Although Gerald Ford eventually won the Republican nomination, Reagan’s supporters got a plank on the party platform supporting a constitutional amendment banning abortion. In contrast, the Democrats refused to support such an amendment. By 1978, however, thirteen state legislatures called for a constitutional convention. Pro-choice Senator Robert Packwood commented that pro-lifers were not only a ‘‘very significant force,’’ but a very ‘‘frightening force. They are people who are with you 99 percent of the time, but if you vote against them on this issue it doesn’t matter what else you stand for.’’75 Pro-life concerns shifted to use of public funds for abortions. Medicaid funded more than 300,000 abortions or over 33 percent of all abortions. In 1976 Henry Hyde, in his first year in Congress, attached an amendment banning use of Medicaid funds to a budget proposal for the department of labor. The Hyde amendment contained no exceptions clause for health problems commonly recognized even before Roe, but passed the House (by a margin of 207–167), although not the Senate. A similar amendment failed only two years before, but the 1976 election altered the playing field. The Senate eventually added an exceptions clause funding abortions to save the life of the mother and passed the bill. The Supreme Court upheld the ban in Harris v. McRae. The ‘‘right’’ to an abortion did not imply the government’s obligation to pay for it, and ‘‘those who [were] helpless [were] condemned.’’76 Abortion was now largely inaccessible to minorities. Meanwhile, the Helms Human Life Statute defined an embryo as a person from the moment of conception and failed to pass. The Hatch amendment, which would leave the decision on abortion to the states, also failed. Constant bickering between factions within the pro-life movement derailed many efforts, partly because pro-lifers were and are diverse— Catholics, Protestants, and even Jews, whose views diverge widely. Although earlier activists, such as Margaret Sanger, succeeded in framing their issue narrowly to appeal broadly, those pushing for the anti-abortion plank in the Republican Party platform in 1976 did so as part of a much larger movement against an Equal Rights Amendment and for prayer in schools. Their position also betrayed some contradictions in the pro-life philosophy; they supported the right-to-life for an unborn child, but favored the death penalty and generally opposed welfare. As the National Catholic Reporter contended, for pro-life Republicans, fetuses had rights, but the poor did not.77 Catholics historically advocated programs for the poor and other examples of big government condemned by the Republican Right. In other words, many pro-lifers are liberal on other social issues, including topics such as euthanasia.78 Some Catholics worried after Roe that the hierarchy was devoting too much attention to abortion and not enough to other social issues.79 Consequently, some feminists argue that it is a mistake to

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classify those who support pro-life, anti-abortion positions as being on the right politically.80 One could not even divide the court that issued the Roe decision evenly along liberal or conservative lines in 1973, as conservative presidents appointed several justices who voted for the decision and vice versa. Pro-life advocates in the 1970s were not clearly divided along party lines. This occurred in the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Christian Right became a significant factor in the Republican Party. If early pro-life movements were largely Catholic, starting in the 1980s there was more Protestant involvement. The Moral Majority, founded by the Baptist Jerry Falwell, gained strength in the 1980s and had a significant impact on politics. With Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, the Moral Majority successfully ‘‘sold’’ religion to some eight million voters. During the Reagan administration, Falwell claimed to exert enormous influence on policy decisions.81 The Christian Right, a diverse group of people from diverse denominations, encompasses various levels of education, socioeconomic classes, and ethnicities. Groups that picket, blockade, and bomb tend to be largely made up of working-class people; professional, upper- and middle-class people dominate other pro-life groups.82 Despite this diversity, those with pro-life views are generally more conservative in their worldviews and tend to be single-issue voters. A major motivation for pro-life activists is the desire to maintain presumed traditional cultural frameworks, especially women’s roles, in the face of perceived threats.83 A person’s position on the morality of premarital sex may be the biggest predictor of abortion attitudes, and Protestant fundamentalists often are more focused on the evils of premarital sex than on the life of the fetus. Catholics focus more on ‘‘right-to-life’’ issues.84 Personal relationships, feelings of grief over loss leading to empathy for aborted fetuses, or the need to redeem themselves after an abortion often influence Protestant women to join these groups. Many factors besides religious convictions enter into the pro-life/pro-choice debate. Central to most pro-life positions is the ‘‘premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception.’’85 As past NRLC president John Wilke put it, ‘‘the totality of everything I am today’’ was ‘‘contained within the single cell who I once was.’’86 Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body emphasized the centrality of the incarnation in Christian theology and of the importance of human embodiment, the only medium through which God reveals himself to humans. Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, explained that ‘‘the human body cannot be considered as a mere complex of tissues, organs and functions,’’ especially since it is inseparably bonded with a human soul.87 The Silent Scream, which purportedly showed a twelve-week-old fetus frantically trying to escape the abortionist’s suction tool, only strengthened these convictions. What is to a pro-choice advocate a conglomeration of cells or a mere parasite in its mother’s body is to a pro-life advocate an unborn child, a fully human, fully individuated person capable of feeling emotions and pain as it is dismembered by the abortionist. On this issue, pro-life positions vary. A fetus’s right-to-life is not always an inviolable

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principle; some pro-life groups, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists and Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, allow exceptions for rape, incest, or the mother’s health. Since the 1980s pro-life advocates have been an especially strong force. Pro-life activism took a decisive turn, starting in the late 1970s, away from passive sit-ins towards direct and more disruptive activities, often called interventions, which escalated into violence. Most participants in violence were males under 25 who lacked ties to others outside of their organizations.88 The former Benedictine monk Joseph Scheidler formed the ProLife Action League (PAL) in 1980 and displayed graphic images of aborted fetuses or even the mangled fetuses themselves outside abortion clinics, traced license plates of clients and followed them home, jammed phone lines, and harassed workers. When these activities failed to achieve the desired results, bombings and arsons followed, starting in 1977 and reaching a high point in 1984. Scheidler gave Protector of Life awards to clinic bombers. In 1986, Randall Terry, a prote´ge´ of Scheidler, formed Operation Rescue. For the first time, Protestant evangelicals became activists in large numbers. In the early days following Roe, evangelical Protestants felt dominated by Catholics, but perceived themselves as the only ‘‘Christians’’ in the movement.89 Whereas perhaps a hundred people might participate in a sit-in, Terry brought thousands to the direct action cause, largely evangelical Protestants. Like some earlier pro-lifers, Terry embraced a larger program for social action, calling for the remaking of society along Old Testament lines, establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. According to Christian Reconstructionism, for example, the state should execute adulterers, homosexuals, rapists, and other ‘‘sinners.’’90 Francis August Schaeffer’s call for Christians to embrace social activism rather than armchair protest influenced Terry. Terry once remarked, ‘‘If you think abortion is murder, act like it!’’91 His most famous clinic blockades were in Atlanta in 1988, and in Wichita, Kansas, in 1991. Authorities arrested more than two thousand people in Wichita, and a federal judge ordered the picketing to stop. As the violence escalated, authorities incarcerated Terry. His less than heroic actions ended his leadership, especially after followers learned of his extramarital affair. In response to escalating violence, the administration of President George H.W. Bush filed a brief as Amicus Curiae in the Supreme Court case Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic. The Bush administration argued that a federal civil rights law could not be used to protect women clinic clients from blockades. But Operation Rescue came under fire for its financial practices under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) laws, and had fines amounting to six figures by the 1990s. Two court cases, National Abortion Federation v. Operation Rescue and National Organization of Women (NOW) v. Scheidler, resulted in restrictions on clinic protests. Dallas Blanchard argues that frustration with the failure of the Reagan administration to achieve significant anti-abortion legislation aggravated the violence.92 Reagan, however, supported the Hyde amendment, refused

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to provide federal funds to international organizations promoting abortion, denied use of federal funds for fetal tissue research, and banned importation of RU-486, a pill that causes abortion. President Clinton later overturned the Hyde amendment, as well as many of Reagan’s other policies. Blanchard claims that as a result anti-abortion violence gained new life, culminating in the death of Dr. David Gunn in 1993 in Pensacola, Florida. Thirty-two activists, including Catholic priests and ministers, signed a letter endorsing violence against doctors. Between 1977 and 1995, 1,712 deaths resulted from anti-abortion violence; the American Conference of Catholic Bishops blamed these deaths on the existence of abortion clinics. But most Christian groups had distanced themselves from Operation Rescue by 1995. Violent activism saw a drastic drop in the number of abortions. In 1985, about one-quarter of medical schools offered training in abortion; in 1991, 12 percent offered training in performing first-trimester abortions, while only 7 percent trained physicians in second-trimester procedures.93 Pro-choice activists were not silent and rallied as the Supreme Court prepared to hear Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989). The makeup of the court had changed, and Justice O’Connor had written two dissenting opinions criticizing Roe. The chief justice was now Rehnquist, who had issued a blistering dissent in Roe. Three other justices were known critics of Roe, including Antonin Scalia. Webster upheld the states’ rights to prohibit abortions in public hospitals and to require physicians to check for fetal viability before proceeding with abortions. The court refused to comment on the portion of the Missouri statute that defined human life as beginning at conception, a claim explicitly rejected by Roe. From a pro-choice viewpoint, Webster’s comments on fetal viability potentially restricted the privacy of the first two trimesters granted by Roe. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Blackmun wrote that ‘‘a chill wind blows.’’ Pro-life factions claimed a victory with Webster. NARAL’s Kate Michelman said that the court had left ‘‘a woman’s right to choose hanging by a thread and passed the scissors to the state legislatures.’’94 Pro-life claims of victory unwittingly boosted the pro-choice movement. Women’s rights groups became more involved in the debate after Webster, though they started to mobilize at least as early as 1986, when Arkansas attempted to pass a referendum abolishing use of state funds for abortions. NARAL and other women’s rights advocates hired a professional pollster, Harrison Hickman, to help defeat that referendum. Hickman discovered that those opposed to abortion for all but victims of rape or incest, yet who promoted the sovereignty of the family and rejected big government, were likely to vote to defeat the measure. Based on Hickman’s polls, NARAL orchestrated a campaign based on the motto, ‘‘Who Decides— You or Them?’’ This strategy became the dominant one after Webster in efforts to defeat attempts by the states to abolish abortion. In 1989, Doug Wilder won the governor’s race in Virginia using this strategy, becoming the first African American governor in American history. Wilder advocated parental consent laws and restrictions on governmental funding for abortions, with riders for rape and incest. Some

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Republicans urged their party to moderate its views on this issue, though ultimately George H.W. Bush failed to respond, vetoing a bill banning Medicaid funding that had exceptions for rape or incest. According to William Saletan, this ‘‘mutant version’’ of the abortion rights message triumphed over NARAL’s more egalitarian message. Whereas NARAL was previously concerned with protecting the rights of poor and underage women to an abortion, now it sought to win the war launched by Webster. Judith Widdicombe, president of the clinic that took Webster to the Supreme Court, used the ‘‘mutant message’’ to protect the legal right to abortion in Missouri. Similarly, NARAL refused to endorse Andrew Young for governor of Georgia; he supported a message close to NARAL’s egalitarian plank. NARAL favored Zell Miller, who stood for the ‘‘mutant version.’’ Even Bill Clinton and Al Gore ran on a plank supporting parental consent laws and opposing government funding for abortion.95 By the early 1990s, Republican Newt Gingrich accurately referred to America as ‘‘pro-choice, anti-abortion.’’96 Although pro-choice forces gained ground for the right to choose, a conservative message prevailed where the government’s role was concerned. NARAL further moderated its message in the 1990s, changing its name to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and announcing it would fight to make abortion less necessary by working for more healthy children. In the 1990s, pro-life majorities also dominated many state legislatures, and Pennsylvania enacted one of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws. Congress introduced the Freedom of Choice Act, designed to prohibit states from restricting abortions before viability and later when the mother’s life was endangered. Predictably, President George H.W. Bush vetoed it. As Laurence Tribe noted, the pro-choice forces kept momentum when they could limit the debate to who would make the choice to have or not to have an abortion; the reverse held when pro-lifers could focus the debate on why a woman might choose an abortion.97 Widespread support for this ‘‘mutant’’ position influenced the Supreme Court to take account of the ‘‘national controversy’’ over ‘‘governmental power to limit personal choice’’ and of the ‘‘pressure to retain Roe.’’98 Indeed, the court had come within one vote of overturning Roe completely in the Thornburgh decision. In 1992 the court issued its decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania v. Casey. The Casey decision upheld a twenty-four-hour waiting period between the time a woman formally recorded her decision for abortion and the procedure. The court had ruled against such a period in Thornburgh. Now it was more difficult for poor women to obtain an abortion. The court allowed records to be kept of abortion procedures, but did not require women to obtain spousal consent. O’Connor’s doctrine of ‘‘undue burden’’ guided the Casey decision; in later decisions, the court would prove that almost no restriction represented an ‘‘undue burden.’’ Basing its argument on the principle of stare decisis (prior decisions), the court refused to overturn Roe, not out of any conviction that it was sound, but out of a desire not to overturn precedent. Justice Scalia chided the court for its ‘‘jurisprudence of doubt,’’

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believing that the court should have overturned Roe. However, the court had reduced the trimester system of Roe to a shambles and allowed numerous restrictions on abortion by the states if they met O’Connor’s ‘‘undue burden’’ standard. Reliance on stare decisis drove home the possibility that none of the restrictions the court upheld might later be removed.

PARTIAL BIRTH/LATE-TERM ABORTIONS AND RU-486 Daniel Moynihan once referred to partial birth or late-term abortions as a procedure ‘‘as close to infanticide as anything I have seen.’’99 Technically called ‘‘intact dilation and extraction,’’ the procedure involves dilating the cervix over several days, delivering the fetal body, piercing the skull so as to suction out the contents of the cranium, and then delivering the fetus intact. Less than one-third of fetuses aborted in this way are dead when the procedure is performed. Although severe deformity of the fetus or the mother’s health problems are reasons given for the procedure, it is difficult to know how many of these procedures are performed annually since pro-choice advocates have admitted to lowering numbers to gain support for their cause.100 The procedure is controversial because the fetus may well be viable and medical research suggests that fetuses in the last trimester can feel pain. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has noted that it should never be the only option available; and the AMA called for a ban based on the ‘‘inhumane’’ nature of the procedure.101 The pro-choice Moynihan voted against allowing it. In 1995, Congress passed a ban on partial birth abortions, but President Clinton vetoed the bill. He continued to veto every ban throughout his presidency. The states took matters into their own hands; by 1998, twenty-two states had banned the procedure. However, in Stenberg v. Carhart, the Supreme Court refused to uphold Nebraska’s ban on partial birth or late-term abortions because it allowed an exception only for the life of the mother and did not include an exception for ‘‘health.’’ The removal of an option for women constituted an ‘‘undue burden.’’ One of the issues was that Nebraska’s law did not distinguish between the ‘‘D and X’’ procedure and ‘‘D and E,’’ a similar procedure often used in the second trimester. Whereas the court reflected public opinion in Casey, in Stenburg it ignored it. Since Stenburg, President George W. Bush followed through on a campaign promise and in 2003 signed a ban on the procedure. He also instituted a ‘‘global gag rule,’’ restricting nongovernmental organizations overseas that use funds for abortions from receiving U.S. financial aid. New technologies complicate the abortion debate for some offer nonsurgical ways of achieving the same outcome. In 1982 Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu invented RU-486, available in France starting in 1988. RU-486 is an anti-progestin that breaks the bond that a fertilized egg has with the uterine wall. Taken in combination with a synthetic prostaglandin thirtysix to forty-eight hours after conception, it causes miscarriage in 96 percent of cases. Though the pill has a wide safety margin, the FDA has

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restricted it to women under thirty-five who are nonsmokers. President Clinton asked the FDA to lift the ban on importation of the drug, and in 1996 the FDA approved its use in the United States where it is marketed as Mifeprestone. Pro-life forces reacted vigorously to RU-486. The Catholic church condemned its use, and companies that distributed the drug received hate mail about their ‘‘death pill.’’ Joseph Scheidler, associated with the violence of the 1980s, threatened to wage a campaign of harassment against physicians dispensing it. Meanwhile, pro-choice factions poured millions of dollars into the campaign for RU-486. Owing to negative reaction from pro-life factions, drug companies have shied away from marketing the drug. One company, Hoechst Marion Roussel, abandoned sale of the drug to nonprofit companies since boycotts threatened its much larger profits from other drugs. Europeans remembered Hoechst as the company that patented Zyklon B, used in Holocaust gas chambers. Germany banned RU-486 outright, as did Spain and France. Ironically, for many years physicians have dispensed without controversy the standard birth control pill; it prevents pregnancy if given within seventy-two hours of intercourse. A new morning after pill (MAP) is also available, as are other alternatives.

WHERE DO WE STAND NOW? As this debate raged, Pope John Paul II issued the encyclical Evangelium vitae (1995). In the most sweeping condemnation yet of abortion, he condemned the ‘‘culture of death’’ and affirmed the dignity of life from beginning to end. John Paul II called abortion and using drugs like RU486 the equivalent of murder. Reversing pre-nineteenth-century theological arguments, he refused to acknowledge the possibility of the fetus as an unjust aggressor. Similarly, he condemned new technologies allowing in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, and enforced sterilization of the physically or mentally deficient. In short, he advocated a ‘‘culture of life.’’ Although Roe did not define a fetus as a person, John Paul II thought of the unborn as fully human and entitled to life. As Alexander Sanger noted, often no force of reason can dispel the prolife belief that the fetus is a person and fully human.102 Recently, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, herself a devout Roman Catholic, received a barrage of hate mail in response to an article by several physicians and legal experts surveying the literature on whether a fetus can feel pain.103 They concluded that a fetus cannot feel pain prior to the third trimester of pregnancy because the cerebral cortex is not connected. Some Catholic philosophers have presented a compelling case that it is impossible for the fetus, lacking higher level brain functions, to have moral status. Daniel Dombrowski and Robert Deltete argue, for example, that without sentience, a prerequisite for being human, the fetus has no personhood.104 Judith Jarvis Thomson insisted that to have moral status, one must have interests. Because interests require feelings it is difficult in light of modern science to attribute feelings to a fetus prior to viability. Since an embryo can separate into twins, ‘‘it is neither an ontological

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individual nor necessarily the immediate predecessor of one.’’105 Contrary to the pro-life position, scientists argue that ‘‘the fertilized egg is clearly not a prepackaged human being . . . the particular person that it might become is not there yet.’’106 For pro-choice advocates, to say that a fetus is a ‘‘human being’’ because it is ‘‘human’’ and a ‘‘being’’ is a misuse of rhetoric. Islamic scholars claim that the fetus exists in a complex community of relationships; because legal status is defined by ability to enter into relationships ‘‘with rights and obligations,’’ the fetus is ‘‘human in some respects, but not in others.’’107 These insights echo pre-nineteenth-century Catholic theology. American legal scholars have also highlighted serious problems that might be associated with considering the fetus a person.108 For many legal scholars, Roe was the only logical decision possible with regard to fetal personhood. Nevertheless, some judicial decisions imply otherwise. Judges have incarcerated African American female crack addicts on charges of endangering their unborn children.109 The recent conviction of Scott Peterson for the murder of his wife Laci and his unborn child, Conner, has prompted renewed examination of fetal personhood on the state level. Even if one considers the fetus a person, Thomson suggests that the mother is not obligated to nurture it. Abortion is entirely a moral, reasonable decision to refuse to nurture a parasite, an obligation that Thomson says no one has, whether they freely engaged in sex or not. Thomson finds it ironic that those who define the fetus as a person deny the mother’s rights as a person to control her own body.110 Some philosophers also suggest that bringing deformed or otherwise ill babies into the world who will be a burden to others is seriously wrong.111 Some Muslim scholars, who generally deeply respect the potentiality of life in the womb, support this view.112 Ronald Dworkin has also argued that those who are pro-life do not ‘‘really’’ mean that the fetus has a right to life and that abortion is murder; rather, they mean that killing it is ‘‘intrinsically bad.’’113 We have come full circle, with Pope John Paul II’s insisting we nurture others despite personal difficulties and philosophers such as Thomson rejecting his premises and the Dworkins of the world saying he means something other than what he really said. Abortion has polarized the American public like no other debate, but there can be movement from one extreme to the other. After Roe v. Wade, Norma McCorvey had a conversion experience, joined an evangelical group, and now opposes abortion. For McCorvey, the issue is simple: Abortion is wrong. Pro-choice advocates still think theirs is the more morally complex position, weighing factors such as rape, incest, poverty, the mother’s health, and other circumstances. Can the two sides ever compromise? New technologies have created new problems. The technology exists to place an embryo in a surrogate womb; will right-to-life groups demand that aborted fetuses be placed in surrogates, with or without the mother’s consent? Already courts have ordered that frozen embryos are ‘‘persons’’ who should be considered ‘‘children’’ of a divorced couple.114 President George W. Bush has publicly supported Nightlife Christian Adoptions, an agency specializing in

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‘‘snowflake embryos,’’ unused embryos from in vitro fertilization programs. Some 400,000 frozen embryos exist, and eighty-four families have adopted snowflake children. The snowflake children have strengthened pro-life opposition to embryonic stem cell research, which has vast potential for treating Parkinson’s and other diseases. Researchers use pluripotent stem cells taken from the embryo when it is still a blastocyst and can divide into twins. Pluripotent cells have the potential to become a number of different kinds of cells, but not the potential to become a fetus. Embryonic cells must be used, since disease, mutations, or chemicals may corrupt DNA in adult stem cells. Although current techniques for harvesting stem cells destroy the embryo, in 2005 researcher Robert Lanza reported a new technique that preserves the embryo. Mice embryos have grown to term after researchers harvested their stem cells. Embryonic stem cells from humans are typically taken from excess embryos left after in vitro fertilization, which parents often discard or leave frozen. Right-to-life groups call stem cell research unethical, seeing the embryos as fully human, and President George W. Bush initially banned federal funding for research. In 2001 he allowed funding to continue for work with existing stem cell lines, most of them now unusable. In 2005, California passed Proposition 71, creating the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine with taxpayer funds, a move supported by Governors Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The family of former President Ronald Reagan, one of the strongest pro-life presidents, lobbied Congress to support the research, which might prove beneficial to Alzheimer’s patients. A 2001 Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research survey showed that a majority of those self-identified as pro-life—even Catholics—support stem cell research. Nevertheless, the Catholic church officially condemns it. Although the debate over Roe v. Wade continues, American society has moved beyond the framework of the decision. The world is different now than in 1973. The court is now different, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito replacing William Rehnquist and the pivotal Sandra Day O’Connor. In 2005–2006, the first case on abortion in five years came before the court. The question is, to what extent can or will the Supreme Court keep up with us?

NOTES 1. Kristen Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1–10. 2. Laurence Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 3. Gene Burns, The Moral Veto: Framing Contraception, Abortion, and Cultural Pluralism in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 4. Marvin Olasky, ‘‘Victorian Secrets: Pro-Life Victories in 19th Century America,’’ Policy Review 60 (Spring 1992): 31.

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5. Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 230; Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: the Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 26. 6. Mark Y. Herring, The Pro-Life/Pro-Choice Debate (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 37. 7. Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 39; Michael Gordon, The American Family: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Random House, 1978), 173. This represents a rate more than three times that of the previous century. 8. Ginsburg, 26. 9. Herring, 34–35. James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 26–45, argues that childbirth was more dangerous than abortion. 10. Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838–1988 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988), 30. 11. Ibid., 32. The Presbyterian Church is now one of the strongest defenders of a woman’s right to choose. 12. See Mohr, 167. 13. Paul Starr, ‘‘A Sovereign Profession: The Rise of Medical Authority and the Shaping of the Medical System,’’ in The Social Transformation of American Medicine, ed. Paul Starr (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 14. Mohr, 21–22. 15. Transactions of the American Medical Association 12 (1859): 73–78. See also Rosalind Petchesky, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (New York: Longman, 1984), 79. 16. ‘‘Report of the Committee on Criminal Abortion,’’ Transactions of the American Medical Association 22 (1871): 241. 17. Gordon, 133–35; Ellen Chesler, Woman of Color: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 215–17. 18. See Chesler, 66. 19. Craig M. La May, ‘‘America’s Censor: Anthony Comstock and Free Speech,’’ in Communication and the Law 19, 3 (September 1997): 22; Herring, 54. 20. See Justice Blackmun’s opinion for the majority in Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973). 21. Carol McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 43. 22. Dennett failed primarily owing to her advocacy of birth control as part of larger, more sweeping policies for society. See Burns, chaps. 3 and 4. 23. Burns, 154–63. 24. Old Testament passages reflect God’s knowledge of humans from the womb. See Isaiah 49:1,5, and 15; Psalm 139:113–16; and Jeremiah 1:5. The New Testament reveres all life as sacred (John 1:4, 10:10, 11:25, 14:6; 1 John 5:11). See Herring, chap. 1. 25. Iulius Paulus, Sententiae Iulii Pauli, Iulii Pauli sententiarum receptarum ad filium libri quinque, ed. Gustav Huge (Berlin: Mylius, 1795), 5, 23, 8, and 13. See also Digestorum seu Pandectarum Justiniani, in Justiniani Augusti digestorum (Rome: Danesi, 1902–1910), 48, 19, 38, 5. Even if no death resulted and there was no evil intent, Roman law forbade the practice. Roman law considered the fetus a part of the mother until birth. See John Connery, S.J., Abortion: The Development of the Catholic Perspective (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1977), 29–31. 26. See Connery, 32–35.

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27. Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert Deltete, A Brief, Liberal Catholic Defense of Abortion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 24. 28. By contrast, the Roman jurist Iulius Paulus imposed the death penalty only when the potion caused the death of the woman or the fetus. Alvah Sulloway, Birth Control and Catholic Doctrine (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 198–99; John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 400–406. 29. Noonan, 406–7. 30. Leslie Tentler, ‘‘ÔThe Abominable Crime of OnanÕ: Catholic Pastoral Practice and Family Limitation, 1875–1919,’’ Church History 71 (2002): 307–8, 310–11, 338–39. 31. Burns, 137–38. 32. Sulloway, 132–38. 33. The Hebrew version in Exodus 21:22–25 levies a greater punishment for an actual injury to the mother than for a miscarriage, according to the principle of ‘‘eye for eye.’’ This passage is the first full expression of the lax talionis in the Torah. Scholars debate whether the translators who produced the Septuagint used a long-lost version, mistranslated the text accidentally, or made a deliberate effort to convey a new theology. See Connery, 17–18. 34. Augustine, Enchiridion: Sive de Fide, Spe et Charitate, Opera Omnium, vol. 6, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1861–1865), 85–86. 35. Marion Holmes Katz, ‘‘The Problem of Abortion in Classical Sunni fiqh,’’ in Islamic Ethics of Life: Abortion, War, and Euthanasia, ed. Jonathan E. Brockopp (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 32. See also Donna Lee Bowen, ‘‘Contemporary Muslim Ethics of Abortion,’’ in ibid., 52–80. 36. The Finnian penitential punished those who administered a maleficium to a woman that caused her to abort with a fast of bread and water for a year and a half, followed by six more fasts of forty days. The penance for homicide was seven years penance. Penitentiale Vinniae, 20, in F.W.H. Wasserschleben, Die Bussordenungen der abenlandische Kirche (Graz: Akademische Druck, U. Verlangsanstalt, 1956), 112. The Canones Hibernenses (ca. 675 C.E.) imposed a lighter penance for abortions of liquoris materiae fillii in utero, or while still in a ‘‘liquid state,’’ than for the destruction of the fetus after it had a formed body and its soul had been infused. 37. Aborting an animated fetus to save the life of the mother, however, was immoral. Antoninus followed the opinion earlier held by John of Naples. See Connery, 116. 38. See Connery, chap. 8. 39. Bowen, 64. 40. Connery, 212. 41. Questio moralis de Craniotomia seu de occisione fetus in utero matris et mater a certa morte servetur, Acta Santae Sedis Apostolice 7 (1872): 285ff. 42. Acta Sanctae Sedis in compendium opportune redacto et illustrate, vol. 7 (Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S.C. de Propaganda Fide, 1872), 285ff. 43. Quinten Scherman, ‘‘Therapeutic Abortion,’’ Obstetrics and Gynecology 11 (March 1958): 323–35. See also Ginsburg, Contested Lives, 32. 44. Luker, 33. 45. Lewis E. Savel, ‘‘Adjudication of Therapeutic Abortion and Sterilization,’’ Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology 13 (March 1964): 14–21. 46. Rickie Solinger, ‘‘Pregnancy and Power: Before Roe v. Wade, 1950– 1970,’’ in Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000, ed. Rickie Solinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 21.

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47. Harold Rosen, ‘‘The Psychiatric Implications of Abortion: A Case Study in Hypocrisy,’’ in Abortion and the Law, ed. David T. Smith (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967), 105. 48. Solinger, ‘‘Pregnancy and Power,’’ 24. 49. Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992), chaps. 2, 6, and 7. 50. David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 120. 51. Jessie M. Rodrique, ‘‘The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement,’’ in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 335. 52. Angela Davis, ‘‘Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights,’’ in From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom: Transforming a Movement, ed. Marlene Gerber Fried (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 17. 53. Loretta J. Ross, ‘‘African-American Women and Abortion,’’ in Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars, 161–207. 54. Luker, 68. 55. Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes, The Politics of Abortion (New York: Praeger, 1981), 45–46; Sherry Finkbine, ‘‘The Lesser of Two Evils,’’ in The Case for Legalized Abortion Now, ed. Alan Guttmacher (Berkeley: Diablo Press, 1967), 15–25; Ginsburg, Contested Lives, 36ff.; Mohr, 254. 56. Eva Rubin, Abortion, Politics and the Courts (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 18. 57. See Tribe, 39. 58. Nanette J. Davis, From Crime to Choice: The Transformation of Abortion in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 254–57; Sagar Jain, Georgia Abortion Act 1968: A Study in Legislative Process (Wilmington, NC: Dept. of Health Administration, School of Public Health, and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, 1972), 39; Burns, 175. 59. Burns, 182, 198–99. 60. Lawrence Lader, Abortion II: Making the Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); Suzanne Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 222–28; Burns, 191. 61. Jain, 58. 62. Tribe, 40; Lader, 49. 63. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1968), 14. 64. Tribe, 47. 65. Laura Kaplan, ‘‘Beyond Safe and Legal: The Lessons of Jane,’’ in Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars, 33–41. 66. Rickie Solinger, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (New York: Free Press, 1994). 67. Tribe, 82–96. 68. Cynthia Gorney, Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 164. 69. Quoted in Herring, 133. 70. Connery, 2. 71. In Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the court further restricted the kind of informed consent that could be demanded from a woman seeking abortion. 72. Legal abortions in the first trimester are nine times safer than carrying a baby to term. James D. Shelton and Albert K. Schoenbucher, ‘‘Deaths after Legally Induced Abortion,’’ Public Health Reports 93, 4 (1978): 375–78.

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73. Tribe, 140–41. 74. Tribe, 143. 75. Martin Tolchin, ‘‘Senators Elucidate Shift on Abortions,’’ New York Times, July 1, 1977, A24. 76. Millicent Fenwick, quoted in Martin Tolchin, ‘‘House Bars Medicaid Abortions and Funds for Enforcing Quotas,’’ New York Times, June 18, 1977, A1, A7. 77. Tribe, 160. 78. Keith Cassidy, ‘‘The Right to Life Movement: Sources, Development, and Strategies,’’ The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective, ed. Donald T. Critchlow (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 128–59. Faye Ginsburg has shown this to be true of radical groups such as Operation Rescue. See her ‘‘Saving America’s Souls: Operation Rescue’s Crusade Against Abortion,’’ The Fundamentalism Project, vol. 3: Fundamentalism and the State, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 557–88. See also James Davison Hunter, ‘‘What Americans Really Think About Abortion,’’ First Things 24 (1992): 13–21. 79. Marjorie Hyer, ‘‘Some Catholics Lament Bishops’ Abortion Stress,’’ Washington Post, September 11, 1976, A4. 80. Sydney Callahan, ‘‘Abortion and the Sexual Agenda: A Case for Pro-life Feminism,’’ Abortion and Catholicism: The American Debate, ed. Patricia Beattie Jung and Thomas A. Shannon (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 128–40; Denise Lardner Carmody, The Double Cross: Ordination, Abortion and Catholic Feminism (New York: Crossroad, 1986); Lisa Sowle Cahill, ‘‘Abortion, Autonomy, and Community,’’ in Jung and Shannon, eds., 85–97. 81. Matthew C. Moen, ‘‘From Revolution to Evolution: The Changing Nature of the Christian Right,’’ Sociology of Religion 55, 3 (Fall 1994): 345–58. 82. Dallas Blanchard and Terry Prewitt, Religious Violence and Abortion: The Gideon Project (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993); Michael W. Cuneo, Catholics Against the Church: Anti-Abortion Protest in Toronto, 1969–1985 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). However, Jerome Himmelstein, To The Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), argues that social positioning does not account for different views. 83. Petchesky, 184. See also Bruce B. Lawrence, Defender of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 100. Lawrence argues that one of five basic traits common to religious fundamentalists is an ideology of male dominance. Luker, 145, also found that her subjects accepted the traditional view of the wife as subordinate to the husband. This included women who wanted to continue to rely on men to support their roles as mothers. 84. Elaine Hall and Myra Marx Feree, ‘‘Race Differences in Abortion Attitudes,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 50, 2 (1986): 201; Blanchard, 46. 85. Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘‘A Defense of Abortion,’’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, 1 (1971): 47. 86. Quoted in Charles A. Gardner, ‘‘Is an Embyro a Person?’’ Nation (November 13, 1989): 557–58. 87. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘‘Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replied to Certain Questions of the Day,’’ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, February 22, 1987; available online at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/ rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html, accessed October 10, 2005. 88. Blanchard, 58–59.

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89. Maxwell, 55. 90. Blanchard, 49. 91. Stephen J. Hedges, David Bowermaster, and Susan Headden, ‘‘Abortion: Who’s Behind the Violence?’’ U.S. News and World Report (November 14, 1994): 55. 92. Blanchard, 58. 93. Ibid., 113; Maxwell, 83. 94. Quoted in Tribe, 176. See also James Ropp and Richard E. Coleson, ‘‘What Does Webster Mean?’’ University of Pennsylvania Law Review 138, 1 (1989): 157–76. 95. William Saletan, Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 96. Quoted in William Saletan, ‘‘Electoral Politics and Abortion,’’ in Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars, 122. 97. Tribe, 193. 98. Saletan, ‘‘Electoral Politics,’’ 117. 99. Quoted in Herring, 162. 100. David Stout, ‘‘An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure,’’ New York Times, February 25, 1997, A12. 101. George J. Annas, ‘‘Partial Birth Abortion, Congress, and the Constitution,’’ New England Journal of Medicine 339, 4 (July 23, 1998): 280. 102. Alexander Sanger, Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 103. Susan J. Lee, Henry J. Peter Ralkston, Eleanor A. Drey, John Colin Partridge, Mark A Rosen, ‘‘Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence,’’ in Journal of the American Medical Association 294, 8 (August 24/31, 2005): 947–54. 104. Dombrowski and Deltete, 67–78. 105. Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘‘Abortion,’’ Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum (Summer 1995), available online at http://www.bostonreview.net/ BR20.3/thomson.html, accessed October 10, 2005. 106. Dombrowsi and Deltete, 44. 107. Celeste Michelle Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 213; Gardner, 557–58. 108. Katz, 38. 109. See Tribe, 125–35. 110. Dorothy E. Roberts, ‘‘Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy,’’ in Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars, 124–55. 111. Thomson, ‘‘Defense of Abortion,’’ 47–66. 112. Mary Gore Forester, Persons, Animals, and Fetuses (Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 195. 113. Bowen, 71. 114. Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 13.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Burns, Gene. The Moral Veto: Framing Contraception, Abortion, and Cultural Pluralism in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hull, N.E.H., and Peter Charles Hoffer. Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.

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Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Mohr, James C. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800–1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Solinger, Rickie, ed. Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 9

Christian Attitudes to Reproductive Technologies Aline H. Kalbian

T

he contemporary American political climate is marked by stark divisions over social, moral, and cultural issues. Many of the disagreements involve debates about the human body and privacy, and about the meaning and essence of personhood and life itself. One area of activity that has been a focus of these debates is the broad area of fertility intervention. This includes fertility prevention and limitation (e.g., artificial contraceptives and abortion) and fertility enhancement (e.g., fertility drugs, artificial insemination, egg donation, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and others). Other controversial matters such as cloning, stem cell research, and genetic technology/research are related, but the focus of this chapter will be the activities that fall squarely in the category of fertility assistance or enhancement. More specifically I want to address how the new technological advancements pose a challenge to certain concepts of religious morality: nature, freedom, personhood, family, gender roles, and parenthood. Many religious faiths are concerned about this technology precisely because they fear that it will undermine long-held ideas and beliefs about the aforementioned concepts. Despite concerns about the effects of fertility assistance and enhancement from both religious and secular sources, the technologies continue to take hold in our society. In vitro fertilization (IVF), which was first used successfully in 1978, has become fairly commonplace in first-world countries and has begun to take hold in some less-developed countries.1 Existing technologies are more readily available and new ones are being developed. Scientific developments have also introduced more sophisticated technologies, so that IVF now seems almost old-fashioned. For example, one might consider the new technologies that use cloning or the even more common intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) procedure where a

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needle injects a single sperm directly into an egg in a laboratory before implantation in the woman’s uterus. One constant, however, is the cluster of moral and religious issues that these technologies raise. Two questions capture many of these issues: (1) Are children to be viewed as a choice that can be willed or as a gift from God? (2) Are interventions in fertility an instance of humans overstepping their bounds by exercising dominion over nature and usurping God’s power? Although many of the major religious traditions in America are concerned about those developments, this chapter focuses on Christian responses. This is not to suggest that ‘‘faith in America’’ is exclusively Christian, but I will focus primarily on one tradition, Christianity, as a case study of how religious attitudes shape and are shaped by cultural and scientific advances in our society. I will examine both Protestant and Roman Catholic perspectives on this issue.2 Before attending to these views, I will survey some important moments in the historical development of these technologies as a way to provide a context to what some have called ‘‘the reproduction revolution.’’3

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES Advances in assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have occurred in the context of important changes and challenges to American society since the 1960s. In what follows I present a quick decade-by-decade sketch of the main developments in these technologies and in the related discipline of bioethics. The decade of the 1960s was marked by a wide range of social changes and developments. Chief among them was the so-called ‘‘sexual revolution,’’ a movement characterized by increased freedom in sexual activities and contexts. A related phenomenon was the women’s liberation movement, which led many women to question the patriarchal construction of the American family. This increased freedom of choice related to sex and gender roles had a profound influence on American ideas about families and about women’s proper activities in the private and public spheres. Regardless of what one thinks of the morality of the birth control pill, it is undoubtedly an important part of this historical moment. The desire to manipulate fertility is by no means a modern desire. Indeed, since ancient time humans have looked for means to prevent conception as well as means to enhance it.4 What appears to be significantly different in the modern era is that these activities are controlled almost exclusively by medical and pharmaceutical interests. By the early 1960s the availability of an effective birth control pill radically changed the face of contraception. Contraceptives had now been raised to the status of medications. Furthermore, the 1965 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut found unconstitutional a Connecticut birth control law that forbade the dissemination of ‘‘information, instruction, and medical advice’’ to help married people avoid conception. This decision was based on a view that the state must respect the zone of privacy that surrounds

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the marital relationship.5 The idea of a zone of privacy has been a central concept in most debates related to sexuality and reproduction since that time. Religious discourse about these issues has, by contrast, not focused on the idea of privacy. Instead, the sanctity of life and the holiness of marriage have emerged as the main themes in most Christian conversations about reproduction. This view was expressed definitively by the Catholic church in 1968 when Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life). There he argued that the use of artificial contraception severs the inseparable connection between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive and the procreative meanings. Hence, ‘‘every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life.’’6 The affirmation of the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act simply reaffirms the importance of the transmission of human life in the context of holy matrimony. A zone of privacy is not a concern in this papal document, nor for most Christian thinkers on this issue, because the conjugal act is not viewed as a private act. Rather it is an act that includes God’s participation in the blessing of new human life, and it is an act that has a significant communal component. In addition to the central argument about the intrinsic meanings of the conjugal act, the pope also expressed concern that allowing artificial contraception could result in the severe consequences to society. For example, the pope writes, ‘‘how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.’’ This could have serious repercussions for women, since it might lead men ‘‘to lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.’’7 Christian concern with fertility intervention expresses this twofold concern with the intrinsic meanings of marriage and the sexual act, as well as the severe consequences that might result from not seeing marriage in both its meanings—unitive and procreative. Humanae Vitae was significant for reasons that extend beyond the morality of contraception. Many Catholics, theologians and laypersons alike, were concerned about the politics surrounding the release of the letter, which it is important to note was issued in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, an event that significantly altered Catholic ecclesiology.8 A group of prominent Catholic theologians issued a statement about Humanae Vitae on the day following its promulgation. They wrote, ‘‘Many positive values concerning marriage are expressed in Paul VI’s Encyclical. However, we take exception to the ecclesiology implied and the methodology used by Paul VI in the writing and promulgation of the document: they are incompatible with the Church’s authentic self-awareness as expressed in and suggested by the acts of the Second Vatican Council itself.’’9 It is also important to place Humanae Vitae in the context of the Anglican statement on contraception that emerged from the 1958 Lambeth Conference. There had been earlier more cautious statements issued in the 1930

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Lambeth Conference, but by the late 1950s the acceptance of contraceptive devices was clear and strong. Essentially the resolutions issued there allowed for the use of contraceptives by married couples ‘‘to enhance conjugal love within a marital relationship that remained open to bearing and educating children, reflecting the unity of Christ and the church, and contributing to the spiritual perfection of husband and wife.’’10 Thus, by the close of the 1960s two major Christian denominations held very different positions on the morality of artificial contraception. ARTs had not yet become a pressing issue for most people. Pope Pius XII had spoken against artificial insemination in the late 1950s, but this issue would not emerge in a major way for at least another decade. By the early 1970s, however, the availability of contraception and the affirmation of a woman’s right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade solidified the public notion that individuals have a right to control the reproductive outcomes of sexual actions. This emphasis on rights language, which emerged from a concern with respect for individual autonomy, is in many ways the most significant development in the 1970s in terms of fertility intervention. In the 1960s, rights and autonomy were being invoked to support many social movements, but in the 1970s, these beliefs were developed and codified. The Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade is a significant milestone in the history of reproductive ethics in America. Still thirty years after the decision, it continues to spark energetic debates and to provoke strong, sometimes extreme reactions. The 1973 case essentially made abortion legal in the first trimester by claiming that the woman’s right to privacy empowered her to make that decision. Like the earlier Griswold case that had also been based on the ‘‘zone of privacy,’’ debates still continue about the U.S. Constitution’s explicit support of this notion of privacy. Excerpts from the majority opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun illustrate the appeal to privacy on which legalized abortion is based: The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the constitution. In varying contexts the Court or individual Justices have indeed found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, . . . in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments . . . in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights . . . in the Ninth Amendment . . . or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. . . . These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed ‘‘fundamental’’ or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, . . . are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage, . . . procreation, . . . contraception, . . . family relationships, . . . and child rearing and education.11

The Roe v. Wade decision, along with increased access to contraception, expanded women’s reproductive freedoms, especially in terms of limiting or preventing fertility. As far as enhancing and assisting fertility, the

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technologies were still limited and most of the work was being developed quietly in laboratories around the world. Artificial insemination, a very low-tech procedure, had been fairly widespread in the United States since the 1950s, but it was not until the end of the 1970s that Louise Brown became the first child conceived in a laboratory using in vitro fertilization, and was born in England on July 25, 1978. It would be a few more years before American clinics had similar success, but the fact of Louise Brown’s life changed the conversation about ARTs dramatically. It was no longer a hypothetical issue. With the birth of a seemingly healthy and normal baby, many of the earlier criticisms about harm to the baby were silenced. Nevertheless, this still left questions about the appropriateness of conducting human fertilization outside of the body. The growth of bioethics as an important area of intellectual and policy studies in the 1970s is also worth noting. Prior to the 1960s and 1970s the moral issues associated with medicine were deemed to be the domain of the physician. Several significant cases in the 1960s and 1970s changed that view dramatically and shifted the focus from the duties of physicians to the rights of patients. The emphasis on rights led to strong critiques of medical paternalism by philosophers and theologians.12 They argued that the patient ought to have the right to self-determination. The debates about the role of autonomy in bioethics have continued to this day. Many have realized that the insistence on autonomy could be exaggerated and could lead to a distorted view of the physician-patient relationship. Moreover, some have noted that the obsession with rights and autonomy is premised on a particular notion of the individual, one that is rooted in Enlightenment thought that glorifies rationality.13 These developments in bioethics led to a greater consciousness of the rights of patients to demand or to refuse medical care. As a consequence, the debate about ARTs developed in terms of reproductive autonomy and freedom to choose any means available to have a child. Maura Ryan, a Catholic theologian, has argued convincingly that this single-minded focus on procreative liberty fails to account for important goods related to family and relationships. She argues that even if the model of procreative liberty does not automatically harm family structures or adversely affect the rearing of children, ‘‘a conception of procreative liberty as the right to Ôacquire that sort of child that would make one willing to bring a child into the world in the first placeÕ seems to play to the basest temptations of parenthood rather than to its highest ideals.’’14 Two short years after the birth of Louise Brown in England, the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Virginia, reported the first successful birth of a baby conceived in vitro in the United States. By the end of the 1980s, the technologies for assisting reproduction would become readily available to large segments of the American population. The pace of the technological developments continued to be rapid. Many important firsts were reported in the field of reproductive medicine: the first birth using a donor egg occurred in Australia; a healthy baby was born from a frozen embryo implanted into a woman’s womb; GIFT (gamete intrafallopian tube transfer) technology was becoming more readily available

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in the United States; and perhaps most radical was the birth of the first baby using IVF surrogacy where the eggs of one woman were fertilized in vitro and then implanted in the womb of another woman who gestated the baby for nine months. This last development introduced the notion of gestational mothers as distinct from genetic mother, and over time there would be cases where the rearing mother was a separate third person. Conception, gestation, and rearing, once understood as part and parcel of parenthood, could now be divided among three distinct persons whose relationship to each other was merely contractual. For Christians, the natural or intrinsic bond between biological and social parenthood was upset by this technology in ways that were new and extremely disturbing. The contractual relationships established to bring about conception led to disturbing court battles in the 1980s. Two in particular are worth discussing because they raise important questions about how reproductive technologies impinge on traditional notions of family and marriage. The first case, known as the Baby M. case, was a legal custody battle between the intending parents, William and Elizabeth Stern, and the surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead. This was a case where Whitehead, the surrogate mother, had legally consented to carry the child conceived through artificial insemination with Stern’s sperm. Upon delivery, she agreed to relinquish all parental rights and allow the Sterns to have full, legal custody of the child. After delivering the baby, Whitehead refused to surrender the baby and fled to Florida with her husband and other children. Stern wanted to enforce the surrogacy contract and took the case to court. The New Jersey Superior Court ruled in favor of the Sterns and forced Whitehead to relinquish the baby to them. The decision was based both on the strength of the contract and what the court felt was the best interest of the child. The New Jersey Supreme Court then invalidated the surrogacy contract, claiming that Whitehead’s parental rights could not be terminated and that Elizabeth Stern could not legally adopt the baby. Their argument was essentially that ‘‘the promise of money from William Stern to Mary Beth Whitehead constituted payment for an adoption, not for Whitehead’s services, and therefore contravened New Jersey law prohibiting the transfer of money in connection with the placement of a child for adoption.’’15 As a result, the court held that William Stern and Whitehead were the child’s parents and Whitehead was granted visitation rights. Although this case did not involve high-tech reproductive assistance (only artificial insemination), it did bring to the public’s attention the complexities of what happens when families are formed using nontraditional means. As Janet Dolgin writes, ‘‘In Baby M. the mode of a family’s creation was at issue. The Sterns and Judge Sorkow [superior court judge] agreed that traditional families can be created on the basis of bargained negotiations and contractual agreement. The state supreme court and Mary Beth Whitehead disagreed.’’16 What was becoming very clear in this historical period was that legal remedies could not resolve the profound moral issues that these reproductive technologies were raising. The second case to gain national attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s was Davis v. Davis. A married couple, Mary Sue and Junior Davis,

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had attempted to have children using in vitro fertilization and had failed. They decided to freeze embryos in case they wanted to try again in the future. The couple divorced, and the wife expressed a desire to have the embryos implanted so that she might become pregnant or to donate them to an infertile couple. The husband, Junior Davis, protested, claiming that the embryos should either be frozen indefinitely or discarded. This case raised troubling questions about the status of frozen embryos as property and about what was involved in the formation of a family. The case was heard by three different courts in Tennessee. The trial court viewed the embryos as children and ruled that Mary Sue Davis ought to be granted custody of the embryos. The court of appeals reversed this decision, rejected the notion that the embryos were children, and argued instead that the embryos should be ‘‘afforded a status somewhere between property and body organs available for transplant’’ and that the couple should be given joint control of these entities. The state Supreme Court affirmed this holding and in the end gave custody to Junior Davis because they claimed that Mary Sue Davis only wanted to donate them to another couple and in such a case the desire of the party wanting to avoid procreation should prevail. Apparently Junior Davis destroyed all of the embryos.17 Like the Baby M. case, this case reveals a wide range of difficulties that can emerge when procreation is removed from its traditional context. Davis v. Davis posed the additional problem of whether to characterize embryos that are not implanted as property, as children, or as something in between. The most significant religious contribution to this debate in the 1980s was the Catholic document Donum Vitae, issued in 1987 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF). In that document, the Vatican made clear its opposition to most forms of reproductive technology. As with the earlier Humanae Vitae, it was especially concerned with the inseparability of the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act. Whereas contraception involved the pursuit of the unitive while avoiding the procreative, reproductive technology focused on the procreative meaning and, in the view of the CDF, sacrificed the unitive. What is odd about this concern is that for much of Catholic history, the conjugal act had one primary meaning, the procreative. Hence, one might presume that any actions on the part of married couples that would be in pursuit of the goal of procreation would be acceptable and perhaps even commendable. Yet, the document rejects even homologous artificial insemination by a married couple (sperm is from the husband). The authors write, ‘‘Artificial insemination as a substitute for the conjugal act is prohibited by reason of the dissociation of the two meanings of the conjugal act.’’ Masturbation, through which the sperm is normally obtained, is another sign of this dissociation: Even when it is done for the purpose of procreation the act remains deprived of its unitive meaning. ‘‘It lacks the sexual relationship called for by the moral order, namely the relationship which realizes Ôthe full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love.Õ’’18 It is clear, then, that by the close of the 1980s, both the courts and institutions like the Catholic church were weighing in with their views

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about the morality and legality of these technologies. The research and development continued to increase rapidly as did the availability of the technologies. Thomas Shannon and Lisa Cahill quote a New York Times article from the late 1980s that indicated that ‘‘since 1981, eight hundred babies have been born in the United States through IVF and that in 1986, about six thousand IVF fertilizations took place.’’19 As technologies like IVF were becoming commonplace, new problems emerged concerning some related issues as well as others that were at the very edges of what fertility medicine had been pursuing over the past several decades. The related matters involved questions such as whether there ought to be age limits for women who wanted to use the technologies; what ought to be done with frozen embryos (by 1999 there were reportedly more than 100,000 frozen embryos in the United States20), should women who ‘‘donate’’ eggs be compensated and if so for how much? There were also more legal cases involving difficult issues emerging from these new modes of forming families. Other matters such as cloning and stem cell research, which had seemed like science fiction scenarios, were suddenly more believable and possible. In February 1997, Ian Wilmut, a scientist in Edinburgh, Scotland, cloned the sheep Dolly.21 Dolly’s birth led to a flurry of commentary about the morality of human cloning. And, even though cloning is a different technology in many ways from most ARTs, many of the arguments made against cloning were similar. Cloning, even more than IVF and other such technologies, appeared to view children as products manufactured by scientists. Cloning introduced an added danger of people wanting to replicate themselves or others dear to them. President Clinton asked the National Bioethics Advisory Commission for recommendations about continued research into human cloning. In 1997, the commission ‘‘proposed a legislative ban, initially of three to five years, on attempts to clone human beings.’’22 By 2002, the growth of these technologies had become phenomenal. The Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act of 1992 required all clinics in the United States that provided reproductive technology services to submit data about their success rates to the Centers for Disease Control. The most recent data available are for 2002. Reports were submitted by 391 fertility clinics operating in 2002. The 115,392 ART cycles performed at these reporting clinics in 2002 resulted in 33,141 live births (deliveries of one or more living infants) and 45,751 babies.23 The prevalence of this technology has certainly decreased the volume of the debates about many of the reproductive technologies. For instance, the primary controversy surrounding IVF in this era is the use of frozen embryos created in vitro for research on stem cells. Christian commentators continue to express concern about the implications of all these technologies. The Vatican has not amended its view about the illicit nature of these interventions Nevertheless, most of the controversies in the twenty-first century thus far have focused on stem cell research and cloning. The purpose of ARTs has generally been to assist individuals or couples in achieving their desired goal of genetically related children. The technologies were developed to assist those who were unable to get pregnant by more

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traditional means. Stem cell and cloning research is intended to achieve rather different goals related to improving treatments for many chronic diseases. The difficult moral problem in stem cell research involves the use of embryonic stem cells. Because these cells are procured from embryos that are consequently destroyed, those who ascribe full moral status to embryos perceive this activity as immoral. Cloning raises a different set of issues about the complete manipulation of human reproduction and the concern of replicating already existing beings.

CHRISTIANS AND RESPONSES TO INFERTILITY A common starting point for discussions about the morality of reproductive technology is the issue of how to characterize infertility. The accepted clinical definition is usually that a couple is considered to be infertile if they have not conceived after twelve months of unprotected sex.24 The difficulty arises when one attempts to decide whether infertility ought to count as a disease or disability, and, if so, whether it requires the same medical treatment and coverage by health insurance plans. Although many acknowledge the emotional difficulties associated with infertility, they hesitate to claim that it is equivalent to a physical disease. The claim that it is a physical disease or disability leads to the conclusion that it is a condition that must be treated or improved. Hence, technology and science are simply working to restore reproductive capacity. If viewed this way, then one could argue that there is a moral imperative to treat infertility. As medical procedures, reproductive technologies look quite different than they do when understood simply as technological interventions or disruptions of a natural process. Most Christian commentators have argued that while infertility is an unfortunate condition, it does not warrant medical intervention. For the authors of the Vatican statement Donum Vitae, this is tied to the notion that ‘‘marriage does not confer upon the spouses the right to have a child, but only to perform those natural acts which are per se ordered to procreation.’’25 The Vatican encourages infertile couples to bear their suffering stoically: The community of believers is called to shed light upon and support the suffering of those who are unable to fulfill their legitimate aspiration to motherhood and fatherhood. Spouses who find themselves in this sad situation are called to find in it an opportunity for sharing in a particular way in the Lord’s Cross, the source of spiritual fruitfulness.26

The authors of the document are quick to add that medical research ‘‘in the fight against sterility’’ is a good that scientists ought to pursue. Nevertheless, they must approach this research within the limits set by the moral obligation to respect the personal dignity of the couple and the child. This treatment of the infertility is certainly minimal. It fails to address the ways in which infertility is a disease and perhaps even a disability. Maura Ryan advocates a position that relies on Eric Cassell’s description

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of suffering as ‘‘distress brought about by [an] actual or perceived impending threat to the integrity or continued existence of [one’s] whole person.’’ This includes loss of group identification, relationship with self, body or family, or one’s essential purpose and meaning.27 On the basis of this definition, Ryan argues that since medicine is commonly understood as having the goal of ameliorating suffering and since the experience of infertility is a loss of purpose and meaning—of one’s integrity—then it is appropriate to view it as worthy of medical intervention. Ryan describes the experience of infertility as ‘‘an assault on important life plans and widely shared conceptions of the good life. It is an experience of physical powerlessness and loss of control.’’ She adds that ‘‘Because the ability to reproduce is a culturally accepted feature of personal and gender identity, a diagnosis of infertility is often experienced as a statement about far more than the efficiency of an individual’s reproductive system.’’28 Ryan’s characterization of infertility leads to a strong presumption that medical intervention to relieve this suffering is a good. Bringing new life into this world is a responsibility that humans take seriously. Indeed, religious traditions make the stronger claim that their adherents are morally obligated to take this responsibility seriously. Religions have a particular stake in this set of activities, namely because creating and caring for new human life is central to what it means to be human and is a reflection of the human response to God. Christians in particular have a long history of commentary about the morality of interventions with fertility and reproduction. The general tone of these responses has been negative. Such interventions, even those that are not necessarily technological, often allow scientists and health care professionals to intrude in an activity that is usually understood to involve two people in a private act. Moreover, many religions view sexual acts that result in procreation as engaging the sacred dimension of the universe. For Christians, humans participate in God’s ongoing act of creation. Hence any interventions in reproduction challenge basic theological presuppositions about the relationship of humans to God. In addition to this theological dimension, the social consequences of fertility intervention also worry Christians whose doctrines of family, marriage, and gender are central to their sense of community and identity. ‘‘Be fruitful and multiply’’ is a central injunction that frames Christian and Jewish thought about reproduction and family. Undoubtedly, there is an emphasis on reproduction in these traditions. Indeed in Judaism, having children is a religious responsibility (mitzvah).29 The central issues in regard to fertility intervention are to what lengths humans can and should go to ‘‘multiply,’’ and how binding is the obligation? Preventing procreation through contraception appears to violate this injunction, whereas interventions that promote fertility and lead to the creation of new human life are a pursuit of this goal. If the goal itself is valid and perhaps even obligatory, then it would appear that the problem lies with the means for achieving this goal, rather than the intention to achieve it. Critics of ARTs are usually as concerned with the morality of the means as they are with the end. But some argue that the means actually

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transform the goal. The desired end of having a child becomes suspect because the means to achieve it involve an apparent manipulation of a special human activity. Religions view this activity as special because engaging in sexual intercourse and human reproduction draws humans into a lifegiving creative act associated with God. Thus they hold that there must be rules to govern and regulate this transcendent activity. Put differently, at issue is the matter of whether humans can really usurp God’s power in this activity. Or more precisely, should fertility interventions be understood as attempts to do so? Thus we can see two sets of conflicting paradigms that govern this debate. One set involves how humans understand/view their children. Are they a gift or a choice?30 Another set of competing paradigms involves how humans interpret the meaning of responsible intervention in nature. Is the appropriate model one of stewardship or of co-creation? These two pairs of concepts, life as gift vs. life as choice and humans as stewards of nature vs. humans as cocreators, are connected to important Christian theological doctrines of creation and incarnation, taking the ethics of fertility intervention to the very heart and foundation of Christian belief. These important theological points about human control over nature are not the only issues at stake for Christians concerned with the morality of these new technologies. The social consequences for the family, gender roles, and marriage are more commonly the focus of Christian discourse on these issues. In this chapter, I will focus only on the theological points.

CHILD AS GIFT VERSUS CHILD AS CHOICE What does it mean to say that a child is a choice? Except in cases where one is forced to have sex against one’s will, some argue that any choice to engage in sexual intercourse is implicitly a choice to have a child. This argument, however, is complicated by the fact that not every act of human sexual intercourse leads to the conception of a child. Moreover, although some persons might consent to sex, they may not consciously desire a child. Much of the debate about the morality of contraception revolves around this matter: Is it morally licit to engage in sexual intercourse without at the very least remaining open to the possibility of conceiving a child? In the context of fertility enhancement, the matter of whether a child is a choice or a gift is clearly different. Persons engage in reproductive assistance only when they choose to have a child. Consequently, one of the primary criticisms leveled against these technologies is that viewing children as a choice that everyone is entitled to make easily leads to the view that a child is a commodity. For others, the choice is perceived as wanting ‘‘a child of one’s own.’’ The language of commodity implies production by human artifice and an economic exchange of money for a service rendered. This argument goes on to suggest that once a child is viewed as the product of technological intervention, her personhood—she becomes merely an object rather than a subject—is compromised. The fear is that she will be treated as a commodity or an object of human production.

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The concern about treating children as commodities is exacerbated by the complex world of reproductive medicine. There were more than four hundred medical centers in the United States that performed ART in 2002. Most of these for-profit clinics are run by private entities. The average cost for one cycle of IVF is $12,000 to $17,000, and most successful outcomes involve at least two or three attempts.31 The enormous expense of these technologies and the consumer models on which these for-profit businesses are based contribute to the view that children might be perceived as products or commodities. In contrast to this image of a child as a choice/product/object is the metaphor of a child as a gift, a metaphor that implies that there is a giftgiver. For Christians reflecting on this topic, the gift-giver is God. As Oliver O’Donovan has argued, children are ‘‘begotten not made.’’ ‘‘Begotten’’ implies that they are given and that there is a giver. When children are viewed as a gift, the argument goes, one is more disposed to treat them as subjects worthy of full consideration.32 The metaphor of gift also draws attention to the fact that although humans produce children through sexual intercourse, God is ultimately in control, choosing when and if to bless humans with progeny. Fertility interventions, by introducing third parties into the activity, appear to deny God this ultimate creative power, or at least lead to humans believing that they are acting independently of God’s creative activity. The notion that life (and hence fertility) is a gift from God is the very essence of Christian thought about moral issues surrounding reproductive technology. There is little disagreement about that notion. The disagreements emerge when one tries to understand what it means to say that life is a gift from God and when one tries to define how the human ought to respond to the gift. Does it mean that the extent of human involvement in procreation is the act of sexual intercourse? And that the consequences of that intercourse cannot be manipulated in any way without somehow interfering in God’s gift-giving activity? Or does it mean that all children born are a gift from God, regardless of how they are conceived? In this view, humans can participate with God using their talents (through science, medicine, and technology) to assist in the creation of new life. One central Catholic document, Donum Vitae, states that ‘‘In reality, the origin of a human person is the result of an act of giving. The one conceived must be the fruit of his parents’ love. He cannot be desired or conceived as the product of an intervention of medical or biological techniques; that would be equivalent to reducing him to an object of scientific technology.’’33 This passage is intriguing because it presents the parents as the ones involved in the act of giving. Their gift, however, is not the child, but rather their love to one another. The sexual act expresses this ‘‘giving’’ in a way that protects the dignity of the child to be conceived. In other words, if the parents were to give their love to each other through using reproductive assistance to reproduce, the child becomes a product in their eyes, no longer a subject. Gilbert Meilaender, a Lutheran theologian, pursues this same line of thinking when he claims that the only way for humans to avoid the

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temptation to view a child as an entitlement is to understand that the ‘‘life-giving’’ act must be part of a married couple’s ‘‘love-giving.’’ Couples who want a child must put the desire aside in the act of love-making. Meilaender does not mean that couples should not desire a child, but rather that their goal ought to be ‘‘giving themselves in love’’ to one another. He writes, ‘‘And the child, if a child is conceived, is not then the product of their willed creation. The child is a gift and a mystery, springing from their embrace. They could and should, if they think the matter through, quite rightly say that they had received their child as a gift of God. . . .’’ In his view, then, infertility, ‘‘is reason for sadness, but it is not reason to take up the ÔprojectÕ of making a child.’’34 Meilaender’s point seems a bit counterintuitive, since most married couples would probably understand their act of love-giving and their desire to have a child as inseparable. What is clear for both the Vatican authors and Meilaender is that the role of parents in procreation is to give their love to one another through sexual intercourse and to allow God to give the ultimate gift of a child. This idea of children as a gift is in contrast to modern Western conceptions of a right to have a child. Rights language, in contrast to gift language, could imply a different relationship with a child. Critics of rights language contend that the belief that one has a right to a child translates into a sense of entitlement that can diminish the child into an object to which one has a right. They also contend that rights language emerges from the Enlightenment paradigm that views each person as an autonomous individual who is defined more by what she can claim a right to than by her relationship to others. This amounts to a matter of ownership. In the Christian view, children belong to God, not to parents. They are not objects of ownership or domination; they possess inherent dignity that must be protected and valued. Here is how the Vatican expresses this concern about rights to a child. ‘‘Marriage does not confer upon the spouses the right to have a child, but only the right to perform those natural acts which are per se ordered to procreation. A true and proper right to a child would be contrary to the child’s dignity and nature. The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered an object of ownership. . . .’’35 The Vatican draws a distinction between the right to engage in acts that have procreation as their goal and the right to the outcome of those acts. This would be equivalent to saying that you have the right to buy a lottery ticket, but you cannot claim a right to the prize. The important passage is that the spouses have ‘‘the right to perform those natural acts which are per se ordered to procreation.’’ The use of the word natural implies that assisted conception is unnatural. For the Vatican authors, this would be because it severs the inseparable meanings (procreative and unitive) of the conjugal act. Meilaender illustrates the two paradigms of ‘‘choice’’ and ‘‘gift’’ by relating each to a narrative. The choice paradigm is part of a story that society-in-general tells about having children and the gift paradigm is an element of a Christian story about marriage, sex, and children. The driving plot of the ‘‘choice’’ story is how we can help couples fulfill their legitimate

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desire to have children. This desire (which is not a bad thing) is, unfortunately, seen more-and-more by our society as an entitlement. Consequently, the argument for the use of assisted reproduction is that ‘‘if the suffering of infertility can be relieved, and if children are not harmed, then high-tech reproductive medicine is a good thing.’’36 By contrast, the Christian narrative focuses on reminding married couples of their appropriate role in the conception of a child; it ‘‘is not the product of their willed creation.’’37 The couple does not produce the child to satisfy their desires. According to the Christian story, ‘‘children are not our possession.’’ Rather, they are ‘‘the sign that, by God’s continual blessing, self-giving love is creative and fruitful.’’38 When the Christian sees a child as a the result of his will, then he forgets that it is only God who can will a child. These two metaphors are not in complete opposition. It would not be unreasonable to think of a child as both a choice and a gift. One might choose to have a child and still understand that child as a gift from God. Adoption would serve as an excellent example of the convergence of gift and choice language. Furthermore, simply because something is a gift does not necessarily mean that it is treated respectfully. The contrast between the implication of a gift exchange and a chosen economic exchange is not so clear cut. An alternative way to think about the role of the gift metaphor in the discussion of the ethics of reproductive technology is to shift the metaphor so that the gift refers to fertility rather than to the child. The late Methodist theologian Georgia Harkness states, ‘‘Fertility, like continence, is the gift of God.’’39 If fertility is the gift, then one might ask, ‘‘What about infertility?’’ Again we see that the way one characterizes infertility influences one’s moral arguments about reproductive technologies.

HUMANS AS STEWARDS OF NATURE VERSUS DOMINATORS OVER NATURE In Donum Vitae, the authors describe the concern about humans usurping powers that are not rightfully theirs. They write: Various procedures now make it possible to intervene not only to assist but also to dominate the processes of procreation. These techniques can enable man to ‘‘take in hand his own destiny,’’ but they also expose him ‘‘to the temptation to go beyond the limits of a reasonable dominion over nature.’’ They might constitute progress in the service of man, but they also involve serious risks.40

The important distinction to note in this excerpt is that between assisting procreation and dominating procreation. The domination is described in terms of ‘‘the temptation to go beyond the limits of a reasonable dominion over nature.’’ The attitude to which the Vatican is responding is expressed by prominent proponents of the right to use reproductive technologies. John Robertson writes, ‘‘The decision to have or not to have children is, at some important level, no longer a matter of God or nature, but has

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been made subject to human will and technical expertise.’’ Robertson’s not-so-subtle implication is that God has been removed from the equation. He goes on to write, ‘‘It has become a matter of choice whether persons reproduce now or later, whether they overcome infertility, whether their children have certain genetic characteristics, or whether they use their reproductive capacity to produce tissue for transplant or embryos and fetuses for research.’’41 Robertson’s words echo the Vatican’s sense that these technologies are enabling humans to take their own destinies in hand. But is it clear that these technologies go ‘‘beyond the limits of a reasonable dominion’’? Aaron Mackler, writing about IVF in Jewish ethics, asks this same question. In the Jewish tradition does the birth of a child make humans ‘‘partners in a relationship of responsible stewardship calling for both initiative and reverence’’? Assisted reproduction that is now readily available to so many couples presses us to question ‘‘the terms of the partnership and its implications.’’ More specifically, Mackler asks, ‘‘When would it represent the hubris of playing God, threatening the exploitation of persons and dangers for humankind?’’42 The important issue, then, is one about the limits of human partnership with God. Meilaender poses the question about limits in terms, not of what we can do, but of what we ought to do. He writes, ‘‘Are there projects we are able to undertake, projects that might even in some sense accomplish good, which, nevertheless, we ought not endorse? Are there circumstances in which we should not use our freedom to bypass, override, or reshape the ÔgivensÕ of our nature?’’43 This question about human limitation and finitude is a central theological question for Christians. In the context of reproductive medicine, one must ask where to draw the line about which givens can be overridden and reshaped and which cannot. One helpful place to look for clarification of these questions about human dominion and stewardship is James Gustafson’s typology of the relationship of humans to God and to nature. This typology was designed to apply to environmental ethics, but it can certainly be applied to the issues of concern in this chapter. Gustafson’s typology includes the dominion model. He places it between despotism on one side and stewardship on the other. Although despotism has never been fully endorsed in the Christian tradition, according to Gustafson, there have been tendencies in that direction. Despotism is based on the attitude that humans function as God, mainly because humans see themselves as totally self-sufficient. ‘‘It does not take seriously human finitude, our limits of knowledge, foreknowledge, and power to control all outcomes of human actions.’’44 While one can certainly see prominent examples of this view in regards to reproductive technology, the more common position is really one of stewardship and partnership. The language of stewardship is more often associated with environmental ethics than it is with reproductive ethics. Gustafson identifies it as one of five models of the relationship between humans and nature. He defines the steward as ‘‘a caretaker of what he or she does not own. The caretaker is responsible to God who is the ÔownerÕ or giver of life as gift.’’ Gustafson

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refers to Karl Barth’s theology of life as a gift as an example in twentiethcentury Protestant theology of this approach to life. In Gustafson’s view, the stewardship metaphor of life as a gift requires humans to ‘‘be thankful for it, but also entails obligations to care for the gift, to respect and not to treat it wantonly.’’45 Mackler also highlights the centrality of the responsibility of human stewardship in Jewish ethics. He defines the concept tikkun haolam as ‘‘reverent but active partnership with God in completing the works of creation and improving the world.’’46 Thus, if one understands the human capacity to procreate as the gift, rather than viewing only the child as the gift, then the obligation that humans have to God is to treat this capacity respectfully. On this model, the question is less about the status of the child who results from fertility intervention, and more about what every process says about how humans are treating their procreative capacities. Are they being disrespectful and wanton? A constant theme of this chapter has been the inevitability of reproductive technologies. What seemed like futuristic fantasies several decades ago have become realities. One might ask, then, what the role of the perspectives of faith communities is to be in the future. Talk of a resurgence of the Christian Right on issues such as the morality of abortion and homosexuality might lead one to think that the religious voice is vibrant on issues related to ARTs. Yet it appears to be the case that the Christian voice remains directed to the matter of abortion and to new procedures such as cloning and stem cell research. Nevertheless, the conflicting paradigms outlined above (children as given vs. children as chosen; and humans as stewards of procreation vs. dominators over procreation) suggest that for many Christians, these technologies touch the very core of Christian beliefs about the relationship between God and humans.

NOTES 1. See Marcia Inhorn, Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2003), for an interesting look at an international perspective. 2. Literature on the Eastern Orthodox position is limited. See New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Analysis and Recommendations for Public Policy (April 1998): 107, for a basic summation of the Orthodox view. 3. The term is taken from the title of John F. Kilner, Paige C. Cunningham, and W. David Hager, eds., The Reproduction Revolution: A Christian Appraisal of Sexuality, Reproductive Technologies, and the Family (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). 4. See John Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) for a thorough study of Christian attitudes and practices. 5. Janet Dolgin, Defining the Family: Law, Technology, and Reproduction in an Uneasy Age (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 40–41. 6. Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Boston: St. Paul’s Books and Media, 1968), par. 11.

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7. Ibid., par. 17. 8. See Robert Kaiser, The Politics of Sex and Religion: A Case History in the Development of Doctrine, 1962–1984 (Kansas City: Leaven Press, 1985); and Robert McClory, Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission and How Humanae Vitae Changed the Life of Patty Crowley and the Future of the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1995), for more about the politics and aftermath of the letter. 9. ‘‘Statement by Catholic Theologians, Washington, D.C., July 30, 1968,’’ in Dialogue About Catholic Sexual Teaching, ed. Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 135. 10. Brenda Margaret Appleby, Responsible Parenthood: Decriminalizing Contraception in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 141. Appleby presents an excellent review of Protestant doctrines on the issue since 1880. 11. Excerpt taken from Biomedical Ethics, ed. Thomas A. Mappes and David Degrazia, 6th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2006), 484. 12. For a prominent example of this view, see Thomas Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Note that the authors have revised this book numerous times in response to various critics; it was in a fifth edition by 2002. 13. For criticisms of the autonomy-centered position, see Ann Donchin, ‘‘Understanding Autonomy Relationally: Toward a Reconfiguration of Bioethical Principles,’’ Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 26, 4 (August 2001): 365–86. 14. Maura A. Ryan, The Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction: The Cost of Longing (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001), 100. 15. Dolgin, 86. The description of this case, as well as Davis v. Davis, are taken from Dolgin’s account. 16. Ibid., 92. 17. Ibid., 160. 18. Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Donum Vitae (Rome: Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, 1987), part II, par. 6. 19. Thomas A. Shannon and Lisa Sowle Cahill, Religion and Artificial Reproduction: An Inquiry into the Vatican ‘‘Instruction on Respect for Human Life’’ (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 15. 20. Lori B. Andrews, The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 67. 21. Ian Wilmot et al., ‘‘Viable Offspring Derived from Fetal and Adult Mammalian Cells,’’ Nature 385 (1997): 810–13. 22. Roger L. Shinn, ‘‘Between Eden and Babel,’’ in Human Cloning: Religious Responses, ed. Ronald Cole-Turner (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 113. 23. Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance—United States, 2002, www. cdc.gov/reproductive/health/, accessed November 26, 2005. 24. New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, 11. A 1995 study attempted to quantify the incidence of infertility in the United States. It found that 7.1 percent of married couples with wives of child-bearing age were infertile. This percentage was an apparent decrease from that found in a 1965 study that indicated an 11.2 percent rate. The 1995 study also found that infertility was 1.5 times more prevalent among non-Hispanic black women than among non-Hispanic white women (11). 25. Donum Vitae, part II, par. 7. 26. Ibid., part II, par. 8. 27. Ryan, 68.

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28. Ibid., 71. 29. Aaron Mackler, ‘‘An Expanded Partnership with God? In Vitro Fertilization in Jewish Ethics,’’ Journal of Religious Ethics 25, 2 (Fall 1997): 279. Mackler’s discussion of the origins and interpretation of this mitzvah concludes that ‘‘those unable to have children are exempt from the obligation’’ (279). 30. See John A. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Karen PetersonIyer writes that ‘‘procreation has become a genuine choice’’ in Designer Children: Reconciling Genetic Technology, Feminism, and Christian Faith (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2004), 1. 31. www.babycenter.com/refcap/preconception/fertilityproblems/4094.html, accessed November 26, 2005. 32. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 33. Donum Vitae, part I, par. 5. 34. Gilbert Meilaender, ‘‘A Child of One’s Own: At What Price?’’ in Kilner et al., eds., 41–42. 35. Donum Vitae, part II, par. 8. 36. Meilaender, 39. 37. Ibid., 41. 38. Ibid., 42. 39. Quoted in Peterson-Iyer, 112. 40. Donum Vitae, intro., par. 1 41. Robertson, 5. 42. Mackler, 277. 43. Meilaender, 36. 44. James Gustafson, A Sense of the Divine: The Natural Environment from a Theocentric Perspective (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1994), 86. 45. Ibid., 92. 46. Mackler, 280.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Donum Vitae. Rome: The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, 1987. Kilner, John F., Paige C. Cunningham, and W. David Hager, eds. The Reproduction Revolution: A Christian Appraisal of Sexuality, Reproductive Technologies, and the Family. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. Peterson-Iyer, Karen. Designer Children: Reconciling Genetic Technology, Feminism, and Christian Faith. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2004. Robertson, John A. Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Ryan, Maura A. The Ethics of and Economics of Assisted Reproduction: The Cost of Longing. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 10

This Mortal Coil: Mortality, Morality, and Stem Cells David H. Smith

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ometimes the smallest things trigger the largest explosions. That’s true with nuclear energy, and for a decade it has been true of the United States’ debate over the use of human stem cells in research. Religious communities have participated in this debate, and it presents issues that will confront them well into the twenty-first century. I want to address three dimensions of the problem in this chapter. The most widely known is moral and relates to our responsibility to and for stem cells and their use. This is the most widely debated dimension of the problem and the aspect on which the religious communities have often taken stands. It is important, but perhaps less important, than the other two components of the stem cell argument that I will discuss. The first of these is political. The stem cell debate reflects deep cleavages in American politics and civil society about our expectations of the body politic generally and government in particular. The debate between liberals and their critics comes up in a distinctive way. And beyond this political level there is a religious dimension to the argument, or so I shall contend. Ultimately I think the heat of the stem cell debates reveals an impoverishment of American religious life, a public sensibility in which religion to be taken seriously must take stands more crisp and clear than the facts warrant. Although my main concern is elsewhere, it is important to begin with a quick survey of the relevant science. Stem cells differ from most cells; their distinguishing feature concerns their fate in cell division—they are ‘‘pluripotent’’ which means that, unlike most of our cells, they can be targeted to become several different kinds of cell. They can be directed to become almost anything (except gametes). Thus they could be used to generate specific kinds of tissue—neurological, renal, or whatever. An important,

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but not the only possible, source of stem cells is the early human embryo at the earliest stages of development. The inner cells of those blastocysts are stem cells. Thus the stem cell discussion is tied into debates about the status of early embryos. Embryos left over from in vitro fertilization (IVF) are the least controversial source. Once removed from an embryo, or some other source, stem cells can be cultured so they will replicate. The result is a stem cell line or set (small or large) of stem cells that are genetically identical. Some of those cells might be separated out and directed to develop in one way, while another group might be channeled in a completely different direction: one to heart cells and another to liver cells, for example.

MORALITY AND THE STEM CELL CONTROVERSY With this in mind I will turn to the most discussed component of the stem cell issue. It has to do with the status of the embryos from which the stem cells may be derived. The arguments fall into two camps: Some contend that from the moment that sperm and egg are combined the resulting life has the same status as all other human beings. Therefore they regard an assault on the earliest embryo as morally equivalent to the murder of one of the most helpless and innocent human beings. In itself this need not mean opposition to any and all stem cell research, but it does mean that use of embryonic stem cells should be forbidden, indeed outlawed as something like murder. In contrast many scientists and others contend that the embryo in its first two weeks of development—two weeks’ gestation is long after the point at which an embryo might be sacrificed for stem cells—is really a different kind of thing than human beings who are clearly members of the human community. They note the high rate of death of fertilized eggs in nature, and the fact that early embryos may combine with each other or divide yielding identical twins, triplets, or other multiple births. Embryonic cells do not begin to differentiate into specific kinds of tissue, such as neurological or circulatory, until after the stage of development at which the embryo would be used as a stem cell source. They conclude that although the embryo is clearly human tissue and life, it is so different from us as to fall into an altogether different moral category. When its interest is weighed into the balance against the possible improvements of the human prospect that the research might yield, the result is a ‘‘no-brainer.’’ Full speed ahead, regulated only as may be necessary to protect the rights of existing citizens. Some researchers add to this an argument that asking them to limit their research projects on moral grounds is, in principle, illegitimate, but that claim seems so clearly specious as not to require serious rebuttal. Few thoughtful researchers will deny the importance of an informed consent requirement for at least some research on human subjects; others will argue that research may be immoral because of an intolerably high riskbenefit ratio or because one particularly vulnerable group is to be exploited for the sake of the powerful. In all these cases research is confined on

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moral grounds. What is unique to the stem cell case is not the appeal to morality, but the appeal to a particular moral claim that researchers find incredible. I contend that both these camps have made a moral mistake: They have claimed moral certainty of a kind that the situation does not warrant. The fact is that the data do not allow us definitively to say what the early embryo is, morally speaking. Either claim, that it is a human being with the same status as the rest of us or that it certainly is not and that it is best understood as a tissue resource, must gloss over data that point in the other direction. On the one hand the earliest embryo lacks all the capabilities that we associate with persons who are bearers of rights; on the other hand the embryo has the unique chromosome count of an individual human being and its existence as an individual life is indisputable. Therefore it is a relatively new metaphysical puzzle, a relatively new moral question, made more difficult by our improved knowledge of genetics and embryology. Thoughtful and conscientious persons do and will disagree about it. Although we, as a community, are in doubt about the moral status of human embryos, we are clear about what they are not: children, gametes, or ordinary human tissue. The trouble is that all these negatives do not add up to a positive; there is room for good faith debate about what to do in situations of doubt, but pretending moral certainty is not one of those ways. Too often there is an inverse correlation between the strength of an argument and the passion with which it is expressed. Two crisp responses to situations of moral doubt or epistemic uncertainty are possible: In the first we would say that since murder may be at stake, we should respond to the situation of uncertainty by taking the morally safest course—that is, treating the earliest embryo as if it were a person. In the second we would claim that when there is no moral certainty, the result is moral indifference. If we don’t know for sure, anything goes: no restrictions on the creation or uses of early embryos. These are morally inadequate responses to real doubt because we do know some things of moral relevance. We know many properties and prospects that human beings have that the earliest embryo does not; we also know what the embryo may grow into and its genetic distinctiveness. Really taking doubt seriously means wrestling with those facts in the most responsible possible way. There is surely room for more than one way of winning this ethical match. I’ll comment on the way I think it is best resolved in the last part of this chapter.

THE POLITICAL DIMENSION This leads to a second dimension of the stem cell debate. This dimension isn’t unique to the stem cell controversy; it relates to our increasing power to control nature and perhaps to design people. Stem cell research provides yet another kind of tool we can use in our attempt to modify and improve human life. The other tools include reproductive cloning, genetic engineering, and genetic testing of gametes and embryos. Cloning, discussed

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at length elsewhere in this volume, provides a helpful example for my purposes. Serious participants in the cloning debate make terminological distinctions. One that has gained some currency is between reproductive cloning, which virtually everyone now professes to oppose, and therapeutic cloning, which is using the cloning procedure to produce early embryos that no one ever intends to use for reproductive purposes, only for research and then hopefully for therapy. Some say that the main problem with reproductive cloning is that it is risky. There were hundreds of attempts to clone sheep before the successful cloning of Dolly; Dolly herself was not particularly healthy and lived a short life. Others say that reproductive cloning crosses a more intrinsic line. It makes reproduction a unisexual or asexual act. The effect is to challenge an implicit assumption that novelty and genetic change are essential to moral reproduction, that the morally sound continuation of human species life requires mingling oneself with another. Thus reproductive cloning is—or should be—repugnant. Accepting it is not exactly tolerating injustice, but it is tolerating a departure from another value of comparable importance to us, albeit one never tested before. The value is that generating new life is a social act; it should be the result of a loving decision by two people, not something one does on his or her own. This value was never controverted before because we couldn’t imagine an alternative, never could test it. Both sides can agree on a ban on reproductive cloning, but for different reasons. If the risks were removed the first side would favor it and the second would not. Moreover, it is widely assumed (rightly or not) that the technical ability to do research cloning will enable reproductive cloning. It will be hard to put a firewall between them, although Canada has legislated a ten-year prison sentence for anyone attempting reproductive cloning. Worries about the inability to build a firewall have led the second camp to oppose even research cloning because it opens the door to reproductive cloning. This debate illustrates a recurring contrast between two schools of thought about the relationship between ethics and public policy, a debate played out again in the stem cell controversy. One view, that I will call the freedom/procedure theory (FP), holds that the two should be crisply divided largely because of the value of pluralism of our democracy. ‘‘When the Gods are silent, or their voices ambiguous, procedures are necessary.’’1 In the controversies over cloning and the use of stem cells FP theorists argue that public policy should give priority to freedom of inquiry in research and reproductive freedom. We must acknowledge an irreducible plurality of conceptions of what is good for people and human flourishing. Thus for the FP moralists the burden of proof is on a decision to restrict freedom. The other theory holds that ethics and policy should be related in a more organic way: that despite our pluralism there is a fragmentary and partial—if often implicit—consensus about a set of values for which we must stand. These might include a commitment to protect human life,

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recognition of the importance of attending to the needs of the poor, a commitment to public health and education. We have shared commitments that extend beyond freedom, a commitment to some substantive, not just a procedural, concept of justice. I will call this the community/ substance theory (CS). For these writers the separation of ethics and politics is less radical. The community has to stand for something besides freedom. The various values start out on all fours; nothing is trump; there is no clear locus of the burden of proof. The Clinton-appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) took a rather centrist version of a FP theory.2 They began by assuming that scientific and reproductive freedom must be respected and then asked if there are circumstances under which they might be restricted. Their answer was ‘‘yes.’’ They concluded that these freedoms must, at least for now, be limited by our commitment to respect the early human embryo, but in their rationale the category of risk was decisive. Moreover, they made no crisp distinction between derivation and use of stem cells. Derivation in itself need not be morally problematic, but NBAC recommended restrictions on the procedures through which embryos were obtained. Those restrictions concentrated on assuring the free and informed consent of those who commissioned the creation of the embryos. Only very limited attempts to generalize about the meanings of parenthood or reproduction are to be found in the NBAC rationale. Thus it is an FP theory, albeit one in which the force of our investment in moral values other than freedom and procedure is acknowledged. President Clinton himself was more cautious—perhaps on principle, perhaps from political calculation. He allowed federal funding for the use of stem cells derived from embryos by other countries or the private sector, if safeguards such as those specified by NBAC were in place, but no federal funding for derivation. Federal funding must not, he seems to have argued, make the public purse and power complicit in the possible murder of early human life. Whether self-consciously or not this seems like a form of CS theory in which the public responsibility is defined more broadly than by NBAC. In contrast, George W. Bush’s President’s Council has held a more expansive and fleshed out form of CS theory.3 Their version of the theory includes several claims: The first of these is that embryos should be seen as a form of life entitled to a distinctive kind of respect by the public. A second is that the ‘‘design’’ of children, through one or another of the new technologies for reproduction, will dehumanize reproduction and convert ‘‘begetting’’ into ‘‘manufacture.’’ It will ‘‘commodify’’ children and lessen our already-diminishing willingness to accept children, with all their limits, for what they are. Therefore, they argue, if we must choose between the values of developing new cures for disease and being fair to and caring for each other, the latter values are more central to our lives together. It is good for us to conquer disease, but it is a ‘‘gratuitous good.’’4 Given this reading of the community’s values, it would seem that federal funding for use of stem cells derived from human embryos had to be opposed because it entails the sacrifice of innocent human beings and, in

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its use of ‘‘research cloning’’ a threat to forms of human community that are constitutive of who we understand ourselves to be. Unless we can be sure that we are not breaking or threatening those values, rules, or principles, we should proceed only with the greatest caution. In fact, however, the PC report on stem cell research does not draw this conclusion and only lists arguments for and against opposing positions. For my purposes, however, the important thing to see is that the two views disagree fundamentally on where the burden of proof falls. For the ‘‘freedom’’ school it is on a choice to limit; for the ‘‘community’’ school it is on a choice to risk a way of life. The first question the FP school asks is ‘‘why limit freedom of research and reproduction if we don’t have to?’’ The first question the CS theory asks is ‘‘why do we need to do this; is what it will bring us worth the material or cultural risks?’’ Often these contrasts are not as sharp as I am trying to make them. Those on the FP side are clearly concerned with risk; they are also concerned with preserving a way of life rooted in freedom. CS theorists are deeply committed to freedom; indeed these theorists may be committed to markets as adequate systems of distribution of health care services. Thus on these issues a CS perspective is more conservative than an FP one, but both perspectives somewhat depart from what one might expect. On the one hand, the FP school has not for the most part taken a consistent line and limited the moral rules to those designed to assure freedom and due process. One can imagine Frederick Hayek’s impatience with the compromises occasioned by waffling about the moral status of early embryos. Some persons out of office may have advocated the more radical perspective of treating them strictly as tissue, as have some members of commissions or councils. But no publicly responsible body has taken this rigorous line. Moreover, neither NBAC nor President Clinton proposed regulations for the private sector. On the other hand, one would expect the CS view to stand for a somewhat more expansive set of commitments than the president’s council has done. The limit of their commitments shows a conflict between their social and economic conservatism. Consistent Hayekian conservatism would move the CS theorists to the left of the FP school; but their social conservatism will not allow that. Moreover, on their own terms, their identification of the early embryo as the most vulnerable of the relevant cohorts of humankind is problematical. As William F. May has argued, dying at six days of gestational age is probably not as grave a harm as dying at three months gestation, three or thirty years of age.5 Moreover, May contends, ‘‘the element of gift in origin requires common access to benefits in knowledge and therapies.’’ If we justify these deaths, as May feels we can, we should acknowledge them to be sacrifices in which some early lives of uncertain future are taken for the good of others.6 May argues that this sacrifice cannot be justified for the sake of private profit, only for the common good. The public should take responsibility for the acts that are done, and for assuring the fair distribution of the benefits that they may bring about. In effect he suggests that the council’s CS theory may entail a too narrow commitment to the value of human life,

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and it may be insufficiently attuned to issues of justice in the larger society. Further it is striking that the president’s council seems to leave research in such areas as cloning and stem cell research unregulated in the private sector. Another form of CS theory might be equally cautious about cloning and stem cell research but more willing to talk about government regulation and problems of distribution and access to services.

THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE DEBATE The political debate over stem cell research has been like most political arguments: not a clear philosophical discussion with rigorously coherent positions on both sides. Unsurprisingly, it has been fueled by religious passion. The most obvious religious component has been the involvement of various religiously informed or sponsored groups on the ‘‘right to life’’ side of the discussion and in opposition to the use of embryonic stem cells. This however is somewhat misleading as many American Christians and Jews passionately support the use of those stem cells in research and their arguments are rooted in traditions of assistance to the sick and needy. Furthermore, on a broader and more psychologically grounded definition of religion as the key component of human identity, many ostensibly secular defenses of use of embryonic stem cells are religious, for they are rooted in commitments to freedom and progress that are foundational for the lives of those who make the arguments. Few players are altogether disengaged or disinterested in the issues. There is not much doubt that the existential religious involvement of parties on all sides of the issue has contributed to our difficulty in getting to a workable resolution. Historically, mixing the passions of religion and politics has been lethal when the two forms of engagement have not first been adequately distinguished. If one’s very identity and sense of self are at stake in a political controversy, it is hard to accept compromise. Only if someone has a spiritual or religious home beyond the political is it possible to remove the element of terror and defensiveness that infects the stem cell debate. Some philosophical perspectives, Stoicism for example, offer such a perspective. But much philosophy leaves this dimension of the moral life out of account. For religious traditions and communities, however, it is their mother tongue. Keeping this fact in mind is not always easy because many of the root metaphors in Western religion are political: covenant people, kingdom of God, and (social) body of Christ. Religion in the West has often been understood as a special kind of citizenship, and that citizenship is much more terrestrial than is often acknowledged. Still, it is an unusual kind of citizenship in which the Sovereign (or Mother, or Pure Act) is no ordinary ruler. However God may be understood, He is distinguishable from human individuals and provides individuals and communities with something they cannot provide themselves. More specifically, the reality of God makes possible a relationship in which humans see themselves as partners and acquire a sense of direction or priorities. It is not always a comforting relationship, but it does put other

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relationships in a different perspective. In the Christian branch of the Western attempt to live with God, the core of the perspective is recognition of a power or source that can be trusted despite the inevitability of death, and a commitment to be loving, loyal, and fair with other people. The most basic thing that a Christian gets out of being religious is a set of attitudes. First, despite realism about human motivations and recognition of mortality, a glimmer of trust in God is not obliterated. Distrust and cynicism are never the last word. Second, a serious Christian is unable to be indifferent to the fate of others. I simply assume that parallel observations could be made about Islam, Judaism, and other religious traditions. These attitudes must be translated into sets of political priorities and there may well be more than one good translation at any historical juncture. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is politically impotent; it does mean that any serious Christian thinker must acknowledge the transcendence of God over her causes and recognize that she may be mistaken. The effect is to defuse the religious time-bomb in political debate, including the stem cell debate. Obviously things may not work out this way. Religious communities, as other groups in civil society, come to collective conclusions then lobby for them. Because they are religious communities these political involvements may feel to those who are not members of the community as dogmatic and undemocratic, a violation of the relationship between church and state. It can make it difficult for a religious community to play the role of honest broker or reconciler in the debate. Actual religious communities have at best an uneven track record at serving as agents of political reconciliation, although in the civil rights era many of them did a commendable job of simultaneously taking a stand and ministering to those on all sides. This was no easy task; in the current stem cell debate the experience is often just the reverse. What should we do about that? One school of thought urges expunging religious language and communities from the debate, precisely because religious language and passion complicate attempts to work out sound social policy. This is, to say the least, an understandable response. Yet it is historically naı¨ve, for there is no evidence at all that religion is losing its power in the early twenty-first century. To the contrary, a large fraction of the world’s peoples take religion very seriously, and telling them that it should play no part in their social and political arguments is bound to fail—as fail it should. It is better, I think, to do whatever one can to revitalize the intellectual component of religious communities so that they are able to play a part that no political group or movement can play. Briefly put, behind the political questions and fueling them are religious or theological questions. The debates over stem cell research or the status of human embryos challenge ways of life built on ideals of independence, invented community, fated community or tradition—or some combination of these starting points. FP arguments challenge one group; CS arguments another. None of these ways of life is scored or arranged in a self-consciously rational way. Ways of life, however, is what religions are all about. Insofar as these debates challenge who we understand ourselves to be, they

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have a religious component and the inflexible polarization in public bioethics debates reflects a religious crisis, a crisis of people seeking to defend their ways of life in a world of rapid change.

EVALUATING THE ARGUMENTS I conclude, first, by suggesting that the distinctive contribution of religious communities to the stem cell debate should not be in the novelty or force of their substantive stands but in sustaining themselves as communities of reconciliation and moral discussion. The debate over stem cells, as that over many of the new biological powers and technologies, is threatening to habits, ways of life, and assumptions around which we have built our lives. The threat may come because possible abuses of the new powers will diminish human life, or because attempts to secure what seems most important in human life restrict our faith in constant medical progress or independence. These are threats to our identities, to our very lives, but we have to live our lives in the face of these threats, in the face of death. No religious community should lose sight of the fact that if it does not address this issue of grounding a life, few if any other institutions will. Ironically, perhaps, that means for me that our religious communities may help best by preserving and nurturing ritual traditions that can sustain persons as they cope with intellectual challenge, threat, and change. I don’t mean feel-good ritual that glosses over the realities of death, destruction, and disappointment. I mean vital ritual that helps us shape our response and gives us strength to think clearly. However, we will never end anxiety, and religious communities rightly enter into public discussion about policy. Two comments about how they should enter are coherent with what I have so far observed. Negatively they should challenge the absolutists on both sides—members of the Abrahamic traditions may call them idolators. They should insist that in the face of uncertainty about what embryos are our best responses are not pretending they are persons or ordinary tissue. Religious communities should stand for civil dialogue and disagreement, for listening and compromise, for intellectual humility and honesty. More positively they might propose either of two lines of reasoning, each of which is a consistent working out of what to do in situations of doubt. Both views assume that because this really is a situation of doubt we can agree that early embryos do not have all the rights of full persons. Taking the fact of doubt seriously must mean that we can do something to or with them that we should not do to an adult human being. There will be good faith disagreements about just what those things are, but there must be something. Moreover, use of these embryos, with necessary safeguards, can have no possible significance for them. Although we owe them some level of respect, they have no value for themselves. Unless we want to press for a general social duty to implant them, the options open to them are no better for them than what we will be doing. Thus it is just, even loving, to think about their fate and possible uses.

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One line of reasoning focuses on the intentions and meaning associated with creation of the embryos. Embryos created as part of the IVF process were engendered in good faith with the objective of reproduction. Parents and professionals knew that some, perhaps most, of these embryos would not become children. But that is the fate of most embryos engendered in vivo as well. For a variety of reasons, many of the IVF embryos may never be used. It seems clear that parents should have the liberty to refuse to parent some of them, and to use them for the advancement of human life in other ways. However, on these terms, we would draw the line at creating a possible human being with no other thought in mind than to kill it for someone else. I use the word ‘‘possible’’ with some care. As scholars have pointed out, possible and potential have different connotations. The writer of this chapter is a possible president of the United States: He meets the constitutional qualifications. But the chances of his election are so infinitesimal as to make the possibility a joke. I am not a potential president of the United States in the way that many public figures are. Using this distinction, the earliest embryo is more like a possible human being than it is a potential human being.7 The upshot of this argument is to justify uses of stem cells derived from embryos left over from IVF, but to oppose the creation of embryos only in order to make them stem cell donors. A more liberal argument might go something like this: If we concede that the embryos may sometimes be sacrificed for some greater good, why denigrate the intentionality of persons who create the embryos in the service of that same good? To be sure the intentionality of these researchers is different from that of the parents and other reproductive professionals. These embryos would not be available by accident. But they would also not have been created in order to be tortured or harmed in any way, at least in part because it is difficult to apply our normal categories of torture or harm to them. They have been created strictly as a means to an end, but it is unclear that this constitutes abuse in any but the most abstract definitional sense of the term abuse. A great difficulty with this argument arises when we begin to read the intentionality of researchers with the hermeneutic of suspicion. We do not have to believe in conspiracy theories or distrust scientists as a class in order to recognize that biomedical researchers, as all human beings (including parents), have mixed motives. An intention to advance the human prospect may be as abstract and remote from the minds and behavior of the researchers as a feeling of abuse is from the earliest embryo. It would be naı¨ve to suppose that especially created stem cell lines will come from the laboratories of unusually respectful, altruistic, and loving researchers. Some way must be found publicly to preserve a sense that what is going on in this creation is truly sacrifice, that scientists or parents are making choices to sacrifice possible members of our community for the good of others. That would seem to block the exchange of embryo creation for wealth or other unrelated goods; far from being a private deal for profit the sacrifice should be a public act in the sense that it is publicly funded and regulated. Religious communities should debate the merits of these

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and other better formulations in the context of their own traditions. They should enter into public discussion to listen and learn as well as to speak; that’s a paradigm for their role in the world of the twenty-first century.

NOTES Earlier versions of this essay were presented and discussed at a meeting of the Board of the Hastings Center, at a symposium on ‘‘Matters of Life and Death’’ in conjunction with the Raymond B. Witt Perspectives lecture series at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and at DePauw and Indiana Universities. I am grateful for the feedback received on all these occasions, especially from Dr. Donald S. Klinefelter, a long-time friend in whose honor the Chattanooga symposium was held. 1. James F. Childress, Who Should Decide: Paternalism in Health Care (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 119. 2. James F. Childress, ‘‘Human Stem Cell Research: Some Controversies in Bioethics and Public Policy,’’ available at www.scoemcedorect.com/science?_ob= ArticleURL_udi=B6WBV-4B5BB82-2&_co, accessed October 28, 2005. 3. Divisions within the President’s Council have been more public and perhaps more intense than those with NBAC. Ceteris paribus this may be a good thing, given the public division over the issues, but it clearly adds a level of problematic to my generalizations. I hold nevertheless that they apply to the general direction the council has taken. 4. Hans Jonas, ‘‘Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects,’’ Daedalus 48, 2 (Spring 1969): 16–36. 5. William F. May, ‘‘The President’s Council on Bioethics: My Take on Some of Its Deliberations,’’ Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48, 2 (Spring 2005): 233–34. 6. Ibid., 235–37. 7. See Cynthia B. Cohen, ‘‘The Moral Status of Embryos and New Genetic Interventions,’’ in A Christian Response to the New Genetics, ed. David H. Smith and Cynthia B. Cohen (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2003), 122–25.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Childress, James F. ‘‘Human Stem Cell Research: Some Controversies in Bioethics and Public Policy.’’ Available at www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=Article URL_udi+B6WBV-4BB82-2&_co, accessed October 28, 2005. Childress, James F. Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Jonas, Hans. ‘‘Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects.’’ Daedalus 98, 2 (Spring 1969): 16–36. May, William F. ‘‘The President’s Council on Bioethics: My Take on Some of Its Deliberations.’’ Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48, 2 (Spring 2005): 233–37. Smith, David H., and Synthia B. Cohen, eds. A Christian Response to the New Genetics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

CHAPTER 11

Reading Foodways as Faithways in Contemporary America Corrie E. Norman

We got to feeling as the ancient . . . Abenaki must have felt in this same little cove . . . on some night like this a thousand years ago . . . as they ate their lobsters over their sprucewood coals just the way we had eaten the same Maine lobsters now. [We] merged with the tide and the soft sounds of life it made around us. . . . I shall remember it all my days. I hope I shall remember it, too, beyond even those.

Robert P. Coffin’s story about eating lobster first appeared in Gourmet in 1946. It is among those that the magazine’s current editor-in-chief, Ruth Reichl, chose for inclusion in an anthology celebrating the magazine’s sixtieth anniversary.1 While seldom written from an overtly religious perspective, these articles often relate experiences in which foodways (practices associated with food) evoke a universal connection to ancestors, nature, and the eternal. Like Coffin’s, they express faith in an order or reality ‘‘beyond even’’ our days in which we may participate through food or reading about it. Founded in 1939, Gourmet, ‘‘the magazine of good living’’ according to its caption, began as something of a statement of faith. ‘‘Just as the world was on the brink of war,’’ Reichl explains, its founder wanted to affirm ‘‘the importance of living well even in the face of disaster.’’2 Gourmet was intended to reflect a worldview: a sense of order that can be realized through good living with food. Stories like Coffin’s, written in wartime, no doubt reflected the desires of many for what scholars of religion call cosmos in the midst of chaos. Reichl’s anthology, however, may also reflect the spiritual hungers of her current readership. Today on a monthly basis, the approximately one million subscribers to Gourmet are fed a steady diet of recipes, photographs, and articles that celebrate and

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invite readers to re-create, literally or vicariously, experiences that evoke good living. Gourmet is just one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon. Since World War II, America has undergone a culinary revolution with a pronounced growth of mainstream interest in cuisine. It has accelerated in the past two decades as increasing numbers of Americans have become ‘‘foodies,’’ a more common nomenclature these days than the elitistsounding ‘‘gourmet.’’ They rely on the TV Food Network for their nightly entertainment, subscribe to multiple food magazines, and splurge at the latest ‘‘best’’ restaurants. Around two thousand new cookbooks were published in 2004 alone for the foodie reading public.3 Novels and films that focus on food have proliferated. Many serve up reminders of transcendent values and feed the spiritual as well as the physical and consumer hungers of postmodern society. Just a decade after Coffin’s essay appeared in Gourmet, Charlie Shedd, a popular spiritual writer and Presbyterian minister, told of a different kind of relationship between food and the transcendent in Pray Your Weight Away. According to R. Marie Griffith, Shedd preached ‘‘a gospel of slimness’’ that made being fat a spiritual problem to be solved with a combination of ‘‘sustained prayer, devotion to the Bible and unshakeable faith in thinness as a sign of sanctity.’’4 Pray Your Weight Away was among the first manuals of what has become a veritable movement of evangelical Christian dieting. Today, organizations such as the Weigh Down Workshop, founded by nutritionist and spiritual counselor Gwen Shamblin, have thousands of followers and reflect the overlap of several phenomena that arose at the same time as the culinary revolution: evangelical Christianity’s move into mainstream culture, the self-help movement, and the science and industry of weight loss. Eating (or not), however, is primarily an expression of faith for evangelical Christian dieters. It reflects their understanding of self and world and how they and it should be in relation to their God. As Griffith surmises, ‘‘from Shedd to Shamblin,’’ Christian dieting ‘‘has carried with it the promise of personal purification—and, with that promise, hope of sanitizing a sinful, fallen world.’’5 Gourmet good living and Christian dieting might be viewed as opposite ends of a broad continuum of foodways that are also faithways. This chapter will provide an overview of some of the most significant of these as evidenced in food-related publications. Rather than casting ‘‘secular’’ gourmet magazines and ‘‘religious’’ Christian dieting guides as polar opposites, however, this overview underlines what they and other genres of food writing have in common as faithful expressions of what ultimately matters and how things are or should be. Much food literature, regardless of genre, expresses a faith in the sacred or ‘‘authentic’’ that individuals and the world are in desperate need of recovering. The ancestors— whether early Christians or Abenakis—knew this reality, as do those who preserve their eating traditions. It is also revealed in nature and natural food, although nature has been as seriously corrupted as human bodies, spirits, and culture. Recovery may be articulated as a restoration of

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harmony or return to paradise; or an awareness of pleasurable wholeness or well-being. It may focus on personal redemption or universal restoration and is usually depicted as a battle between good and evil or an arduous search. ‘‘Good’’ food and eating are the primary means through which the sacred is recovered or revealed. This mythos, whether articulated fully or mostly implied, is often spoken of in a fluid mix of the language of religion and the language of foodways. It appears in myriad forms that often overlap the traditional boundaries of sacred and secular and defy genre. Jewish and Christian clergy-foodies translate theological values and traditional rituals for a ‘‘secular’’ foodie public. Articles and books about Eastern religious approaches to food appear in gourmet magazines as well as in New Age health guides. Overtly religious and ostensibly secular works advocate ‘‘whole’’ living through vegetarian or raw diets. Autobiographies cast life as a spiritual journey in which food is the key to finding meaning and identity for those distanced from traditional religion by modern life. A chef’s passion for food is communicated in religious symbols as well as recipes. Reformist food manifestos, and even works of journalism, portray the world as being caught in a battle between the forces of good and bad foodways. All of these encourage the reader to adopt a way of understanding the world through adapting their understanding of food and practice of foodways. The inextricable relationship of food, religion, and worldview is illustrated in the most ubiquitous food concept in use today: fast food. Although by no means the first to use the phrase or to raise the concerns associated with it, Eric Schlosser, in his 2001 expose´ Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal, helped to secure it as a code for a ‘‘distinctly American way of viewing the world.’’ While a work of investigative reporting on the fast food industry, the book also unveils the values behind its growth: ‘‘uniformity,’’ ‘‘efficiency,’’ and a ‘‘boundless faith in science and technology.’’ These find structure in ‘‘fast’’ time and ‘‘archetypical’’ spaces such as McDonald’s restaurants, which ‘‘sell magic’’ along with hamburgers. In conclusion, Schlosser offers an alternative vision of how the world could be.6 It is similar to the vision already put forward more than a decade earlier by the Slow Food Movement, founded by Italian Carlo Petrini in protest over the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome’s historic Piazza di Spagna. The Slow Food Manifesto articulates a vision that counters the fast food worldview: Our century . . . first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed. . . . Fast life . . . forces us to eat Fast Foods. . . . Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.7

Schlosser uses the language of ‘‘faith,’’ ‘‘values,’’ and ‘‘magic’’ to articulate fast food as a worldview. The Slow Food Movement takes on the aura of a religious crusade against the forces and foods of ‘‘fast.’’ Meanwhile, philosophers and theologians from Leonard Kass in The Hungry Soul to

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Shannon Jung in Food for Life highlight religious values in the language and literature of food as well as sacred texts that might counter the fast food worldview. Kass, for example, prescribes the Jewish dietary law, Plato’s Symposium, and ‘‘Babette’s Feast’’ as antidotes for the ‘‘spiritual anorexia’’ from which modern society suffers under its ‘‘technological worldview’’ manifested in ‘‘fast food, TV dinners, and eating on the run.’’8 Although not enough research exists to venture a comprehensive explanation of the interest in food and food as expression of worldview and spirituality since World War II, several contributing factors are obvious. First, as Schlosser put it, ‘‘What we eat has changed more in the past 40 years than in the past 40,000.’’9 Convenience foods and chain restaurants, ethnic cuisines new to the United States, the green revolution that put colossal strawberries in grocery stores in December, the obesity crisis, new dietary research, and the organic movement are among the developments that have shaken the foundations of American eating and caused Americans to wonder about what they have lost as well as gained. Social change has also played its part. The attempt to understand oneself and society in the face of changing gender roles and family lifestyles, technological and scientific advancement, and globalization is evidenced in connections between foodways as expressions of identity and meaning. Religious expression has also been changing. Sociologists of religion, led by Robert Wuthnow and Wade Clark Roof, emphasize the development of secular, noninstitutional, media-informed modes of ‘‘everyday’’ spirituality that people may seek out in an expanding ‘‘spiritual marketplace.’’ This way of being religious, or spiritual as many prefer, is compatible with America’s fascination with food. Food literature’s emphasis on authenticity parallels the hunger for a ‘‘more authentic life’’ characteristic of ‘‘seeker spirituality.’’ They share nostalgia for ‘‘idealized lineages,’’ ‘‘traditional, ethnic’’ cultures, or a ‘‘dwelling place.’’ The notion that the sacred, salvation, or wholeness can be found through everyday activities like cooking and eating, permeates contemporary spirituality and food writing. Many food writers, like spiritual seekers in general, treat religions as sources of ‘‘symbols to draw upon’’ rather than as belief systems to follow strictly.10 Existential concerns characteristic of spirituality in the postmodern world can be read between the recipes. None of this would surprise theorists who have paid attention to the symbolic roles of food, although few have focused on American foodways and the sacred. One who has considered them is Mary Douglas. Although she has shown how food communicates conceptions of holiness and impurity that undergird identity and order in cultures, she has cautioned against distinguishing sacred and profane practices too rigidly. ‘‘Very little of our ritual behavior is enacted in the context of religion,’’ she observes; it is more often in the daily practices of living, such as having dinner, where meaning is expressed.11 This chapter focuses on the literature of food rather than cooking or eating per se as anthropologists like Douglas might prefer. Foodways is an enormous subject and this brief chapter cannot even cover all genres of food writing. I omit an examination of the large body of contemporary

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food-related fiction and can only begin to cite examples of food Web sites. Focusing on writing about food, however, makes much sense as an introduction to the connections between religion and food. Historians of food in America have highlighted the importance of food literature as an overlooked resource for understanding American culture.12 The few historians of American religion who have considered food have focused largely on texts. The connection between food and religion in contemporary food literature has remained largely unexamined, yet there is abundant evidence for such a link. Food literature is also a gateway to practice. Books and magazines are related to other ‘‘products’’—television shows, cookware, foods, and restaurants—that reflect the ideas and practices not only of their authors, but also of the consumer public. Finally, reading has been an important source of spiritual guidance and practice historically. Many cookbooks, food memoirs, and dietary guides provide evidence of functioning similarly to devotional literature: They relate the experience of the holy that may be imitated or enjoyed vicariously. To see the visions behind foodways that makes them faithways, literature is a good place to begin. In reading contemporary food literature as religious literature and especially in understanding how most Americans approach it, it is important to remember that America has a long history of playing actively with food, creative combinations, culinary eclecticism, and dietary paradox.13 Similar things could be said about America’s religious history as well. Especially in today’s climate of religious shopping around, it might be best to read the variety of publications that express faith through foodways as items on a large buffet from which people might pick and choose. Some may stick to one dish, most will sample a few, and on many plates several will run together. Some will eat for long-term sustenance; others want only a bite of heaven.

HISTORY AND SCHOLARSHIP Americans are mixing religion and food today in large part because they always have. To take the two examples with which I began, today’s Christian dieters and gourmets have antecedents in American history and further back in the historical traditions that have fed American culture. Although it is perhaps impossible and even unwise to claim direct influences, one can see themes expressed by Christian dieters and gourmets with regularity in America’s culinary and religious histories. In some respects, Christian dieting hearkens back to a history of Christian asceticism or bodily discipline. As Griffith has documented, religious leaders as diverse as Cotton Mather, Sylvester Graham, and Dorothy Day have appealed to early Christian fasting practices as a means by which to identify with Christ.14 American New Thought movements and a range of utopian groups connected spiritual health and physical well-being through proper diet. Currently chic vegetarian and raw diets also have antecedents in America’s religious history.15 The connection between eating well and well-being of the spirit in gourmet culture has precedent in the French and Italian humanistic traditions.

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The nineteenth-century French gourmet Brillat-Savarin’s axiom, ‘‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are,’’ is probably the most quoted phrase in contemporary food literature (and is seen at the beginning of each Iron Chef episode on the TV Food Network).16 Ironically, Brillat-Savarin intended his Physiology of Taste to be a ‘‘scientific’’ study of gastronomy, but it also appealed to a sense of cosmic order and the sacred experienced in the natural pleasure of eating well and in good company. It connected one’s sense of meaning and character to one’s taste. It is those aspects to which food writers (and television producers) have been most drawn. The connection between aesthetics and spirituality is native to America as well, however. From Jonathan Edwards to the Transcendentalists to William James and beyond, American religious leaders have underlined the connection between the transcendent and appreciation of creation’s beauty and bounty, just as others focused on limiting excesses of material enjoyment. Even in most of those traditions that stressed temperance, feasting took place as much as or more than fasting. The sacrament of Holy Communion provides a model for the Christian life lived in a fellowship of persons who eat together. And although Protestant notions of sacramentality might reduce the sense of sacred presence, they certainly did not do away with it altogether. Protestant leaders like Horace Bushnell could still advocate a sacramental model of eating in Christian homes, where ‘‘animal enjoyments’’ are ‘‘sanctified’’ in mealtime fellowship.17 Understanding the connections between food and religion today will require not only more examination of contemporary foodways and spirituality but also more attention to their historical relationships. Griffith and a few others have set an excellent example in analyzing the primary literature of religious dieting in America. Although there has been significant interest in food and religion in other areas of religious studies, scholarship in American religious studies has paid relatively little attention to foodways or the primary literature of food.18 Elsewhere, however, the body of research on food has grown remarkably over the last three decades. Anthropologists, social historians, and practitioners of cultural studies have ruminated on its significance, focusing especially on its roles as expressions of ideologies and identities. Few, however, have acknowledged the connection to religion.19 Indicative of this is the recent anthology, Food in the USA: A Reader, which brings together a representative range of the fine work done in many areas of food studies. In the introduction, editor Carole M. Counihan states that the articles show ‘‘belief and behaviors’’ about ‘‘who we are’’ and how food ‘‘establishes meaningful and affirming relationships.’’ But she never mentions religion. The word does not appear in the index. In discussing food scholarship in various disciplines, religion is omitted. Two articles about ethnic religious cultures are included, but the role of religion in the contemporary contexts is glossed over. An article on a soup kitchen in a church basement ignores any possible relation to religion or spirituality. Another on Thanksgiving acknowledges the religious rhetoric and mythos of the holiday, but interprets it as a celebration of family and national identity now devoid of religious substance.20

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Other scholars provide much insight and information for which the scholar of religion should be grateful, even when they do not focus on it. Religion in current food scholarship sometimes suffers in significant ways when it is considered, however. One tendency has been to treat religion as something relevant only to ‘‘ethnic’’ minorities rather than to the culture as a whole, paralleling the nostalgia for ethnic traditions in popular food writing. As important as ethnic studies are, one gets the sense that only in the remnants of ethnic traditions is faith (or ‘‘quaint superstition’’) expressed in foodways. Another problem is the characterization of religion as negative background history. Religion is equated with Puritanism, which, especially in food journalism and popular literature, is blamed for the dismal culinary history of America and for the extremes of food rules and diet disorders. Scholars are generally more careful, yet there is a tendency to reduce religion’s intersection with foodways to sin and guilt. Underlying these tendencies is the assumption of religion’s demise that Griffith has observed in diet histories that present a ‘‘secularization tale whereby scientific authority and consumer capitalism joined sometime in the late nineteenth century to displace religion.’’21 All these underline the need for scholars of religion to come to the feast that food studies has become in recent decades. When scholars of religion have considered food, they have tended to focus on the themes that also attract food scholars in other disciplines: dieting/fasting and food in minority communities. Studies of ethnic religion such as Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street and Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, while not focused on food, provided models for the consideration of foodways as an integral part of religious expression.22 Patricia Curran contributed a study of how foodways in two Roman Catholic convents reflect changing understandings of religious life, and a volume of essays on food in utopian communities is in preparation.23 We await, however, attention to other food-related themes and more comprehensive examinations of food and religion in America. Peter Gardella’s chapter on food in Domestic Religion provides a thoughtful if brief overview, although he focuses largely on diet and minority traditions as well. Daniel Sack has made the best attempt so far to examine food and religion in the mainstream, documenting how a variety of foodways reflects the worldview of ‘‘whitebread Protestants.’’ As comprehensive as his work is, however, the omissions indicate just how dauntingly large and complex this subject is.24 The religious functions of foodways in America beyond the bounds of overtly religious contexts have only begun to receive attention by religion scholars. Wade Clark Roof has connected religious belief and ritual, foodways, and regionalism in examining barbecue as an expression of a distinctly Southern worldview in an exemplary and entertaining article. My own study of ‘‘foodie faith’’ in gourmet culture in is progress. Robert C. Fuller’s short but thorough study of religion and wine is, to my knowledge, one of two books by religion scholars that treat a secular food practice (drink, in this case) in America as religious. Fuller argues that ‘‘wine culture’’ is a way through which its participants ‘‘express and shape . . . [an]

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understanding of themselves and the world they live in.’’ Michelle Lelwica’s theological analysis of the religious dimensions of diet disorders among young women is the other.25

DIETING AND DIET According to the studies of Lelwica and Griffith, fighting fat takes on cosmic proportions, particularly for American women, whether they articulate it as directly related to God or not. While Griffith the historian and Lelwica the theologian have different approaches as well as different subject groups, the worldviews that they find among dieting Americans share basic similarities. Lelwica describes a worldview she calls ‘‘culture lite’’ that pervades American society, particularly the media, and affects the lives of many women and girls to dangerous physical extremes and great spiritual harm. Thinness is the ultimate expression of female worth, and dieting is the primary means to recover value or gain ‘‘salvation’’ in this ‘‘secularized theology.’’ Participants in culture lite look forward faithfully to an ‘‘apocalyptic’’ end when they will reach their desired weight and with it, ‘‘meaning and wholeness.’’ The ‘‘rituals’’ of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are just the most extreme manifestations of this dualistic worldview that requires discipline, pain, and self-denial that resonate with traditional religious asceticism.26 Although Griffith is more reluctant to judge the worldview of the evangelical Christian dieters she studies, she also describes a worldview centered on dieting as key to salvation, this time in clearly Christian terms. For Gwen Shamblin and other evangelical Christian dieters, overeating is a ‘‘misguided attempt’’ to fill ‘‘a spiritual hunger for God’’ with food. Fat is the result of falling to the devil’s temptation. Thinness is next to godliness and becomes the gauge of one’s relationship to Christ. Fighting fat through godly dieting becomes a way of practicing a worldview in which human beings participate in a battle between God and Satan and of expressing faith that ultimately they will reach the ‘‘promised land’’ of thinness and redemption.27 Both authors emphasize the gendered dimension of these diet cultures. Culture lite preaches conformity to ideals of female worth tied to physical beauty and compliance. Christian dieting guides sometimes parallel ‘‘submission to God through dieting’’ to the proper relationship of wife to husband.28 Other women, however, write about escaping patriarchal understandings of themselves that were played out in their relationships to food. An early example is Kim Chernin’s memoir of her struggle with food. It is a secular tale of redemption that begins with her realization that food communicated negative notions about her body and self-worth. It climaxes in a spiritual awakening in a cafeteria where her relationship to food is re-sacralized. A display of oranges catches her eye and evokes a vivid memory of oranges from her childhood, from before her understanding of food and self were damaged. ‘‘This early sense of wonder and delight came to me again now,’’ she writes. ‘‘I looked at the fruit as if it were the

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gift of a divine being or were itself divine. And now suddenly I realized that my hunger had vanished.’’ Chernin’s recovery centers on finding ‘‘joy and abundance’’ in food and through it reconnecting to her body and femaleness, the world, and the sacred.29 Margaret Bullitt-Jonas’s struggle with overeating, told in her book Holy Hunger, illustrates the fluidity between secular and religious ways of relating to food that appears in accounts of recovery from eating disorders. ‘‘I grew up hungry for all sorts of things—contact, intimacy, self-expression— and buried these longings in a craving for food,’’ she explains. After years of struggle with binging and purging, she found the means of liberation in Overeaters Anonymous (OA). Initiated in the late 1950s by a California woman who adapted the twelve-step model to dieting, OA is now a worldwide organization with millions of members. While declaring itself ‘‘not religious,’’ its core ‘‘traditions’’ espouse a view of the world in which God or a ‘‘higher power’’ is in charge and where aligning one’s relation to food to this cosmic order is central for well-being.30 Bullitt-Jonas eventually comes to understand her recovery as a spiritual transformation that leads to religious vocation. ‘‘Through the grace of God,’’ she writes, ‘‘I learned to stop acting on my addictive cravings and listen to my deeper desires. Recovering from compulsive overeating has made it clear to me that I was created with an infinite longing that only the infinite can satisfy.’’31 Now an Episcopal priest, she ministers to others with eating disorders. Many Americans follow diets that promise, among other benefits, to make one more attuned to the sacred and the natural order through purifying the body, and subsequently the world, of unnatural elements. Most of these ‘‘natural’’ diets are vegetarian. Vegetarianism in America has had both religious and secular origins and motivations. Contemporary vegetarian literature clearly shows the difficulty of distinguishing them. In his study of Protestant foodways, Daniel Sack relates a significant example. In 1971, Frances Moore Lappe´ published Diet for a Small Planet. As much political analysis as dietary guide, Diet put forth an alternative to the ruinous mythology of ‘‘The Great American Steak Religion’’ legitimizing consumer capitalism, starving millions, and destroying the environment. Liberal Protestants, as well as many other Americans, were captivated by Lappe´’s vision. It resonated with their understanding of the Christian worldview and mission. While calling for a return to a simpler existence, Diet provided new language and practice that liberal Protestants could combine with traditional notions of mission and virtuous living. They could adapt their lifestyles, primarily by adopting a vegetarian (or mostly vegetarian) diet. ‘‘By giving up beef and simplifying their lives,’’ Sack explained, they believed they could ‘‘feed the hungry and create a just world.’’32 Today, whether religious or secular in name, most vegetarian organizations reflect a worldview that counters an existing culture characterized by the pollution of artificial food production and meat consumption. They call for the restoration of a pure existence (for the individual and/or world) through a change in lifestyle that centers on diet. Among them are

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several Christian and Jewish vegetarian groups, generally more conservative theologically and socially than the liberal Protestants influenced by Lappe´ thirty years ago. These groups directly tie the restoration of the world through diet to biblically based imperatives. The Christian Vegetarian Association’s main goal, according to its Web site, is to follow Christ’s command ‘‘to go and make disciples’’ (Matthew 28:19). Through ‘‘vegetarian discipleship,’’ it explains, ‘‘Christians may positively impact our world for Christ, by caring for people, animals, and the environment. We believe, therefore, that encouraging plant-based diets is an effective, evangelistic witness to the gospel.’’33 Stephen Webb, in what he calls the first ‘‘modern systematic theology’’ of diet, stresses the missionary aspect when he argues the superiority of ‘‘Biblical vegetarianism’’ to secular vegetarian ideologies and lifestyle guides that he finds too idealistic. Christian ‘‘good eating’’ acknowledges the necessity for divine intervention and is a ‘‘diet of hope’’ that bears witness to faith in ‘‘God’s promise to complete history by returning the whole world to God’s original intentions.’’ Although he admits that Jesus was most likely not vegetarian, he argues that a vegetarian diet is the best way today to practice the ‘‘good eating’’ that Jesus advocated.34 Jewish vegetarians practice the imperative to keep God’s commandments through adopting a plant-based diet that they believe is more closely in line with Jewish teaching than eating meat. Keeping the kosher meat regulations, according to the Web site of Jewish Vegetarians of North America, is not enough in the modern world, where meat production and consumption violate the law’s concern for ‘‘humane treatment of animals . . . the land . . . and human health.’’35 Richard Schwartz, a mathematics professor who first published Judaism and Vegetarianism in 1982, goes further back than the law in evoking Adam and Eve, ‘‘the first vegetarians,’’ when he states that vegetarianism is ‘‘an especially Jewish imperative’’ to help restore God’s intended order in creation.36 Even though Webb and Schwartz distinguish their religious forms of vegetarianism from others, both are on the board of Earth Save, an international organization with no religious affiliation that ‘‘promotes food choices that are healthy for people and for the planet.’’37 Earth Save was started by John Robbins, author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize–nominated, Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness, and the Future of Life on Earth (1987). Robbins clearly articulates basic ideas that appear to be shared by religious and secular vegetarian groups today. In discussing his recent book, Food Revolution (2001), Robbins assesses the state of the world in strongly dualistic language: ‘‘The power of darkness in our world is great, but it is not as great as the power of the human spirit. . . . It is in our nature to honor the sacredness of life.’’38 He envisions a battle in which the dietary choices of individuals are at the center of the action: ‘‘It will be fought in courtrooms and the media, but it will also be fought in people’s minds, hearts, and kitchens. In the process, those seeking a more humane and sustainable way of life—for themselves and for our society—will be criticized and attacked by the industries that profit from activities that are harming

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people and the planet.’’ That Robbins would so strongly connect lifestyle to cosmic destiny makes sense for a number of reasons, his own background among them. Son of the founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, he tells his story as one of a choice between competing worldviews played out in lifestyle clashes. Rejecting ‘‘the path my father had envisioned and prepared for me’’ in the family business, Robbins moved ‘‘back to nature’’ to realize ‘‘a dream of a people living in accord with the natural laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it.’’39 It was a choice between good and evil, sacred and profane, modern industry and nature, and father and son, symbolized in the choice between mass-produced ice cream and a natural diet. For those who advocate raw food diets, mere vegetarianism is not enough to purify body or spirit. Raw foodism is not new, but has been revived in new forms and even become trendy in fashionable circles.40 The appeal of raw food diets is both distinctly contemporary and reflective of the mythic language of restoration and purification. Whether aiming at sectarian religious groups or spa-goers, raw foodists base their appeal in part on a way of understanding religion that they contrast with the religious status quo. Ironically perhaps, given the drastic change that raw food diets would mean for most people (as well as the regular colonic purging usually recommended to accompany them), a range of raw food advocates emphasize that letting go of stringent notions of religion is the beginning of spiritual and physical nutrition. Along with this, they express a reluctance to define diet in terms of specific rules. In the book that began the growing international movement centered on his ‘‘Hallelujah Diet,’’ Reverend George Malkmus, in Why Christians Get Sick (1989), encourages Christians to shift their focus from negative religious interpretations to ‘‘lifestyle.’’ The cosmic connection comes in the faith that through returning to the diet that God originally intended for humans in Eden, Christians will ‘‘show this old negative world something different’’ and be ‘‘the happiest and healthiest people on earth.’’ Malkmus offers ‘‘suggestions’’ in the book for how to incorporate raw food into daily living and further guidance through his ‘‘health ministers’’ on three continents and Back to the Garden, a monthly newsletter.41 For Gabriel Cousens, author of Conscious Living and founder of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center and a number of related enterprises, transformation also begins with a new understanding of the proper relationship between religion and diet as lifestyle. ‘‘Diet,’’ he writes, ‘‘if looked upon from the perspective of spiritual nutrition, is not a religion or an obsessive, misdirected search for God. It is simply part of a balanced, harmonious life. . . .’’42 Offering the ‘‘skills and inspiration to shift from the dysfunctional, artificial . . . modern paradigm,’’ Cousens invites retreatants to ‘‘awaken to the new paradigm of being open to and in touch with Life—in harmony with Nature . . . and the Self/the Divine Presence.’’43 Chefs Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis were not looking for spiritual transformation when they first encountered raw food. The authors of Raw Food/Real Food discovered, however, that raw foods not only gave one a physical ‘‘glow,’’ but also a sense of ‘‘peace with yourself and the

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world’’ and an ‘‘indescribable happiness and sense of communion.’’ They too stress that a raw food diet is not ‘‘a religion or cult and it doesn’t have to be all about sacrifice and discipline.’’ Rather, it can be incorporated ‘‘into your own lifestyle’’ through the suggestions and recipes they offer. Rules and religion for all these are replaced by lifestyle and spirituality.44

THE ‘‘ZEN’’ OF FOOD Increasing exposure to and fascination with Eastern religions that advocate or require vegetarian diets and familiarity with the vegetable-based cuisines of immigrant Americans of Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist backgrounds are having an enormous impact on food literature from healthoriented diet guides to gourmet magazines. Eastern religious elements, especially the word ‘‘Zen,’’ have become synonymous with ‘‘Slow,’’ symbols of an alternative worldview and related food practices superior to those of the West. Usually the contrast is between the ancient wisdom of the East and the modern technological West, although Rynn Berry, in his book on vegetarianism and religion, contrasts the wise and enduring culture of ‘‘Hindu India’’ with those ‘‘truculent, flesh-gorging tribes, with their patriarchal customs and their war-like gods over the centuries from Persians to the British’’ who have invaded them.45 Besides the peacefulness associated with Eastern foodways, a slower pace and heightened awareness of reality through normal activities of life are emphasized. A main theme of food literature that draws on Eastern traditions is that ‘‘mindful’’ cooking and eating lead to physical and spiritual health and wholeness for individuals and the world. How to eat well and think well about it are as or more important than what (not) to eat in literature that draws on Eastern foodways. While many food writers make casual (and sometimes inaccurate) use of Eastern traditions, serious practitioners of Buddhism have attempted to translate Buddhist teachings and foodways for the largely non-Buddhist audience that buys food-related books. Among the first was poet and Zen teacher Edward Espe Brown. Past president of the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), Brown is best known for his cookbooks, which include stories from Tassajara, the monastic training and retreat center of SFZC, as well as his poetry and recipes. His cookbooks teach awakening through picking lettuce, washing vegetables, kneading dough, and even doing the dishes.46 Brown and SFZC were pioneers in their attempts to integrate Buddhist ideas and practice into the American culinary world and mainstream home kitchens. Green Gulch, an organic farm, and Greens Restaurant are two other venues of Soto Zen practice affiliated with SFZC and are known as much for their high quality in the culinary world as for their Buddhist foundations. Along with Brown, Greens’ chef Annie Somerville and former chef/founder Deborah Madison have enjoyed success in gourmet food culture as award-winning cookbook authors.47 Another area through which Eastern dietary ideas and practice are being mainstreamed is alternative medicine. A successful endocrinologist who became a spiritual teacher and practitioner of holistic medicine, Deepak

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Chopra is now one of the most popular leaders in that field. He and his colleagues at the Chopra Center have produced dozens of best-selling guides on health and spirituality, including cookbooks that are based in ayurvedic principles. In his foreword to one of these, Chopra stresses that a transformation of attitude toward food as well as dietary practice is necessary for health. He begins with a classic Hindu idea, ‘‘Food is Brahman.’’ Translating this into a more familiar religious language for a Western audience, he states, ‘‘If we could understand this one idea—that the Absolute (spirit) transforms itself in the Relative (physical world) through its own self-sacrifice—eating would be elevated to the stature of a sacrament. . . . This is what we really need in our awareness—to make eating a celebration.’’48 The recipes that make up most of the book are also translations of Eastern dietary principles that can be practiced in American home kitchens. Hybridized versions of awareness or mindfulness are often the key themes of authors who write about food as a ‘‘spiritual path.’’ Deborah Kesten, nutritionist and former collaborator in the Dean Ornish heart study, now teaches ‘‘integrative eating’’ across the country and writes the ‘‘Enlightened Diet’’ column for Spirituality and Health magazine. ‘‘Mindfulness,’’ according to Kesten, is one of the ‘‘healing secrets of spiritual nutrition’’ that can aid us in recovering from the deadly ‘‘Puritan’’ and ‘‘food as fuel’’ mentalities that have negatively impacted our eating.49 Former Buddhist monk Donald Altman’s Art of the Inner Meal offers ‘‘spiritual ingredients’’ from all the major religious traditions to those wishing to create a ‘‘personalized inner meal path.’’ But when he discusses ‘‘surrender’’ in Islam, for example, he links it to awareness.50 Although the language of a worldview based on recovery of the ancient and sacred revelation of food is often spoken in Western dialects, increasingly it is also heard in Eastern accents. Indeed the interwovenness of Eastern and Western religious influences, as well as secular ones, is becoming hard to unravel. Altman says his ‘‘awareness’’ of the meaningfulness of food began not in his Buddhist practice but as a child at the dinner table of his Jewish family. Edward Espe Brown says he also awakened to the spiritual power of food in childhood, while reading about it. ‘‘I read about a world,’’ he said, ‘‘in which food and cooking were integral to the fabric of daily life, not something to take time out for, to get out of the way, or just to fuel up on. Food was life. Life was food.’’51 He was reading the works of M.F.K. Fisher.

FOODIE FAITH Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher began to write about food in the 1930s while living in France. Long before her death in 1992, she was known to gourmets as the literary inspiration of the culinary revolution. Sometimes she wrote of sublime experiences of humble meals eaten alone. Frequently, she wrote of the transformative power of meals generated from the passion of survivors of social upheaval or personal loss who persevered through keeping their culinary traditions as best they could, which was often

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extraordinarily well. Always she wrote of faithful acts of eating that restored an individual’s spirit and, perhaps, the human condition. In the introduction to her 1943 work, The Gastronomical Me, she gave a justification for focusing on food that resonates with foodies today as much as it does with the gastronomic philosophy of Brillat-Savarin, whom she translated for an American audience in 1949: We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity. There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger and not wars or love?52

Fisher’s writings are full of epiphanies, redemptions, and glimpses of a better world seen in kitchens and at tables, yet the subtle sacramental reference here is typical of the distance she kept from religiosity. Fisher’s father was a convert to both the Episcopal Church and the pleasures of food and drink. Her mother’s mother was an avid Campbellite who insisted that the Fisher children follow the dietary regimen of her religion. Fisher took up the example of the household cook, ‘‘mad Ora,’’ who ‘‘loved to cook the way some people love to pray.’’ At age fourteen, she and her sister petitioned their parents in writing that they might not have to attend church services any longer, arguing that they could find God better in nature and cooking the Sunday dinner.53 Her faith that the sacred is something to be found in creation and inspired cooking rather than in religious (or dietary) rule foreshadows the ‘‘spiritual not religious’’ sensibility that would develop in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and that permeates foodie literature today. Integral to that faith are two themes that run through subsequent food writing as well as Fisher’s. First, foodies express a strongly sacramental understanding of eating as ‘‘a communion of more than bodies.’’ Michael Ruhlman, author of The Soul of a Chef: Journey to Perfection says that cooking is about the ‘‘spirit of the [food] and its material elevation . . . to a state in which its [true] essences are available where they weren’t before.’’54 The sacred revealed in food is not usually called such, although contemporary food writers are much more apt to use religious language than Fisher was. The terms more often used are ‘‘perfect,’’ ‘‘real,’’ or ‘‘authentic.’’ Food literature is replete with nostalgia for ‘‘authentic’’ foodways of traditional, ‘‘slow’’ cultures that contrast sharply with modern America. Authenticity is experienced or personified in foodie narratives, but as a concept is difficult to pin down. In 2004, Saveur magazine, which carries the subtitle ‘‘Savor a world of authentic cuisine’’ on each cover, celebrated its tenth anniversary with an issue devoted to defining it. Editor-in-Chief Coleman Andrews stated that authenticity ‘‘isn’t made from recipes.’’ Grasping it is not about following a formula but about understanding the ‘‘spirit’’ of a food, ‘‘where it comes from; the people who first made it. . . .’’ Realizing that inspiration in one’s own way is the goal. According

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to Andrews, ‘‘The point isn’t whether or not a recipe can be authentic; it’s more whether we can be.’’55 As in Fisher’s story, realizing the authentic in oneself through food means stirring up memories of family and religious tradition for many foodies. This is hardly ever an easy mix. Food memoirs are among the bestselling books for foodie audiences today and gourmet magazines regularly contain articles about returning to familial, culinary, and spiritual roots. Usually, the story features a revelatory food or meal, a spiritually attune cook (often a grandmother), and a ‘‘recipe’’ for re-creating the experience in one’s own context. The main theme is a resolution of conflict among family, religion, and personal identity through food. Two examples appeared recently in postings on egullet, a popular foodie Web site. Brooks Hamaker wrote that ‘‘it has taken me many miles and many years to finally appreciate the place I was born.’’ Now he returns ‘‘anytime I want and remember the good parts’’ through the recipe book compiled by his mother and grandmother. Along with the recipes, his mother included Bible verses and religious advice that otherwise remind him of bad childhood memories of Sunday school. Mixed with food, however, religion becomes more palatable. ‘‘I am not a particularly religious guy,’’ he states, ‘‘but I have found myself looking some of these [verses] up over the years.’’ It is the ‘‘meat of the matter’’—the recipes for beloved maternal cooking—through which Hanaker finds an authentic spiritual connection, however. He translates it into a religious language with which he is more comfortable: ‘‘There is no substitute . . . [for mother’s] big Pyrex dish of Nirvana.’’56 In another post, Andy Lyne, ‘‘an agnostic,’’ tells of rejecting his Jehovah’s Witnesses background, especially its food rules. Through revisiting the food strictures of his past, however, he is able to articulate his own ‘‘religion’’ and the faith that many foodies express: I choose to worship at the church of gastronomy. . . . [I]t has no restrictions on what I can consume. I celebrate the glory of creation by eating as much of it as I possibly can, in all its varied delights. My church is broad, as are its people. . . . [T]here is room for everyone. . . . Our bible is the cookbook . . . and every recipe is a revelation. When we cook, we give praise to the Gods of nourishment, and when we eat, we commune with the eternal.57

A number of food memoirs reflect the particular dilemma of modern women who want to be themselves and yet keep faith with their mothers and grandmothers. For these professional women, whose lives are so different from those of their grandmothers, food becomes the means of connection. The subtitle of a Gourmet article sums up the common sentiment, ‘‘A World without Measurements: For one woman perfecting the spring rolls that are her grandmother’s specialty creates a communion that goes beyond words.’’58 Many stories are about recovering a spiritual authenticity that women perceive in earlier generations of female relatives and that has been lost in all the gains their generation has found. Among the most celebrated of these is Elizabeth Ehrlich’s Miriam’s Kitchen. It

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tells of a nominally religious woman’s spiritual awakening realized through following the example of her mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor who keeps a kosher kitchen and for whom life revolves around cooking and feeding according to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar.59 Told in monthly installments as Elizabeth moves progressively toward adopting Miriam’s foodways, it is a tale of retreat from a world that cannot give spiritual sustenance and return to the nourishment of women’s traditional ways of practicing faith. At the springtime celebration of Shavuot, when the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi is remembered, Elizabeth struggles with how to ‘‘read’’ the book of Ruth. Left empty by male-dominated religion, secular conceits, and feminist community, Elizabeth resolves to follow Ruth’s example and feed (or bake) her soul in Miriam’s kitchen: I cast about for a group of women that could meet to read Ruth and discuss it, but no one has time. . . . Perhaps I will go to synagogue, to hear Ruth read. I envision myself on the sidelines, among a smattering of weekday attendees, mostly retired men, listening to men read Ruth. I don’t think I can bear it, just now. . . . I don’t know, I don’t know what to do about Shavuot. I think about synagogue. I think about staying home. . . . Maybe I will go to the gym. . . . Then I think of Miriam, faithfully baking cheese danishes every Shavuot, true to her mother’s recipe, true to the calendar, true to her sense of right and duty. . . . So early the next morning . . . I leave behind my unfulfilled notions. . . . I pack up the baby and leave my home and set off for the Bronx, to make cheese danishes. Whither thou goest, I will go.60

More often, however, foodie stories are about temporary pilgrimages and moments of awareness rather than conversions that change one’s lifestyle. The March 2004 Saveur contained an article about ‘‘two women [who] savor what endures.’’ The American author writes of a ‘‘voyage of discovery’’ to her parents’ native Taiwan, where the ‘‘humble but refined’’ cuisine is ‘‘revealed’’ to her by an old family friend, Mrs. Cheng. Mrs. Cheng is the model of authenticity, ‘‘a Buddhist’’ and ‘‘a marvelous cook . . . who believes in culinary purity.’’ The author connects to her family heritage through this ‘‘pure’’ cooking, and returns to her family’s ancestral religion to voice what she witnesses. ‘‘The act of cooking,’’ she explains, ‘‘works upon Mrs. Cheng as a transformation, in the same way that, according to Buddhist belief, the most everyday activities bring the most enlightenment.’’ Across the double layout, which shows pictures of Mrs. Cheng’s beautiful food and the two women cooking together, appears a foodie (if not very Buddhist) sentiment: ‘‘Everything in her kitchen has a soul.’’61 Over the past four decades, a number of clergy-foodies have written about the connections between faith traditions and food. Marc Wilson, ‘‘Rabbi Ribeye,’’ holds forth on egullet. Along with Buddhist monastics like Brown, several Roman Catholics offered cookbooks that describe a world in which dining is sacred and at the center of communal spiritual life. These invite readers to taste this way of living by adopting the attitudes and recipes in their own kitchens.62 In Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Cafe´, Brother Peter Reinhart translates the spirituality of religious community into a setting more comfortable for foodies with

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misgivings about religion. Acknowledging that most people have given up on religion, he shows them where else they might find the sacred. ‘‘Restaurants,’’ he explains, can be ‘‘like secular churches . . . in which the latent possibility of sacramental magic always exists.’’63 Two Protestant clergy preached about the twin perils of dieting and fast food and promoted the spirituality and practice of pleasurable eating, using their home kitchens as pulpits. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Methodist minister Jeff Smith appeared on public television as ‘‘the frugal gourmet.’’ The show was accompanied by several cookbooks that reached best-seller status. Smith decried both religious and social ideologies (‘‘Puritanism’’ and ‘‘privatism’’) that spiritually starved Americans as they destroyed their foodways, and called for a return to ‘‘the communal table’’ modeled in the Bible.64 Declaring that ‘‘the hunger for affection, for community, for feasting in order to remember, cannot be satisfied by a fastfood French fry,’’ he offered ‘‘frugal’’ versions of gourmet dishes that could be recreated in middle-class family kitchens.65 Twenty years before the first Frugal Gourmet cookbook, Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon published a small book titled The Supper of the Lamb in which he articulated basic themes of foodie faith in a theologically astute way while walking readers through the preparation of a lamb dinner. It was reissued in a series of ‘‘food classics’’ edited by Ruth Reichl in 2000. In the introduction to the new edition, Deborah Madison (of SFZC’s Greens) proclaims it ‘‘the voice of Slow Food Movement (years before its birth) . . . fully capable of rescuing us from the dangers . . . foisted upon us by the too-fast pace of our lives.’’ What makes it so helpful today, as Madison explains, is the way in which Capon describes the relationship between religion, food, and life. Starting with theology, she says, ‘‘can get sticky and stodgy, with all the rules that tell us with what, how, and with whom we should take our sustenance.’’ Capon offers an alternative, according to Madison: ‘‘the long arm of theology wrap[ped] . . . around the art of living, which is fully restored within the art of cooking.’’66 The high priests and heroes of the art of cooking today, however, are not clergy or literati but professional chefs. Michael Ruhlman has written two popular books on chefs that link spiritual passion and an innate sensitivity to the sacredness of food to culinary talent. Technique and knowledge are important, but it is a mystical ‘‘passion’’ in the soul that makes the chef great. Writing about America’s current most-celebrated chef, Rulhman describes an ‘‘ultimate respect for the food and the life bound up in it,’’ in Thomas Keller’s every kitchen activity whether bringing out the ‘‘true essence’’ of a short rib or the reverence with which he cleans his kitchen.67 Famous chefs themselves are as likely to include their stories of culinary inspiration and spiritual journey as recipes in their cookbooks. Two examples suffice to show both common themes and the range of styles and temperaments. Eric Ripert is chef de cuisine at Restaurant Le Bernardin, consistently ranked New York City’s top restaurant. In 2003, he published a cookbook titled A Return to Cooking. The ‘‘return’’ refers to an irony:

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Eric, at the top of the culinary world, no longer really cooks. He’s lost what he calls ‘‘his culinary soul.’’ So he undertakes a ‘‘spiritual journey’’ of cooking, beginning by conjuring his deceased grandmother’s spirit through a simple dish she made for him when he was a child. Along the way, he faces trials, experiences ‘‘epiphanies,’’ and seeks ‘‘perfection.’’ Many a candle is lit. Buddha and Jesus are invoked as are Eric’s chef-mentors who taught him about ‘‘the sacredness of food.’’ While cooking, ‘‘at once a powerfully physical and deeply meditative process,’’ Eric says, he finds his soul again.68 At the end, he voices his profession of faith: For most of history, art had a religious motive. An artist before the Renaissance had a mission to pay homage to God. As a cook, I’m attempting to convey a message that food is sacred. I’m paying homage to God, to our mother earth, to the life force of this world. To realize this in food, I believe, is when cooking becomes art. . . . And it would be absurd to try to bring out the best of the ingredients and myself if the food isn’t to be shared and enjoyed. Those moments of sharing are a kind of religious experience for me, an actual communion. They connect us, and encourage us to nourish ourselves spiritually from the same source of energy that is created at the table. Artists are craftsmen with a spiritual message. And cooks may convey spiritual messages as well.69

A favorite foodie hero (or anti-hero) is Anthony (Tony) Bourdain, author and executive chef of Les Halles New York. After a ‘‘very nice score with an obnoxious and over-testosteroned’’ expose´ of professional cooking (Kitchen Confidential), Bourdain says he was approached by the TV Food Network to make Cook’s Tour—a kind of culinary quest-meets-Survivor show in which he travels widely ‘‘in search of the perfect meal.’’ The series was accompanied by another book by Bourdain that describes and comments on the journey.70 Dissing the hype of celebrity chefdom and yet admitting he’s ‘‘sold his soul,’’ Tony repeatedly acknowledges the contrivance of his quest. This makes it seem all the more real when he does experience what he calls ‘‘the magic.’’71 In one segment, for example, he goes to Morocco. Expecting to realize ‘‘another moment of under-informed fantasy,’’ he finds himself mystified by the sacrality of Muslim Fez. In Moroccan cuisine and calligraphy, he marvels at ‘‘repeating patterns never varying from God’s plan’’ and the ‘‘unwavering faith’’ of the artists and cooks and asks, ‘‘Why couldn’t I be that certain—about anything?’’ Moved by the authenticity of his host family at dinner, he stops the cameras, not wanting to subject them to ‘‘the automatic dumb-down’’ of TV. He spends the evening reading the Koran, ‘‘moved by its seductive . . . unquestioning absolutism’’ but eventually realizes that ‘‘however righteous and unpolluted, I could never live this way.’’72 Later, slow-roasting a fresh, ritually slaughtered lamb in the desert with Berber tribesmen, he does find the ‘‘perfect meal’’ and a spirituality that is real for him.73 Joking with the men who give him the prized delicacy— roasted lamb’s testicles—Tony ‘‘relaxes’’ into himself and becomes open

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to the cosmos. As the tribesmen sing around the fire, Tony expresses faith in the worldview revealed to him: I am the luckiest son of a bitch in the world, staring out at all that silence and stillness, feeling for the first time in a while, able to relax, to draw a breath unencumbered by scheming and calculating and worrying. I was happy just sitting there enjoying all that harsh and beautiful space. I felt comfortable in my skin, reassured that the world was indeed a big and marvelous place.74

Eric seeks the sacred in food, mixing together religious themes and language as he mixes ingredients for his dishes. Tony, more distanced from religion, also seeks and finds ‘‘the magic’’ in food that reminds him that there is something real and good in himself, the world, and even beyond. Eric’s nostalgia for a pre-modern sense of sacred mission and Tony’s postmodern cynicism are not so far apart. For both, life and spirituality can be, to use Father Capon’s words, ‘‘restored in the art of cooking.’’

FOOD AND RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA Food is at once profane and sacred, a necessity and a luxury, biological and metaphysical. . . . Food is somehow, simultaneously, both itself and more than itself.75

There is much attention in contemporary America to the ‘‘profane’’ necessity of eating—the science, technology, and economy of it. The examples discussed in this chapter remind us that people know food as ‘‘more than itself.’’ Whether expressed through lifestyles informed by rules about what (not) or how (not) to eat or the search for the perfect meal, many Americans today desire to feed on something sacred when they eat. Making meaning appears to be as necessary as making dinner. Scholars of religion in America have been slower to come to the table when it comes to the study of food than scholars in other fields. As we do, we need to bring thick description of and historical perspective on a broad range of religious expressions. Once all is laid out together on the table, we will have a full menu to chew on. Food, however, is ‘‘at once’’ many things. While emphasizing religious dimensions, we will need to be aware of others and of the permeability (and artificiality) of the boundaries we draw. We will need to make the case that paying attention to religious expression is crucial for understanding both the sacred and the profane in our society. One example more than suffices. Given that physical hunger is a reality for many Americans today, why have I found relatively little attention to it among the expressions of spiritual hunger I have surveyed? Given the burgeoning of interest in food, should we not wonder how the rhetoric and worldviews of food might relate to hunger in America? To perceptions and policies about it? These are not questions that scholars of religion alone can answer, but they are questions about which we might have something helpful to say. If food is ‘‘itself and more than itself,’’ then it should be examined integrally as much as possible. Scholars of religion

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in America should join the feast of food studies, and others should make room at the table for them.

NOTES 1. Robert P. Coffin, ‘‘Night of Lobster,’’ in Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, ed. Ruth Reichl (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 114. 2. Reichl, ix. 3. On the culinary revolution see Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford, 1993); Leslie Brenner, American Appetite: The Coming of Age of Cuisine (New York: Avon, 1999); Patric Kuh, The Last Days of Haute Cuisine (New York: Viking, 2001). See also William Rice, ‘‘A Passion for Food: Foodies Have Re-Defined the Art of Eating,’’ Chicago Tribune, June 24, 2003, http://www.freep.com/features/food/ foodie24_20030624.htm, accessed September 15, 2005; Corie Brown, ‘‘Just a Giant Rumble in the Belly: The Culinary World Shakes Its Head over the Growing Influence of Food TV,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2004, http://www.latimes.com/ features/food/la-fo-foodtv7jul07,1,3411483.story?coll=la-headlines-food, accessed July 7, 2004; and Bruce Cole, ‘‘TV Master Chef Jacques Pepin Has Gone from La Technique to Le Fast Food,’’ http://www.sautewednesday.com/archives/2005/ 02/my_interview_wi_1.html, accessed September 19, 2005. Circulation rates for food magazines are available at http://www.mdsconnect.com/topcirculation.htm, accessed September 19, 2005. 4. R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 163–64. 5. On contemporary Christian dieting groups, see ibid. chaps. 4–5; quote from ibid., 225. Shamblin’s Web site is http://www.wdworkshop.com, accessed September 19, 2005. 6. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001), 3, 5–6, 9, 20–21, 42, 50, 288. 7. From ‘‘The Slow Food Manifesto,’’ www.slowfoodusa.org/about/manifesto. html, accessed September 19, 2005. 8. Leon R. Kass, M.D., The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. 229–31. See also L. Shannon Jung, Food for Life: The Spirituality and Ethics of Eating (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004). Kass, 229–31. Isak Dinesen’s short story, ‘‘Babette’s Feast,’’ appears in Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (New York: Vintage, 1993), first published in 1958. 9. Schlosser, 7. 10. Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 10, 170, 228; and Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 138–39. 11. Douglas is the author of several important works that address the cultural meanings of food, including: Purity and Danger (1966), Natural Symbols (1973), Implicit Meanings (1975), and, on American foodways, Food in the Social Order (1984). I was reminded of Douglas here by Michelle Lelwica in Starving for Salvation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 68–69, where she quotes from Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 1991), 68–72. 12. See, for example, Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and

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Anne L. Bower, ed., Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). 13. See Harvey Levenstein and Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 14. Griffith, 4. See also her ‘‘Fasting, Dieting, and the Body in American Christianity,’’ in Perspectives on American Religion and Culture, ed. Peter W. Williams (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 216–27. 15. See Griffith’s works cited above and Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo, Vegetarian America: A History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). 16. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (Washington: Counterpoint, 1949), was first published in 1826 in France. 17. Horace Bushnell, excerpt from On Christian Nurture (1847) in Philip Greven, ed. Child-Rearing Concepts (Itasca, IL: F.E. Peacock, 1973), 403–4. 18. For an overview of the study of food and religion with bibliography see Corrie E. Norman, ‘‘Food and Religion,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, ed. Solomon H. Katz, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003), 171–76. 19. A good starting point for an overview of the range of food studies is Carole M. Counihan, ed., Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), which includes excerpts of some works that give attention to religion and some of the most significant theoretical works. 20. Carole M. Counihan, ed., Food in the USA: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. 21. See, for example, Mark Kurlansky, Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History (New York: Ballantine, 2002), 15; and Leslie Brenner, American Appetite: The Coming of Age of Cuisine (New York: Avon, 1999), 1, 13, 251, 302–5, 312. See also Griffith, Bodies, 12. 22. Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Karen McCarthy-Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 23. Patricia Curran, Grace Before Meals: Food Ritual and Body Discipline in Convent Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Forthcoming is Martha Finch and Etta Madden, eds., Eating in Eden: Food in American Utopias (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). 24. Peter Gardella, Domestic Religion: Work, Food, Sex and Other Commitments (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1998), esp. chap. 4. See also Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000). 25. Wade Clark Roof, ‘‘Blood in the Barbecue? Food and Faith in the American South,’’ in God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Eric M. Mazur and Kate McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 109–21; Robert C. Fuller, Religion and Wine (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 113; and Lelwica, n12. 26. Lelwica, 7, 37, 69. See also Margaret Miles, ‘‘Religion and Food: The Case of Eating Disorders,’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995): 549–64. This volume of JAAR contains a number of articles on food and religion. 27. Griffith (quoting Shamblin), 177. See also ibid., 171, 181–83, 204. 28. Lelwica, 55; Griffith, 222. 29. Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (Harper and Row, 1981). Quotation taken from an excerpt in Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke, eds. Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 64–65.

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30. www.oa.org/twelve_step.html and www.oa.org/twelve_traditions.html, accessed September 19, 2005. 31. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Holy Hunger (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Quotations from ‘‘A Conversation with Margaret Bullitt-Jonas about Her Memoir Holy Hunger,’’ http://www.holyhunger.com/holyhunger.html, accessed September 19, 2005. 32. Sack, 198–202; quotation, 201–2. See also the works Griffith and Iacobbo, and Iacobbo, cited above in notes 15–16. 33. http://www.christianveg.com/jandv.htm, accessed September 19, 2005. 34. Stephen Webb, Good Eating (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001), 13–14, 52, 128. See also Maureen Hayden, ‘‘Dinner with Jesus: Pass the Tofu? Christians are starting to ask, ÔWhat would Jesus eat?Õ’’ August 22, 2001, http://www. beliefnet.com/story/86/story_8654_1.html?rnd=248, accessed September 10, 2005. 35. http://www.jewishveg.com/index.html, accessed September 19, 2005. 36. Nathan Braun, review of new edition of Richard Schwartz, Judaism and Vegetarianism (New York: Lantern, 2001), http://www.jewishveg.com/revjf.html, accessed September 19, 2005. 37. http://www.earthsave.org, accessed September 19, 2005. 38. John Robbins, ‘‘A Statement from John Robbins,’’ http://www.foodrevolution. org, accessed September 19, 2005. 39. Robbins, Food Revolution (Boston: Conari, 2001), accessed at http://www. foodrevolution.org/chapter_one.htm, accessed September 19, 2005. 40. ‘‘Rest the Tummy, Restore the Soul,’’ New York Times, August 8, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/fashion/24FAST.html?ex=1126584000&en= deab538caf2518a4&ei=5070, accessed September 19, 2005. 41. ‘‘Why Christians Get Sick,’’ www.hacres.com/diet/articles/why_christians_ get_sick.pdf, accessed September 10, 2005. On the activities of Malkmus’s organization see its Web site, http://www.hacres.com/home/home.asp. 42. Gabriel Cousens, Conscious Living (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2000), 5. 43. www.treeoflife.nu, accessed July 1, 2005. 44. Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis, Raw Food/Real Food (San Francisco: Regan Books, 2005), excerpt from introduction at http://www.amazon.com/gp/ reader/0060793554/ref=sib_rdr_ex/103-6887286-3153422?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p= S00F&j=0#reader-page, accessed September 10, 2005. 45. Quoted in Charles Patterson, ‘‘Food, Animals, and Religion,’’ review of Rynn Berry, Food for the Gods: Vegetarianism and the World’s Religions (New York: Pythagorean Books, 1998), http://www.vegsource.com/berry/foodgods.html, accessed September 10, 2005. 46. Among the books of Edward Espe Brown are The Tassajara Bread Book (Boston: Shambala, 1995; first edition, 1970) and The Tassajara Recipe Book (Boston: Shambala, 1985). See also, Seppo Ed Farrey and Myochi Nancy O’Hara, 3 Bowls: Vegetarian Recipes from an American Zen Buddhist Monastery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); and Kimberly Snow, In Buddha’s Kitchen: Cooking, Being Cooked, and Other Adventures in a Meditation Center (Boston: Shambala, 2003). 47. Deborah Madison and Edward Espe Brown, The Greens Cookbook (New York: Bantam, 1987); Annie Somerville, Fields of Greens (New York: Bantam, 1993). Madison’s subsequent cookbooks include Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (New York: Bantam, 1997).

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48. Ginna Bell Bragg and David Simon, M.D., A Simple Celebration: A Vegetarian Cookbook for Body, Mind, and Spirit (New York: Harmony Books, 1997); Deepak Chopra, ‘‘Foreword,’’ A Simple Celebration, xiii–xiv. 49. H.J. Kramer, ‘‘Integrative Nutrition: A Revisioning of Nutritional Science,’’ at http://www.deborahkesten.com/interview.htm, accessed September 10, 2005. Deborah Keston’s books include Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul (Boston: Conari, 1997). 50. Donald Altman, Art of the Inner Meal: Eating as a Spiritual Path (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1999), jacket cover, 5–7, 94–96. 51. Altman, 5; Brown, Tassajara Recipe Book, 119. 52. M.F.K. Fisher, Foreword to The Gastronomical Me (first published in 1943), in The Art of Eating (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 353. Fisher’s bibliography is available at http://www.mfkfisher.net/books.htm. Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin (see n.16) appeared in 1949 and was re-issued in 1971. 53. Fisher, The Art of Eating, 354–60. See also Joan Reardon, Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher (New York: North Point, 2004), esp. 30. 54. Michael Ruhlman, The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection (New York: Penguin, 2001), 330. 55. Colman Andrews, ‘‘Authenticity: It’s the Real Thing: We Love the Word and Its Implications, But What Exactly Does It Mean?’’ Saveur 78, 14 (2004), 38. 56. Brooks Hamaker, ‘‘Binder; Bible; a Pyrex Dish of Nirvana,’’ http://egullet. com/?pg=ARTICLE-brookscookbook052704, accessed September 10, 2005. 57. Andy Lynes, ‘‘The Cookbook of Revelations, http://forums.egullet.org/ index.php?showtopic=71790, accessed September 10, 2005. 58. Bich Minh Nguyen, ‘‘A World without Measurements,’’ Gourmet 64 (December 2004): 190. 59. Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam’s Kitchen (New York: Penguin, 1997). 60. Ibid., 232–37. 61. Mei Chin, ‘‘Eat Drink, Mother Daughter,’’ Saveur 73 (March 2004): 34, 45–46. 62. Among these are Rick Curry, The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking (New York: Penguin, 2002), and Victor-Antoine D’Avila-Latourrette, Simplicity From a Monastery Kitchen (New York: Broadway Books, 2001). 63. Peter Reinhart, Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Cafe´: Recipes and Stories from Brother Juniper’s Cafe´ (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994), xxi–xiii. 64. Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet Keeps the Feast (New York: William Morrow, 1995), 71–75, 289. 65. Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet (New York: Ballantine, 1984), xiv. 66. Deborah Madison, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 2002), xii–xiii, xv. 67. Ruhlman, 310–11, 328–29. See also idem, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 68. Eric Ripert, A Return to Cooking (New York: Artisan, 2002), front flap, 17, 83, 261. 69. Ibid., 318. 70. Anthony Bourdain, Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001), 5. 71. Ibid., 8, 13. 72. Ibid., 100, 109, 115. 73. Ibid., 115. 74. Ibid., 123.

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75. Phyllis Passariello, ‘‘Anomalies, Analogies, and Sacred Profanities: Mary Douglas on Food and Culture, 1957–1989,’’ Food and Foodways 4, 1 (1990): 53.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Counihan, Carole M., ed. Food in the USA: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002. Fuller, Robert C. Religion and Wine. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Griffith, R. Marie. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Lelwica, Michelle. Starving for Salvation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Norman, Corrie E. ‘‘Food and Religion.’’ In The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, ed. Solomon H. Katz, 3:171–76. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. Roof, Wade Clark. ‘‘Blood in the Barbecue? Food and Faith in the American South.’’ In God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Eric M. Mazur and Kate McCarthy, 109–21. New York: Routledge, 2001. Sack, Daniel. Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

CHAPTER 12

Sacred Bodies: Religion, Illness, and Healing Jonathan R. Baer

I

n recent decades in the United States, a pronounced interest in the relationship between religion and health has developed. Religious bodies, both innovative and traditional, hold healing services; academic and professional conferences address the topic from the perspectives of medicine, religious studies, anthropology, public health, and other disciplines; an immense profusion of books and articles flows from the presses analyzing various dimensions of the issue; and, leveraging the trends of the times, popular news magazines like Time and Newsweek produce glossy cover stories that highlight recent research and promise to explain what it means for each of us, while magazines like Spirituality & Health proliferate.1 These developments raise several important questions: What factors have contributed to this widespread engagement with religion and health? What are the various ways people understand the connections between the two? And what are the implications for religious practice and health care in America? A wide range of social and cultural factors has shaped the contemporary interest in the connections between religion and health. Among them, alternative medical practices have grown phenomenally since the 1960s and have achieved a wide acceptance in American culture. Accompanying this development, sustained critiques of the limitations of Western biomedicine have been offered by alternative practitioners and religious adherents of various stripes. Mainstream Christian and Jewish denominations have reinvigorated or established anew religious healing practices, while new religions, such as many of those under the general rubric of the New Age movement, have developed innovative approaches to health and wellbeing. Along with new religions, a vast increase in the number of immigrants to the United States since 1965 has enhanced American religious

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diversity, bringing new beliefs and practices relating to health and healing and also increasing the public visibility of existing minority traditions. Simultaneously, a broad embrace of cultural pluralism has led many Americans to look beyond their own religious and medical traditions to examine those of immigrants or other peoples. Finally, burgeoning medical studies and articles have stressed the positive impact of religious faith and hope on health prevention and outcomes.2 Many of these factors reflect changes in American society in the past several decades, but they have deeper historical roots that help make sense of them in today’s environment.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT In one form or another, religions have always addressed issues of health and healing, because they are concerned with questions of human weakness and mortality. Historically, most human beings have approached health concerns through the categories of religion. The anomaly, then, is not that we have copious evidence today of the interrelationship of religion and health in modern America, but rather that this relationship was relatively muted for a century or more before its recent resurgence. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, American medicine began to professionalize under the banner of science, led by organizations like the American Medical Association. Leaving behind the ‘‘heroic medicine’’ of purgatives and bleedings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, physicians increasingly turned to the laboratory. From vaccinations to germ theory, science promised to cure many deadly diseases, and its successes gave great plausibility to allopathic or ‘‘orthodox’’ medicine, today commonly called ‘‘biomedicine.’’ On the foundation of disinterested science, clinical diagnostics and therapeutics de-emphasized the art of healing, and physicians tended to examine patients as scientific objects rather than complicated human beings. The physical organism of the body became the point of scientific investigation, and various other life components—emotional and spiritual well-being, work and family stresses, damaged relationships—became irrelevant to the medical task. In this regard, biomedicine embraced the mind-body duality of the Enlightenment, while its rigorous scientific culture combined with Enlightenment intellectual influences to diminish the medical relevance of religion radically. Religion may or may not have been fine within its own purview, but in the medical world it represented superstition and retrograde thinking and practice.3 The medical marketplace of the late nineteenth century presented a rich array of therapies and medicines, by equal parts innovative and dangerous. From hydrotherapy to electrotherapy to Swedish massage, the range of treatment options and practitioners, including those who were religiously inspired, was truly impressive. Yet in an essentially unregulated medical environment, where addictive and potentially harmful drugs like morphine and cocaine were available over-the-counter and sometimes in home-brewed nostrums and tonics, biomedicine held out great promise. As part of its process of professionalization, orthodox medical doctors and institutions drew boundaries around their own practices and sought to delegitimate

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outsiders. As modern medical schools developed in the late nineteenth century, orthodox medicine established authorized curricula that appropriately trained doctors should master, a process of standardization forwarded by the famous muckraking Flexner Report of 1910, which shined an unflattering light on the many informal, unprofessional medical schools originating in the prior century. Further, state medical regulations and licensure requirements gave government approval to biomedical preeminence. Thus, physicians defined their professional turf, which more clearly made many other therapies ‘‘alternative.’’ The same Progressive-era process of standardization took place in the pharmaceutical realm, where the Food and Drug Act of 1906 established federal standards for medicines.4 Until quite recently, the history of biomedicine could be presented as an unqualified success story, and there is much truth to this account. Scientific and technological accomplishments have produced enormous advances in our capacity to understand, diagnose, treat, and cure all sorts of diseases. Combined with improvements in public health and nutrition, medical advances have resulted in massive reductions in infant and childhood mortality and increases in life expectancy. Smallpox, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, polio, and a host of other emissaries of suffering and death have been defeated. Reliable analgesics, modern anesthesia, and innovative surgical and treatment techniques have meant that most people do not have to endure chronic pain in a way once common, as an intractable reality of life in this world. With all the shortcomings of our contemporary health care and medical environments, and all the awful diseases characteristic of our age—heart disease, cancers, Alzheimer’s, autism— most Americans in the last half century have lived with a very high degree of health, at least in comparative historical terms.5 This relative health of Americans has issued in greatly increased cultural and personal expectations for healthy, pain-free, physically and psychologically vibrant lives. Our forebears may have looked upon this life as a veil of tears, a sojourn of suffering, but we have the luxury of believing otherwise, in large measure thanks to biomedicine. We can afford to become emotionally attached to our babies and romanticize our young children as cherubic innocents, for example, in part because of our confidence they will survive their early years. Along with medical advances, historical changes in medical delivery and the death industry have contributed to our conceptions of and expectations for health. Until well into the twentieth century, the great majority of medical care and most terminal illnesses and deaths took place in the home. By treating severely ill family members, dressing wounds, bathing and toileting sick loved ones, and caring for their dead bodies, people saw intimately the devastation and profound indignities of illness and death. Today, the healthy are spared many of the brute and messy realities of physical degradation by our hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes, which quarantine severe illness and death in the institutional shadows.6 Consequently, individually and communally we face death less often and at a greater distance than those of prior eras, so it is not surprising we have come to expect that it remain a stranger for longer.

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Even in the early stages of these developments, there arose many religious healing systems that challenged the premises and claims of biomedicine. Mary Baker Eddy developed Christian Science in the late nineteenth century on the assertion that women and men could be healed of their ailments when they adopted right thinking, namely that all was spirit; thus evil, suffering, and matter itself were illusions in an entirely good world governed by the eternal Mind. Various elements of the New Thought movement popularized Eddy’s focus on mental healing, stressing that positive thinking was the key to health and rejuvenation. Evangelical faithhealing ministries in the Holiness and Pentecostal movements around the turn of the twentieth century claimed that God would provide supernatural healing to believers who had sufficient faith to claim their own miracles. Chiropractic medicine, today essentially shorn of the early religious underpinnings of founder Daniel David Palmer, taught that proper manipulation of the vertebrae would release blockages that prevented vital energy in the brain from circulating throughout the body, thereby enabling healing through proper alignment with the divine force Palmer called ‘‘Innate.’’ These new developments supplemented the long-standing health and healing practices of established religions, such as the visits to shrines, prayers to saints, and other devotional healing rituals of Catholicism.7 To varying degrees, each of these religious healing movements decried what it regarded as the objectifying, unspiritual, dehumanizing practices of scientific medicine. By the early twentieth century, at least three major religious healing strands had taken shape. First, Christian healing ministries, such as evangelical faith healing and the sacramental healing that took root in parts of the Episcopal Church, built upon a basic division between nature and supernature, with the natural world the fallen realm of suffering and sickness. The healing power of the personal God entered the natural realm to bring about restoration by means of prayer, relics, holy water at a shrine, a sacrament, or some other authorized medium. Second, ‘‘metaphysical’’ or ‘‘harmonial’’ movements like Christian Science, New Thought, and chiropractic medicine premised their claims upon a monistic cosmology that conceived of all reality as part of an undifferentiated whole. Human beings each had a divine spark or essence within themselves, which was a reflection of the impersonal, ultimate life force or energy variously called the Infinite, Mind, Innate, God, or one of any numerous other designations. Healing occurred when individuals who were suffering from disconnections to this pervasive divinity removed impediments and properly aligned themselves to it. A third form of religious healing that had begun developing by the turn of the century and grew in the following decades involved the marriage of psychology and liberal Protestantism. The research of William James at the intersections of psychology and experiential religion proved seminal to this movement. In practice, the early-twentieth-century Emmanuel movement combined psychotherapy and Christianity to treat emotional and psychological afflictions under the direction of medical doctors, originally in the Episcopal Church but spreading to other mainstream denominations. As

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E. Brooks Holifield has shown, the burgeoning field of pastoral counseling became more heavily indebted to psychology as the twentieth century progressed.8 By mid-century, amid the popularization of Freud and Jung, dozens of seminaries and divinity schools had developed counseling curricula, most reliant upon the client-centered therapy of Carl Rogers and his acolyte Seward Hiltner. Rogers taught that successful therapy in a nonjudgmental and putatively non-normative environment facilitated the healing resources within the individual, helping him actualize his innate potential for well-being. Mainstream religious bodies, both Christian and Jewish, combined this focus with the understanding that God wanted fragmented, suffering people to become whole. Simultaneously, the self-help movement, spearheaded by figures like Dale Carnegie, also stressed unlocking human potential, in order to attain maximum personal success. At mid-century, Norman Vincent Peale, Joshua Loth Liebman, and Fulton J. Sheen encapsulated these trends in inspirational best-sellers that offered divinely sanctioned personal enhancement and well-being through easily digestible psycho-spiritual insights.9

THE 1960s AND BEYOND As in so many areas of contemporary American life, the 1960s was a decisive decade for recent changes in the relationship between religion and health and healing. The forces set in motion in the 1960s, built upon decades of developments in religion and health, continue to influence our religious and cultural lives. The Immigration Act of 1965, which opened the doors to vast increases in the numbers of immigrants to the United States, has had enormous significance for the texture of American society, including reshaping the American religious landscape.10 The social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and thereafter unleashed enormous religious creativity and innovation. Even as existing religious bodies fashioned new forms of worship like folk masses, sought the gifts of the Spirit through the charismatic movement, or established fresh spheres of sacred concern, such as civil or women’s rights, new religious movements proliferated. The New Age movement drew upon the metaphysical tradition, but it also looked to the Eastern religions it saw represented among more and more neighbors. The charismatic movement, which introduced Pentecostal emphases—including healing ministries—into several mainstream churches, also spawned its own churches, such as the Calvary Chapel church movement and the Vineyard churches. Social and political concerns in that era of experimentation gave rise to dozens of new bodies that decried a corrupt world and sought purer forms of koinonia, or communal living, such as Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple or the Sojourners community led by Jim Wallis. Generally, the revolutions of the 1960s and thereafter radically challenged traditional sources of authority and transcendent truth; sought new foundations for personal identity in ethnicity, race, and gender; and looked to the authority of individual or communal experience over sacred texts, theologies, or established institutions.11 The truth value of a given religion or its practices came to be refracted through pragmatic and

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experiential questions: What does it do for me or us in the here and now? How does this help me live a better and more fulfilling life? A widespread embrace of religious pluralism has accompanied the enhanced ethnic, racial, and religious diversity produced by new immigration and new religions. The ecumenical initiatives of twentieth-century mainstream Protestantism have extended from interdenominational organizations that brought together Protestant churches to interfaith worship services and other efforts to create mutual understanding across religious lines. Themes of inclusion and tolerance dominate liberal Protestant churches like the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian-Universalist Association. In the wake of Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has taken steps to shed its historic exclusivity, including new forms of interdenominational and interreligious dialogue. Among American evangelicals, thousands of nondenominational Bible or community churches testify to a somewhat different form of religious inclusion. All these developments suggest a strong desire to transcend religious difference and exclusive categorization in favor of commonality or shared understanding.12 Building on the experiential focus of contemporary religiosity, this pluralistic impulse looks more to what scholars have called ‘‘lived religion’’ than to the institutional or theological expressions of religion. On the popular level, we speak today of ‘‘spirituality’’ as a kind of religious common denominator, signifying one’s personal experience of the sacred, often shorn of denominational or institutional particularities.13 Because of the universal human experience of suffering and death, healing has become a foundational element in this pluralistic desire to stress religious commonality. All religions, in one form or another, engage in healing ministries, broadly defined as promoting human health and well-being. Supported by the American tradition of religious freedom, an astonishingly diverse religious environment has combined with pluralistic sensibilities to make ours an era of ‘‘spiritual seekers’’ and ‘‘church shoppers.’’ In a voluntaristic religious marketplace, we are much less beholden to given religions and specific traditions than our forebears, and much more comfortable with experimentation in the search for authentic spiritual experiences. Reflecting a host of medical, cultural, and social changes, we look less to the glories of heaven or the afterlife, and more to this-worldly benefits of our religiosity. In many Christian circles, we have seen a profound shift away from the traditional language of sin, redemption, and salvation that were salient in the broader American culture until mid-century. By the early twenty-first century, one was more apt to hear from Christian pulpits the therapeutic language of dysfunction or hurt, adjustment, and healing. We are no longer sinners who have offended a holy God and are in need of salvation, but wounded persons who have harmed ourselves or been harmed by others and are in need of healing. The words ‘‘salvation’’ and ‘‘healing’’ share common etymological roots, so perhaps this shift is not surprising. But it speaks to a larger religious de-emphasis on particularistic theology that draws clear boundaries between religions and establishes claims of exclusivity. It also betokens important transitions in our understanding of the divine as well as the human condition. Our coloring

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of God or the divine has taken on more singularly cheerful hues; gone or holed up in cultural backwaters is the darker God of judgment and punishment, as well as grace and mercy, and present is the loving, beneficent pastel God who always desires human health and well-being. A corollary to these shifts is our tendency today to view the divine, however conceived, as much more immanent than transcendent, more tangibly present and active in our world, or interwoven into it, than distinctly apart from it, even if intervening in various ways.14 Intersecting with this new religious environment and supported by increases in immigration, the field of alternative medicine has skyrocketed into a multibillion-dollar industry. From urban centers to suburban strip malls to smaller towns, one can find ample testimony to the reach of alternative medicine: herbal supplements and medicines, acupuncture, chakras and energy fields, therapeutic touch, therapeutic massage and bodywork; the list goes on and on. In general, these alternative medicines and therapies have participated in an ongoing critique of biomedicine’s tendency to separate the human body from its larger contexts, mentally, spiritually, and ecologically. To alternative practitioners, biomedicine artificially segregates the organic dimensions of the physical body from the spiritual or natural world, then tries to establish diagnostic and therapeutic cause and effect relationships. For many alternative practitioners, and certainly those engaged in religious healing, this approach ignores the broader dimensions of human health and well-being, and the greater resources available for understanding and treating illness.15 The various approaches to treating the human body, mind, and spirit represented under the rubric alternative medicine have become, in the aggregate, so much a part of American culture that they recently have called forth a more appropriate designation, ‘‘complementary and alternative medicine.’’ This phrase more accurately reflects the pluralism of patient experience, as people approach medicine and their personal health with multiple frames of references and a pragmatic sensibility rather than an exclusive orientation. The new name also indicates something of a rapprochement between biomedicine and its competitors. Although many complementary and alternative therapies critique the limitations of biomedicine or rely upon medical systems that challenge its precepts, biomedicine has increasingly sought to incorporate them, reflecting their substantial influence among patients. The National Institutes of Health, for example, now has under its aegis a National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. As its Web site notes, ‘‘complementary medicine’’ is used together with conventional biomedicine in what is termed ‘‘integrative medicine,’’ whereas the older term ‘‘alternative medicine’’ points to approaches used in place of biomedicine. A patient, for instance, might complement biomedical surgery with aromatherapy to speed the post-operative healing process.16 These developments suggest the expanding horizons of biomedicine and the desire of many of its practitioners to learn about and incorporate medical treatments that originate in different therapeutic contexts. One reflection of that trend has been the enormous interest among medical doctors over the past two decades in the relationship between religion or

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spirituality and healing. Thousands of clinical studies, funded by organizations like the John Templeton Foundation, have investigated the preventative and curative impact of different forms of religious belief, ritual, and community. Although these studies have varied enormously and have raised numerous questions in the biomedical community and beyond, including the potential religious agendas of researchers, in general they have provided strong medical evidence to suggest a positive relationship between religion or spirituality and health, both in terms of prevention and treatment outcomes. Through the work of leading investigators like the late David B. Larson, Harold G. Koenig, and Herbert Benson, well over half of American medical schools have developed curricula in spirituality and health.17 Additionally, centers for the study of spirituality and health have been established at leading universities and medical schools, including those at Duke, Harvard, George Washington, Minnesota, Florida, South Carolina, and Indiana State. Beyond the field of medicine, scholars from anthropology, history, religious studies, sociology, and public health have studied religion and health through their own methodological and disciplinary lenses. Organizations like the Interfaith Health Program of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University provide helpful guides into this large intellectual terrain.18 As these various studies have been communicated to a broader public through books, television, magazines, radio, and the Internet, they have fueled further interest in the connections between religion and health. As the preceding references suggest, new technologies continue to be a critical dimension in the dissemination of information related to healing. Whereas earlier practitioners or advocates of religion and health used print technology, radio, and television, today the Internet is the most important source of information. One no longer has to wait for the faith healing revivalist to come to town or for the local library to receive the latest metaphysical healing text. Cyberspace presents an almost endless array of religious options and information, and ‘‘online religion’’ is reshaping our religious ecology in hugely significant ways. At the click of a mouse, the seeker interested in religion and health can examine psychoneuroimmunological studies that attempt to pinpoint the precise physical impact of certain forms of religious faith. Or, she can visit the Ramtha School of Enlightenment and learn about the ‘‘miracle healing’’ and capacity to leave one’s body made possible by JZ Knight’s unique relationship with Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior and spirit being from Lemuria and Atlantis. Ramtha’s sacred consciousness is accessible through retreats, workshops, conferences, DVDs, and books, all readily available for the right price. Hundreds of competitors crowd the cyber bazaar, offering health and well-being straight to our desks and easy-chairs.19

THE NATURE OF ILLNESS AND HEALING The incredible range of religious diversity surrounding the issue of religion and health, and the avalanche of information at our fingertips are apt to overwhelm us. How can we make sense of it all? One helpful avenue is

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to examine the nature of healing, which first requires inquiry into the illness experience. Anthropologists are quick to note that ‘‘illness,’’ ‘‘health,’’ and ‘‘healing’’ are culturally constructed concepts that hold different meanings in distinct national, ethnic, and historical contexts.20 While there is much to commend this viewpoint, as their own studies demonstrate, our focus on the United States mitigates some of these differences. Certainly immigrants, differing ethnic and racial communities, men and women, and many other such groupings in the United States show variations in their experiences of illness and healing, as their diverse medical and religious healing strategies imply. Nevertheless, there are certain biological commonalities involved in facing sickness and death which make it meaningful to speak in general terms. The discussion of illness and healing here should not be taken as prescriptive, but rather as an effort to sketch broad outlines. The particularities of any individual case may well make my analysis of illness and healing inapplicable in that situation, but thinking in larger terms remains a useful exercise. Whereas ‘‘disease’’ denotes a biomedical reality—the presence of certain pathogens, for instance, and the organic results—‘‘illness’’ speaks to the individual or communal experience of disease. Patients facing serious illness often experience isolation, rooted in the inability of language to communicate adequately the internal experiences of pain and suffering. As Elaine Scarry has argued, physical pain lacks concrete external referents, so we speak of pain in terms of metaphors, often metaphors of violence, such as stabbing, throbbing, shooting, attacking. Beyond these, our most salient, effective tools for communicating pain are primordial grimaces, cries, and moans. The experience of pain associated with serious illness is intensively, insistently personal. At a fundamental level, this is where the art of medicine begins and the point from which it must proceed; good doctors and medical care providers, as well as supportive family members and friends, know that sympathy, although helpful, is not enough. Instead, empathy, the capacity to ‘‘feel’’ along with patients through the exercise of moral imagination, to step into their world and suffer alongside them, to the extent possible, is a critical part of effective health care.21 And yet, even with this sort of support from loving family and excellent health care providers, at a very basic level every patient must face the experience alone. Patient isolation is furthered by the ways serious illness removes us from our normal round of activities and relationships. The patient is unable to work as usual, go to school, participate in communities like churches and synagogues, or contribute to family well-being and meet other responsibilities. Symbolic of this disruption is the sickbed, where the patient must spend waking hours, in addition to nighttime, prone and immobile. Of course, in modern American society, the sickbed for the seriously ill usually is not in the home, where some of this isolation might be countered, but in the hospital, amidst strangers and fearful machines and overworked doctors who may or may not be telling us everything we want to know. Illness robs the sufferer of those activities and regular relationships that enrich and give substance to life. The gnawing presence of this vile thief within one’s body and the need for existential appropriation of its reality come to

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dominate personal identity. Serious illness readily pervades, suffuses, and controls the patient’s life and personhood. Additionally, serious illness creates profound dependencies. Illness makes us dependent upon others, whether it is our family members, our social communities, or our health care providers, for that which we can no longer do for ourselves, including preparing our meals, bathing and using the toilet, driving an automobile, meeting work obligations. In these and numerous other ways, illness diminishes our capacities and threatens to render us infantile. Further, the huge knowledge imbalance in the patientdoctor relationship makes the clinical situation fraught with dependence. The medical expertise of the doctor prepares her to pronounce upon the patient and prescribe medication or treatment; the relative ignorance of the patient leaves him reliant upon trust. Savvy patients or family members attempt to learn as much as they can about their circumstances, if possible, a process helped by tools like the Internet, but the knowledge imbalance and the authority associated with it remain substantial. Along with its isolating tendencies, the various dependencies created by serious illness challenge the self-conception of patients, especially in a culture and era where we fashion ourselves autonomous beings. Finally, the illness experience is saturated with fear. From intolerable pain and suffering to alienating oncology wards to ominous medical terms and medicines we can barely pronounce, let alone understand, illness is a fearful reality. At bottom, serious illness is a harbinger of death and the great unknown, so it forces us to face our mortality in ways most people try to avoid. Altogether, isolation, dependency, and fear create profound disorder in the lives of patients, destroying the carefully constructed order they have established, and threatening chaos. Illness ‘‘unmakes’’ the world of patients; and perhaps most devastatingly, it appears to do so with no meaning or purpose.22 The horrifying specter of meaninglessness hangs over the sickbed, mocking human pretensions of a purposive life. By generating isolation, dependency, fear, and the prospect of chaotic meaninglessness, the illness experience provokes in patients the need to find meaning and purpose in the midst of sickness. Why did this happen? Why to me? What is its purpose for my life? Biomedicine does not answer these sorts of existential questions, or it answers them in ways many people find unsatisfying. Its responses pertain to the material realm of the body, but not to larger questions of spirit. It speaks to cause and effect, but not meaning and purpose, with recourse only to the god-of-the-gaps language of randomness or bad luck. Biomedicine, as part of the modern scientific enterprise, recognizes no overarching providence at work in our world—there is no divine plan in which we participate—instead substituting the notion of chance or, at the colloquial level, a vague, secularized variation on the ancient concept of fate. In responding to the illness experience, ‘‘healing’’ entails a meaningmaking process that reorders the life world of the patient. Healing makes illness and its suffering part of a larger plan or design. It enables patients to situate their own experiences within an overarching narrative or set of narratives that create meaning out of seemingly random events.23 Usually,

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though not always, this is a religious process, since religions provide authoritative answers to cosmological questions, including at their points of intersection with our personal lives. How am I to understand the divine in light of my suffering? What does God want me to learn from this experience? What resources can my religious tradition provide to help me endure or overcome this illness? This meaning-making or reordering process supplies language and categories with which to comprehend and come to terms with illness. It also diminishes the isolation, fear, and loneliness that illness can cause, by virtue of a supportive religious community—one’s fellow church, synagogue, or temple worshippers or ‘‘family’’—and the patient’s participation in the narratives or larger mythos of her religion. Healing offers the patient the opportunity to reimagine her identity and connect or reconnect with her religious, as well as cultural or ethnic, roots. If the illness experience unmakes the world of the patient, then healing remakes it, often along new or unexpected lines.24 Healing is distinct from ‘‘curing.’’ Curing addresses the patient’s material condition; it entails the successful physical resolution or removal of disease. Healing and curing sometimes go hand-in-hand, but not always. In other words, healing may accompany a cure, but one may be healed without being cured. Rather than physical renewal, per se, healing is the establishment or reestablishment of wholeness, integrity, completeness, equilibrium, or one of several other metaphors we use for getting at this fundamental quality of health and well-being. Likewise, a patient may be cured of an illness without experiencing healing, without coming to terms with it in such a fashion as to incorporate it into one’s identity or personhood. Even when successful, the mechanical curing biomedicine promises can seem hollow in the absence of meaningful healing. When unsuccessful, or when a condition is chronic, learning to cope with illness and integrating it into one’s identity and life can be a crushing burden, especially if one is left to find solace in bad luck. Individual cases vary, of course, but in general four basic, interrelated components appear to be present when healing occurs: hope, empowerment, liberation, and restoration. These components may appear sequentially— not necessarily in the order here listed, though it suggests a certain experiential and logical progression—or they may occur simultaneously or in various combinations. Thus, this is not intended to be a stage theory of healing, akin to the famous stage theory of grief articulated by Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross, but rather a brief elucidation of characteristic elements involved in healing.25 Hope entails the patient’s expectation that his desire for positive transformation will be realized in some meaningful fashion, that change for the better can occur in his illness experience. The presence of deeply appropriated hope moves the patient from foreboding, resignation, or despair into the realm of possibility. It transfers him from the closed, suffocating experience of serious illness into a sphere of openness and opportunity, even if constrained by his continuing limitations. Put differently, hope overcomes the passivity of illness—the experience of disease happening to the patient—and supplies personal agency; the patient becomes an actor with

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opportunities to engage his world in an efficacious manner. Hope is the patient’s positive orientation toward the future, a vision for what his life may or will become. In many forms of religious healing, this hope is generated and sustained by faith in the capacity and willingness of the divine to effect beneficial change, as perhaps validated in the prior life experiences of other ill believers. Usually hope is an early, activating element in the healing process. Empowerment is the capacity to function in new and vital ways. Perhaps it is the patient’s re-attainment and activation of personal agency, or her capacity to function physically in ways previously impossible, or her ability to come to terms with her situation psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. For those who embrace religious healing, the force that animates empowerment typically comes from or is unleashed by the divine, and the patient must receive or tap into this source of power. Liberation is the patient’s deliverance from the existential terrors of the illness experience. Isolation, dependency, and fear lose their capacity to dominate the patient, shape her identity, and control her future. Instead, she is freed to remake herself and her world, to reorient herself toward the future on other grounds. Liberation may or may not involve the elimination of disease, an organic affliction, or other causative factor, though usually some measure of tangible improvement accompanies liberation. Empowerment and liberation often occur simultaneously or nearly so, with either one preceding the other. Finally, restoration represents the culmination of hope, liberation, and empowerment. It involves the patient’s re-appropriation of wholeness and well-being, perhaps accompanied by renewed physical function. Although restoration seems to imply a return to a previous state, in this context it suggests a new kind of ordering, one that does not skip back over the illness experience, but incorporates it into one’s larger life meaning in a way that brings peace and equilibrium.

CATEGORIES OF RELIGIOUS HEALING After analyzing the nature of illness and healing, it is useful to delineate broad categories of religious healing. Importantly, those suggested here are ideal types, and thus they appear much clearer in thought than in actual lived experience. Their borders are not fixed in the ways a typology might suggest, but in fact are permeable. In their religious and medical lives, suffering patients might fit squarely within one of these categories, but they just as likely might combine features from several of them. Or, they might find themselves in different categories at different times in their lives, or at various stages of a particular illness. In today’s experiential, pragmatic religious and medical environment, those facing illness look for approaches or therapies that seem to work in given instances. Additionally, the lines differentiating categories of religious healing could be drawn elsewhere with equal plausibility. In light of these cautionary notes, the categories developed here help define what people mean when they assert a relationship between religion and health and healing. The five categories

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are divine healing, metaphysical healing, therapeutic healing, humanistic healing, and systemic healing. Built upon earlier Christian healing ministries, divine healing rests on the conviction that healing comes from outside the self, as a gift from God. Human beings are incomplete, prone to disorder or wrongful behaviors, and subject to evil and suffering in their lives. According to the traditional Christian understanding of original sin, sinful humanity faces hardship and pain in a fallen world. Just as God acts to provide salvation people cannot achieve on their own, so also God acts to provide otherwise inaccessible healing. The power that fuels divine healing is God’s, even if human beings act in certain ways or engage in specific rituals to facilitate the reception of this power. Although the term ‘‘miracle’’ is used variously, generally divine healing is miraculous, that is, it entails a specific supernatural penetration of the natural order in ways that produce wondrous and otherwise inexplicable results. Divine healing relies upon some sort of mediation between God and the suffering individual. For the popular Pentecostal healer Benny Hinn, God has provided healing in Christ’s atonement; since disease results from the effects of sin in the world and Christ died for our sins, his atoning sacrifice paid the price for not only sins but also sickness. Even as faith mediates forgiveness and salvation for our sins, it also mediates healing from our diseases. Stressing the gifts of the Holy Spirit, many Pentecostals and charismatics claim that certain men and women have been given the gift of healing, and by means of the laying on of their hands, anointing with oil, or their special prayers, healing flows forth from God. Among Mexican ˜o de Americans in Los Angeles and elsewhere, in contrast, El Santo Nin Atocha, an incarnation of the Christ child in the form of a Mexican boy, mediates God’s healing power. At shrines, before images or statues, with votive offerings in hand, the faithful make known their requests in prayer. Flowers, photographs, candles, handwritten notes pleading for assistance, ˜ o shrines. Like and articles of clothing for the Holy Child crowd El Nin ˜o is a specialist, in his case for young children, many Catholic saints, El Nin especially their health problems. As a boy familiar with suffering, he can identify with those scared children who face illness and comfort their anxious parents; as a Holy Child, he can intercede God’s miraculous healing power. Finally, divine healing can also be mediated through a sacred physical object, like the Christian sacraments. In many high-church Episcopal or Anglo-Catholic congregations, healing services center on the Eucharist, which mediates healing power through Christ’s body and blood in the form of the bread and wine.26 Metaphysical healing envisions healing resulting from a proper alignment between the ill person and impersonal life forces, sometimes a pantheistic divinity. The primal human state is not one of disorder or incompleteness, as in divine healing, but of wholeness and harmony. Illness results from impediments to the realization of this natural state, such as negative or wrong thoughts, as in mental healing, or physical blockages, as in various forms of energy healing. Healing removes or negates these impediments, reestablishing a connection between the ill person and the

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healing force, thus enabling the free flow of energy or light to restore personal equilibrium. Building upon nineteenth-century movements like Christian Science, New Thought, and Mesmerism, metaphysical healing has experienced a revival in the last few decades in the holistic health and New Age movements. Shaped in part by Eastern concepts of potentially transformative energies pervading the universe and the human body, the holistic health and New Age movements have attained widespread popularity and influence in American culture.27 Metaphysical healing stresses the establishment of connections or pathways between the ill person and the source of healing power. In the 1970s, New York University nursing instructor Dolores Krieger relied upon the teachings of two nineteenth-century metaphysical movements, Theosophy and Mesmerism, to develop her system of Therapeutic Touch. Krieger claimed a ‘‘subtle energy’’ force, which she identified with the Hindu term prana, exists throughout the universe and underlies all healing. All living beings are open to this prana, she suggested; continuous contact with it ensures ongoing health, but shortfalls of prana create sickness. Krieger trained nurses to purify their own chakras, which regulate and channel their internal flow of prana. So trained, they are able to channel healing prana to their patients in the sick regions of their bodies where they lack it. In several New Age healing systems, crystals serve as especially important refractors of healing light and energy, while in others shamanic spirit guides connect ill persons with the universe’s healing forces. Some substance abuse counselors have found success treating addictions with shamanic drumming, which induces altered states of consciousness and spiritual receptivity to divine powers.28 The almost unlimited imagination and creativity of metaphysical purveyors and participants has generated an extensive sphere of religious healing that promises to restore harmonious balance to sufferers. Therapeutic healing builds upon the twentieth-century union of religion and psychology. It tends to focus less on healing from physical illnesses and more on emotional, psychological, and spiritual healing from damaged relationships, behavioral problems or addictions, and life disappointments and hardships. Therapeutic healing operates with the conviction that facing one’s problems and communicating openly and honestly about them, either in a one-on-one or group setting guided by a spirit of empathy and skillful leadership, is a key factor in the healing experience. Whereas physical healing entails facing the potential results of disease or disability, therapeutic healing addresses issues of anger, betrayal, dashed hopes, personal failings and powerlessness, and many more. As with physical illness, therapeutic healing stresses that the ongoing presence of these emotional and psychological pathogens produces dis-ease within persons, eating away at the soul and destroying happiness. Millions of Americans seek therapeutic healing for marital troubles, broken relationships, and so forth through pastoral counseling with their ministers, rabbis, priests, or other religious leaders, or through specially trained therapists operating from particular religious perspectives. Many mainstream religious bodies like the United Church of Christ have

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embraced therapeutic language and categories as their primary tools of religious analysis and discourse. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has helped alcoholics live with their addiction through regularly scheduled group meetings, empathic one-on-one ‘‘sponsor’’ relationships, the security of relative anonymity and a deep respect for personal privacy, and reliance upon a ‘‘higher power,’’ however it is understood by the individual. AA stresses that alcoholism is never cured, but alcoholics can be empowered and liberated from its awful grip, finding healing by learning to live meaningful, honest lives. The success of AA’s twelve-step model has produced dozens of similar organizations, such as Narcotics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous. Less formally, millions of Americans find therapeutic healing in ‘‘small groups,’’ typically intimate gatherings of fifteen or fewer individuals, often supported by specific religious congregations. Called ‘‘life groups’’ or ‘‘cell groups’’ by some churches, many of these bodies involve Bible study, but they center on sharing and praying for one’s burdens in a supportive context. Finally, therapeutic healing overlaps with the enormous self-help arena through works like M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled (1978), which spent an amazing thirteen years on the New York Times best-seller list, and quasi-religious bodies like L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, which offers to maximize personal potential through an expensive and controversial therapeutic program.29 Humanistic healing differs from divine, metaphysical, and therapeutic healing in that it involves no concrete claims about divinity. If religion is defined substantively, in terms of what it is, then humanistic healing appears to be nonreligious, since substantive definitions usually focus on a divine being or beings. If we employ a functional definition, however, one that focuses on what religion does, humanistic healing is a legitimate category of religious healing. That is, like other forms of religious healing, humanistic healing speaks to questions about the meaning and purpose of life and how one’s particular illness participates in larger narratives, patterns, or life forces. A patient might find healing, for instance, through the belief that in his illness he is playing a role in the grand evolutionary scheme of life, which promotes human progress leading to perfection. Humanistic healing focuses on optimal human capacities and the patient’s personal desire to act in accord with the best of the human spirit. Martin Marty labels his similar category ‘‘autogenesis,’’ since healing arises from within the individual with no claim for outside input. Marty cites Stoicism as an ancient example. Following Stoic teachings, a patient might display the best of human nature in the face of illness by meeting fear, dependence, and isolation with personal courage, fortitude, and sublime resignation. Secular therapies grounded in positive thinking reflect the common premise among advocates of humanistic healing that the mind and body are thoroughly interconnected and that a powerful natural placebo effect promotes healing. Whatever one’s circumstances, then, think happy, peaceful thoughts, for this will augment the body’s healing capacities. Norman Cousins’s 1979 best-seller Anatomy of an Illness told of his healing experience from the incurable degenerative disease ankylosing spondylitis through rest, high doses of vitamin C, and what might be

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called laughter therapy, aided by comedy films. Cousins recovered away from the hospital, the routines of which he found depressing and harmful, and his book helped spark critiques of biomedicine and interest in mindbody healing.30 Finally, systemic healing extends the notion of healing beyond the individual to the community, however defined. Reflecting the popularity of healing language, advocates today speak of healing social injustice, racial discrimination, strained or alienated ethnic identities, or even human discord with the natural world. Often aligned with specific religious beliefs and practices, systemic healing usually relies upon elements of metaphysical and therapeutic healing, but applies them to broader areas of concern. The feminist Wiccans described by Grove Harris, for example, circle a fire while dancing and chanting at a Reclaiming Witch Camp, thereby generating and connecting to healing energy not only for the participants and their loved ones, but also the earth itself. As a reflection of ‘‘earth healing’’ and ‘‘political healing,’’ Harris describes a separate ritual in which participants give locks of their hair for a magical spell to protect California’s redwood forests. The radical Catholic sisters of the Hope Community attempt to provide healing to the blighted Minneapolis neighborhood in which they reside through their homeless shelter and programs for children and families, counteracting the rampant hopelessness and traumas of the inner-city with love and hope. Meanwhile, ‘‘La Danza Conchera,’’ or the Conchero Dance tradition, syncretizes Catholic and indigenous Mexican religiosity in a holistic ritual performance. For Mexican American practitioners, it provides a powerful way to reconnect with Aztec spirituality and reintegrate it into their identities, thus healing centuries of colonial structural violence. Likewise, Julianne Cordero describes how the Chumash, Native Americans historically located on the southern California coast, found healing from a forcibly fragmented identity and reconnection to their tribal ancestors by building a sacred canoe called a tomol and then using it for a ritual journey.31

THE DILEMMA OF EUTHANASIA What happens when patients cannot find healing, religious or otherwise, and face terminal or debilitating chronic illnesses? In the midst of their suffering, these patients sometimes look to death as offering desired relief from the indignities of dying and the threat of self-dissolution. Since the late nineteenth century, many radical leftist thinkers of both religious and secular stripes have advocated euthanasia as a solution to the problem of protracted or fearful deaths. Traditionally, Judaism and Christianity adamantly opposed suicide and euthanasia, claiming that the individual is not at liberty to take that which is not his own; life is a sacred gift from God that a person holds in trust, and self-destruction or facilitating the death of another represents a profound violation of this trust. For some intellectuals and social reformers in the Progressive movement around the turn of the century, Darwinism, higher biblical criticism, and pressing social realities like overcrowded cities undercut these traditional taboos. For Robert

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G. Ingersoll, Felix Adler, and others, if each individual was no longer a sacred creation of God, but solely a product of material forces, there was no sin in either suicide or euthanasia. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as Ian Dowbiggin has shown, euthanasia advocates like Margaret Sanger almost universally supported the practice as part of a range of social reforms, including forced sterilization and other eugenics measures intended to purify the race, as well as birth control availability and women’s suffrage. Throughout the history of the euthanasia movement in the United States, two goals have competed for ascendancy and have often been held simultaneously by advocates: freedom for individual patients to choose the time of their deaths, with physician assistance; and freedom to kill ‘‘defective’’ infants, handicapped persons, the mentally ill, criminals, and other undesirables or ‘‘mistakes of nature’’ who are deemed to have no meaningful quality of life and who utilize social resources that experts could better spend elsewhere.32 In their drive for personal autonomy and authoritarian social control in matters of death, historical and contemporary euthanasia advocates have sought to overturn the social and cultural influence of allegedly retrograde religious traditions that restrict conventional morality. Through organizations like the Euthanasia Society of America, the Hemlock Society, and Compassion in Dying, proponents have argued at various times for both passive and active euthanasia—that is, letting one die by withdrawing or withholding treatment on the one hand, and directly causing death on the other—as well as voluntary and involuntary euthanasia, depending upon whether the patient consents to or requests death or not. Since the horrors of the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs, and the subsequent disavowal of eugenics by mainstream science, euthanasia advocates have been much more circumspect about open advocacy of active involuntary euthanasia on utilitarian grounds, preferring instead to stress the need for population control measures and readily available abortions to accompany voluntary euthanasia. From its inception, euthanasia has united many Unitarians and other liberal Protestants, liberal Jews, humanists, Ethical Culture members, agnostics, and atheists in opposition to the Catholic church and orthodox Protestants. Along with much lay involvement, clergymen like the Unitarians Charles Potter, Donald McKinney, and Ralph Mero, the liberal modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Episcopalian Joseph Fletcher, the Presbyterian Henry Sloane Coffin, and Rabbi Sidney Goldstein of the Free Synagogue of New York attempted to legitimate euthanasia to the American public. In the name of unfettered individualism and divine mercy to the suffering, they have argued for a ‘‘right to die’’ with medical assistance, an effort that has persuaded many Americans but succeeded legally only in the state of Oregon, which passed a Death With Dignity Act in 1994.33 Although it seems to offer a negation of healing or an alternative in its absence, the euthanasia movement uses the language of healing in describing the death it seeks to provide. It promises hope and liberation through the cessation of suffering, and empowerment by virtue of the act of choosing one’s own death or that of another. Terminal illnesses progressively

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rob the patient of control and create dependency, but choosing the timing of one’s death enables patients to exert control one last time, to proclaim their autonomy even in the act of its termination. Focusing on voluntary euthanasia, advocates like Derek Humphrey, co-founder and longtime head of the Hemlock Society, speak of euthanasia as ‘‘self-deliverance.’’ For those who need help delivering themselves to death, Humphrey has written two how-to guides describing how best to kill oneself with dignity, Let Me Die Before I Wake (1981) and the best-selling Final Exit (1991).34 The term self-deliverance seems to assure a kind of restoration, the final element of healing, but it is not clear how self-destruction can coincide with a patient’s restoration. In other words, if the patient is delivered from suffering and fear, what is she delivered to? Other than some sort of personal understanding of the afterlife a patient may have—a hope for restoration in the hereafter—it appears euthanasia offers something far short of healing, though admittedly it provides a kind of relief or even restoration for those who have borne the burden of caring for ill or handicapped patients, as well as for the society that endures their presence. Critics like Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert Meilaender, and the late Pope John Paul II decry a supposed compassion and care for the sufferer which necessitates the elimination of the sufferer, and have assailed the readiness of euthanasia proponents and others to declare unacceptable the quality of life of those who cannot speak for themselves or are too much in the grip of depression, fear, or grief to think clearly and meaningfully.35 Paradoxically, at the very time Americans are focused intently on healing the body in the context of religion, we are greatly concerned with death and how to hasten it. Partly this results from new medical technologies that can prolong life in ways many people find frightening and dehumanizing, but it is also ideological. When the body and its proper functioning are elevated to a position of foremost importance, not only does one seek all possible means to promote health and well-being, but one is less able to tolerate physical degeneration. At the most basic level, the process of dying in all its gruesome and petty indignities provides the ultimate challenge to the Western conceit that we are autonomous beings in control of our lives. Bodily or mental failure that leaves us dependent and afraid— along with those who embody such weakness in their mental or physical handicaps—shows us that we are hardly the self-masters we imagine. As the autonomous self begins to disintegrate under the onslaught of death, euthanasia offers the pyrrhic victory of a putatively reintegrated self achieved in a self-chosen annihilation. Personal autonomy is a costly illusion.36

FUTURE PROSPECTS As the range of religious healing categories described above suggests, health and healing have become major tools of religious experience and analysis in the United States. Given the vast number of religious expressions in the United States and prevailing pluralistic sensibilities, health and healing broadly provide a useful common language for comparing disparate communities, asserting fundamental commonalities while recognizing

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diversity, and identifying the nature of personal religious experiences. Not only do health and healing speak to human encounters with illness, suffering, and recovery, as they long have in religious contexts, but metaphorically they address huge swaths of individual and collective experience. In our post-Christian culture, illness, health, and healing have displaced sin and redemption as the accepted discourse to analyze and experience grave human problems and their resolutions. Since this language has become common parlance across popular culture and in intellectual circles, it is hard to see it diminishing any time in the near future. No doubt certain movements or even religious healing categories as a whole will lose popularity and adherents, although others will arise, as the fickleness of the American spiritual marketplace, new medical developments, and the constant push for religious innovation in America impact our religious and medical landscapes. But many religious seekers eventually settle, and various signs point to a revivification of religious tradition and theology.37 Whether this has staying power, and whether it can displace the experiential focus on health and healing, remains to be seen. Regarding euthanasia, as the Terri Schiavo case in the spring of 2005 has demonstrated anew, it is a deeply contested and passionately argued issue that speaks to the very nature and meaning of human life and death.

NOTES I wish to thank Charles Lippy and John Schmalzbauer and the rest of the 2004–2005 Young Scholars in American Religion for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1. See, for example, Time, June 24, 1996; Newsweek, November 10, 2003. 2. For a wide range of articles that highlight these trends, see Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered, eds., Religion and Healing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For medical studies, see Jeff Levin, God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality-Healing Connection (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001); and Harold G. Koenig and Harvey Jay Cohen, eds., The Link between Religion and Health: Pscyhoneuroimmunology and the Faith Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. For the history of American medicine, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 4. James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–217; Starr, 79–234. 5. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Irvine Loudon, ed., Western Medicine: An Illustrated History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 6. Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 7. Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the TwentyFirst Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 328–41; Nancy A. Hardesty, Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements

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(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003); Robert C. Fuller, ‘‘Subtle Energies and the American Metaphysical Tradition,’’ in Barnes and Sered, eds., 377–79; Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 132–62. 8. Robert C. Fuller, Religious Revolutionaries: The Rebels Who Reshaped American Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); E. Brooks Holifield, A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1983). 9. Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, DC: Counterpoint), 209–34; Holifield, History of Pastoral Care, 275–300; Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952; reprint ed., New York: Ballantine Books, 1996); Joshua Loth Liebman, Peace of Mind: Insights on Human Nature That Can Change Your Life (1946; reprint ed., Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1994); Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul (Ligouri, MO: Triumph Books, 1949). 10. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001). 11. For a recent reading of the religious influence of the 1960s revolutions, see Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). See also James R. Lewis and Jesper Aargaard Petersen, eds., Controversial New Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12. For a historical interpretation of religious pluralism, see William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 13. David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 14. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993); idem, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 15. Whorton, 219–95. 16. See http://nccam.nih.gov/, accessed October 4, 2005. 17. A useful resource for investigating the state of medical research is Harold G. Koenig, Michael E. McCullough, and David B. Larson, Handbook of Religion and Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 18. For the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University, see http://www.dukespiritualityandhealth.org/; for the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing, see http://www.csh.umn.edu/. The Interfaith Health Program’s Web site is http://www.ihpnet.org/. 19. Brenda E. Brasher, Give Me that Online Religion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001); http://www.ernestrossi.com/PsycheSomaGeneExpression.htm; http://www. ramtha.com/, both accessed October 9, 2005. See also Gail M. Harley, ‘‘From Atlantis to America: JZ Knight Encounters Ramtha,’’ in Lewis and Petersen, eds., 319–30. 20. Cheryl Mattingly and Linda C. Garro, eds., Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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21. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. 3–11; Howard Spiro, Mary G. McCrea Curnen, Enid Peschel, and Deborah St. James, eds., Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 22. Kleinman, 3–74; Scarry, 27–157. 23. Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999); Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 24. Scarry, 161–326. 25. Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1997); Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (New York: Scribners, 2005). 26. See http://www.bennyhinn.org, accessed November 8, 2005; Patrick A. Polk, Michael Owen Jones, Claudia J. Herna´ndez, and Reyna C. Ronelli, ‘‘Miracu˜o de Atocha and lous Migrants to the City of Angels: Perceptions of El Santo Nin San Simo´n as Sources of Health and Healing,’’ in Barnes and Sered, eds., 103–20. Hinn’s Web site offers an intriguing view of the prevailing health and healing syncretism, even among historically exclusivist divine healers. Along with his own international healing ministry, Hinn’s site offers tips on diet and nutrition (including recipes); exercise, vitamins, and supplements; citations of medical research supporting the healing power of religion and particularly forgiveness; articles on the dangers of dehydration, the importance of physical activity, and blood pressure in seniors; links to numerous medical nonprofits such as the American Cancer Society; etc. 27. Fuller, ‘‘Subtle Energies,’’ 375–85. 28. Ibid., 379–84; Michael Winkelman, ‘‘Spirituality and the Healing of Addictions: A Shamanic Drumming Approach,’’ in Barnes and Sered, eds., 455–70. 29. Bobbie McKay and Lewis A. Musil, ‘‘The ÔSpiritual Healing ProjectÕ: A Study of the Meaning of Spiritual Healing in the United Church of Christ,’’ in Barnes and Sered, eds., 49–57; Ernest Kurtz, A.A.: The Story (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); Robert Wuthnow, ed., ‘‘I Come Away Stronger’’: How Small Groups Are Shaping American Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994); Dorthe Refslund Christensen, ‘‘Inventing L. Ron Hubbard: On the Construction and Maintenance of the Hagiographic Mythology of Scientology’s Founder,’’ in Lewis and Petersen, eds., 227–58. 30. Martin E. Marty, ‘‘Religion and Healing: The Four Expectations,’’ in Barnes and Sered, eds., 490–92; Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan, rev. ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Howard Brody, The Placebo Response: How You Can Release the Body’s Inner Pharmacy for Better Health (New York: Cliff Street Books, 2000); Anne Harrington, ed., The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration (New York: Norton, 1979). 31. See, from Barnes and Sered, eds., Grove Harris, ‘‘Healing in Feminist Wicca,’’ 253–63; Mary Farrell Bednarowski, ‘‘ÔOur Work Is Change for the Sake

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of JusticeÕ: Hope Community, Minneapolis, Minnesota,’’ 195–204; Ine´z Herna´ndez´ vila, ‘‘Las Mesa del Santo Nin ˜o de Atocha and the Conchero Dance Tradition A of Mexico-Tenochtila´n: Religious Healing in Urban Mexico and the United States,’’ 359–74; Julianne Cordero, ‘‘The Gathering of Traditions: The Reciprocal Alliance of History, Ecology, Health, and Community among the Contemporary Chumash,’’ 139–57. 32. Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17, 19, 24–25, 36, 54, 60, 71–76, 102–3, 124, 128, 130–32, 141, 151–52. See also Shai J. Lavi, The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 33. Dowbiggin, passim; Lavi, 41–162; Derek Humphrey and Mary Clement, Freedom to Die: People, Politics, and the Right-to-Die Movement (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 34. Derek Humphrey, Let Me Die Before I Wake (1981; reprint, New York: Dell, 1992); idem, Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, 2nd ed. (New York: Dell, 1996). 35. In Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey, eds., On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987); Gilbert Meilaender, ‘‘Euthanasia & Christian Vision,’’ 454–60; Stanley Hauerwas, ‘‘Rational Suicide and Reasons for Living,’’ 460–66; Hauerwas, ‘‘Authority and the Profession of Medicine,’’ 522–26; and John Paul II, ‘‘Euthanasia,’’ 441–44; Gilbert Meilaender, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 55–64; Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped and the Church (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). 36. For a helpful set of essays on both sides of the issue, see Michael M. Uhlmann, ed., Last Rights? Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Debated (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998). For more recent essays in favor of personal autonomy and choice, see Timothy E. Quill and Margaret P. Battin, eds., Physician-Assisted Dying: The Case for Palliative Care & Patient Choice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Concerning the ways we die today, see Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); and Sharon R. Kaufman, . . . And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of the Life (New York: Scribners, 2005). 37. Within Christianity, see for example, D.H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999); Thomas C. Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003); and Colleen Carroll, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Barnes, Linda L., and Susan S. Sered, eds. Religion and Healing in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Dowbiggin, Ian. A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Koenig, Harold G., Michael E. McCullough, and David B. Larson. Handbook of Religion and Health. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Numbers, Ronald L., and Darrel W. Amundsen. Caring and Curing: Health and Healing in the Western Religious Traditions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Porterfield, Amanda. Healing in the History of Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Uhlmann, Michael M. Last Rights? Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Debated. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998. Whorton, James C. Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Index AA. See Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) Abeyta, Bernardo, 42 abortion: American attitudes about, 89; Catholic views on, 157–62, 164, 167, 168–69, 174; Christian Right and, 66–68, 73, 88–93; court cases, 87, 88, 91–93, 165–67, 172–73; early history of, 155–62; and the fetus, views of, 159, 160, 169–70, 174–75; and mother’s welfare, 88, 156, 160, 161, 169–70; in 1960s and 1970s, 162–65; political factors in, 167–73 ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 115 Aderholt, Robert, 94 AELC. See Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC) African Americans: abortion and, 89, 162; civil rights movement and, 20–21, 28; conservatism among, 73–74; Democratic Party and, 73, 80; feminism and, 146; gay rights issue and, 87; homosexuality and, 116, 124; ordination of women and, 142; Republican Party and, 74; school vouchers and, 82; 2004 election trends among, 80, 81, 86 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 115–16

agnostics, 94 AIDS, 114–15 Alabama, and Ten Commandments on government property, 94 Alam, Faisal, 120 Alamo, 50–52 Alaska, abortion legislation, 164 ALC. See American Lutheran Church (ALC) Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 251 Al-Fatiha Foundation, 120 alternative medicine, 224–25, 243 America: A Tribute to Heroes (television broadcast), 7 American Academy of Religion, 120 American Center for Law and Justice, 70 American flag, 5 American Lutheran Church (ALC), 138–39 American Medical Association: abortion and, 157, 173; and professionalization of medicine, 238 American Psychiatric Association, on homosexuality, 111–12, 120 American society, post–World War II, 24–27, 162–63. See also 1960s era Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, 97

262 American Theological Library Association (ATLA), 105 American Unitarian Association, 135 Anatomy of an Illness (Cousins), 251–52 Anderson, Benedict, 5 Anglican Church, reproduction issues, 158, 185–86 animism, Disneyland and, 10 anti-war protests, 21 Antoninus, 160 Aquinas, 160 Aristotle, 159 Arkansas, abortion legislation, 171 ART. See assisted reproductive technologies (ART) artificial insemination. See assisted reproductive technologies (ART) Art of the Inner Meal (Altman), 225 Ashcroft, John, 72 Asian Americans: civil religion and, 29–30; feminism and, 146; impact of, on foodways, 224, 225 assisted reproductive technologies (ART): and children, views of, 193–96; Christian responses to, 191–93; historical perspective on, 183–91; and procreation, views of, 196–98. See also stem cell research Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC), 139 atheists, 62, 94 ATLA. See American Theological Library Association (ATLA) Atlanta, Georgia, 164, 170 Augustine of Hippo, 158, 159, 160 Avanzini, Pietro, 161 Baby M. decision, 188 Bahnsen, Greg, 63 Bailey, Derrick Sherwin, 109 Baptists: homosexuality and, 118, 119; ordination of women and, 135, 141 Barnett, Ruth, 164–65 Baulieu, Etienne-Emile, 173 Bean, Carl, 116

INDEX Beeson, Ty and Jeannette, 68 Bellah, Robert, 3–4, 19–20, 22–23, 29 Belotti v. Baird, 166 Benedict XVI (pope), 123, 169 best-selling books, Christian Right and, 72 Bible: and abortion, allusions to, 158, 159; gender-specific language in, 147–49; as patriotic symbol, 5; reading in schools, 22–23; use of, for swearing-in ceremonies, 4 Biel, William, 46 bioethics: cloning and, 190, 203–4; patient rights and, 187; stem cell research and, 202–7. See also abortion; assisted reproductive technologies (ART); morality biomedicine. See medicine birth control. See contraception bisexuality, 105, 115, 118, 120, 123. See also homosexuality Black, Hugo, 165 black Americans. See African Americans Blackmun, Harry: and abortion, 91–92, 165–66, 171, 186; and school prayer, 96 Bourdain, Anthony (Tony), 230–31 Bowers v. Hardwick, 87 Bray, Mike, 67 Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 170 Breyer, Stephen: and abortion, 90, 92; and school prayer, 96; and school vouchers, 82 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 218, 226 The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Bellah), 19 Brown, Edward Espe, 224, 225 Brown, Louise, 187 Bryan, William Jennings, 97 Bryant, Anita, 114 Buchanan, Pat, 89 Buddhism: civil religion and, 29–30; foodways, 224; homosexuality and, 121, 125

INDEX Bullitt-Jonas, Margaret, 221 Bush, George H.W., 170, 172 Bush, George W.: alignment of, with Christian Right, 67, 72, 90; and partial birth abortions, 173; in post–September 11 ceremonies, 7; and ‘‘snowflake embryos,’’ 175–76; and stem cell research, 176, 205 Butcher, Sam, 46–48 cable television, Christian Right and, 71, 72 California: abortion legislation in, 164, 168; and Proposition 71, 176; same-sex marriages in, 70 California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, 176 Calvary Chapel churches, 241 cargo cults, Disneyland as, 10 Carnegie, Dale, 241 Carter, Jimmy, 31 Casti Connubii, 158–59 Catholics: abortion and, 89, 157–62, 164, 167, 168–69, 174; contraception and, 158–59, 164, 185; homosexuality and, 87, 117, 123; impact of feminism on, 142–43; religious inclusion and, 242; reproductive technologies and, 185, 189, 191, 194, 195, 196; shift to individualism and, 112–13; stem cell research and, 176; 2004 election trends among, 81 CBST. See Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) Centers for Disease Control, fertility clinic success rates, 190 centrists, voting trends, 81 ceremonies. See public ceremonies and events Chalcedon Foundation, 63 Chapel of San Miguel por Barrio de Analco, 41 charismatic movement, 241, 249 Chernin, Kim, 220–21

263 children: feminism and, 132, 146–47; as gift, 193–96; homosexuality and, 114; public ceremonies and, 9–13; religious right and, 71 Chilton, David, 63 Chimayo´, Santuario de. See Santuario de Chimayo´ chiropractic medicine, 240 Chopra, Deepak, 224–25 Christian Church, 135 Christian Coalition, 31–32, 71, 89 Christian Defense Coalition, 94 Christian Reconstructionism, 62–66 Christian Right: abortion and, 31, 66–68, 73, 88–93, 169; African American voters and, 73–74; boycott of Disneyland by, 11; and Christian Reconstructionism, influence of, 62–66; civil religion and, 32; faithbased initiatives and, 71, 73–74, 82, 83–85; gay rights issue and, 68–71, 73, 85–88; intelligent design and, 97–98; origins of, 60–62, 65–66; patriotism of, 72; political influence of, 31–32, 66–73, 79–82, 89–91; school vouchers and, 82–83; and Ten Commandments on government property, 93–95 Christian schools: Christian Right views of, 85; use of Reconstructionist materials in, 63–64 Christian Science, 240, 250 Christian Vegetarian Association, 222 church attendance, election trends and, 80–81 Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), 137 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: homosexuality and, 108–9, 118, 119; ordination of women and, 142; tourist visitation of, 53 Church of Stop Shopping, 3, 12–15 Church of the Beloved Disciple, 109, 115 Church of the Nazarene, 137

264 church-state relations: abortion and, 88–93; faith-based initiatives and, 73–74, 82, 83–85; gay rights issues and, 68–71, 85–88; intelligent design curriculum and, 97–98; school prayer and, 22–23, 95–97; school vouchers and, 82–83; stem cell research and, 207–9; and Ten Commandments on government property, 93–95 civic ceremonies, 2, 3–5 civil religion: American shared identity as, 24–28; civic and political ceremonies in, 2, 3–5; conception and hypothesis of, 19–20; exclusionary nature of, 22, 34; modern religious diversity and, 28–34 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 133 civil rights movement, 20–21, 28 Clement, Robert, 109 Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, 164 Clinton, Bill: and abortion, 171, 172; and cloning, 190; and partial birth abortions, 173; and RU-486, 174; and stem cell research, 205, 206 cloning, 190, 203–4 Coffey, Linda, 165. See also Roe v. Wade Coffin, Henry Sloane, 253 coins, ‘‘in God we trust’’ on, 26 Colorado, anti-gay initiative, 68, 87 commercialism. See consumerism communism, opposition to, 25, 26 complementary medicine, 243. See also alternative medicine compulsory heterosexuality, 7 Comstock Act, 157, 158, 165 Concerned Women of America, 69 Conchero Dance tradition, 252 Concordia Theological Seminary, 139 Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST), 117 Connecticut: abortion legislation in, 156, 159; ban on contraceptives in, 157, 159; Griswold v. Connecticut,

INDEX 92, 165, 184; Menillo v. Connecticut, 166 conscientious objection, 21 Conscious Living (Cousens), 223 conservatism. See Christian Right Conservative Judaism: homosexuality and, 119; ordination of women and, 139–40, 141 ‘‘conspicuous consumption,’’ 27 consumerism: as ‘‘conspicuous consumption,’’ 27; protests against, 12–15; tourism and, 45–48 contraception: Catholic views of, 158–59, 164, 185; legislation against, 157; in 1960s, 184–85; right-to-life opposition to, 66; RU486 and, 173–74. See also assisted reproductive technologies (ART) cooking. See foodways Cook’s Tour, 230–31 Coral Ridge Ministries, 69 Corduba, Antonius de, 160 Cortes, Luis, 84 Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH), 109–10, 115 Cousins, Norman, 251–52 creationism, 97–98 CRH. See Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) crucifix, Santuario de Chimayo´, 41–42 crystals, healing and, 250 Cuban Americans, 29. See also Hispanic Americans cuisine. See foodways culture war. See Christian Right currency, ‘‘in God we trust’’ on, 26 Daniels, C. Mackey, 84 Daniels, Sedgwick, 83 Darrow, Clarence, 97 Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), 50, 52 Davis v. Davis, 188–89 death: attitudes about, 239; euthanasia and, 252–54, 255

INDEX Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather), 40–41 Death With Dignity Act, 253 Defense of Marriage Act, 87 Degeneres, Ellen, 32 deity. See divinity DeLay, Tom, 90 Democratic Party, 73, 79, 80 Dennett, Mary Ware, 157 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III), 111–12 Diet for a New America (Robbins), 222 Diet for a Small Planet (Lappe´), 221 dieting, 214, 217, 220–21 Dignity (organization), 113, 117, 118, 123 disease. See healing Disneyland/Disneyworld, 3, 9–12 divine healing, 249 divinity: in civil religion, 29–30; language about, 147–49; perceptions of, 242–43 Dobson, James, 88, 89, 90 Doe v. Bolton, 166 Domestic Religion, 219 dominion theology, 64 Donum Vitae, 189, 191, 194, 195, 196 Douglas, Mary, 216, 231 Douglas, William O., 165 Dover, Pennsylvania, 97 DRT. See Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) DSM-III. See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) Earth Save, 222 Eastern Orthodox Christianity, 143 eating. See foodways Eddy, Mary Baker, 240 education: evolution versus intelligent design in, 60, 97–98; parochial schools and, 61, 63–64, 85; school prayer and, 22–23, 95–97; school vouchers and, 82–83 egullet.com, 227, 228

265 Ehrlich, Elizabeth, 227–28 Eisenhower, Dwight, 24, 25–26 ELCA. See Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) elections. See presidential elections El Potrero, New Mexico, 41–44 ˜ o de Atocha, 249 El Santo Nin embryos, frozen. See frozen embryos; stem cell research Emmanuel movement, 240 Enesco Corporation, 46 Engel v. Vitale, 95–96 Episcopal Church: homosexuality and, 119; ordination of women and, 137–38; sacramental healing and, 240 Equal Rights Amendment, 31, 133 ethnic minorities: civil religion and, 28–30; foodways, 219; influence of, on American religion, 238, 241 Eucharist, in healing services, 249 Eucharistic Catholic Church, 109, 115 euthanasia, 252–54, 255 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), 139 evangelical Protestants: 2004 election trends among, 80, 81, 86; abortion and, 89, 169, 170; faith healing and, 240; gay rights issue and, 87; homosexuality and, 123; ordination of women and, 141; religious inclusion and, 242; and Ten Commandments on government property, 94. See also Christian Right; fundamentalism Evangelium vitae, 174 Evans, Tony, 83 evolution, 60, 97–98 ex-gay organizations, 118, 119, 120 Exodus International, 119 Fairfax Christian bookstore, 63 faith-based initiatives, 71, 73–74, 82, 83–85 faith healing, 240. See also healing

266 Falwell, Jerry: anti-gay activities of, 69, 70; and Moral Majority, 31, 89, 91; views on politics of, 71, 169 Family Research Council, 69, 89 family values, Disneyland and, 11–12 Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal (Schlosser), 215 fasting, 217 Federal Council of Churches. See National Council of Churches The Feminine Mystique, 131–32 feminism: early women’s rights movement and, 130–31; Equal Rights Amendment and, 31, 133; impact of, on religious thinking, 143–49; 1960s movement and, 21, 131–33; radical feminists and, 144–45; reformist feminists and, 145–46, 147, 149; religious language and gender and, 146–49 Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act of 1992, 190 fertility enhancement. See assisted reproductive technologies (ART) Final Exit (Humphrey), 254 Finkbine, Sherry, 163 Fisher, Mary Frances Kennedy, 225–26 Fletcher, Joseph, 253 Florida: abortion legislation in, 164; faith-based initiatives in, 83 Flowers, Robert, 165 Focus on the Family, 89 Food and Drug Act of 1906, 239 Food for Life (Jung), 216 Food in the USA: A Reader (Counihan), 218 Food Revolution (Robbins), 222–23 Foodways: dieting and, 214, 217, 220–21; and Eastern religions, influence of, 224–25; emphasis on, 213–14; historical and scholarly perspective on, 217–20, 231–32; literature about, 217, 225–31; raw food diets and, 223–24; and relationship to religion and

INDEX worldview, 214–17, 231–32; vegetarianism and, 221–23 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 109, 253 Foucault, Michel, 107 Fox News Channel, 71, 72 Freedman, Eugene, 46 Freedom of Choice Act, 172 Friedan, Betty, 131–32 frozen embryos, 175, 188–89. See also stem cell research Fujioka, Yasuhei, 46 fundamentalism: abortion and, 169; ordination of women and, 141; postmillennialism and, 64; women’s rights and, 131. See also Christian Right; evangelical Protestants The Gastronomical Me (Fisher), 226 gay rights: Christian Right opposition to, 68–71, 85–88; historical perspective on, 109–12. See also homosexuality; same-sex marriages gender disparity: African American attitudes about, 74; 1960s movement and, 21, 131–33; religious language and, 146–49; suffrage and, 130–31. See also feminism geophagy, 41, 43 Georgia: abortion legislation in, 163, 164, 166; anti-abortion activism in, 170 Gillespie, Ed, 83 Gingrich, Newt, 172 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader: and abortion, 90; and partial birth abortion, 92; and school prayer, 96; and school vouchers, 82 God: in civil religion, 29–30; language about, 147–49; perceptions of, 242–43 ‘‘God-and-Country’’ conservatism. See Christian Right; patriotism Goldstein, Sidney, 253 Good Friday celebrations, 43–44 Gourmet (magazine), 213–14

INDEX government: faith-based initiatives and, 71, 73–74, 82, 83–85; symbolism of, in inaugural ceremonies, 4–5. See also church-state relations Graham, Billy, 7, 25 Greene Dragon, 12 Green Gulch, 224 Greens Restaurant, 224 Gregory XIV (pope), 160 Grimke´, Angelina and Sarah, 130 Griswold v. Connecticut, 92, 165, 184 Guadalupe, Santuario de. See Santuario de Guadalupe Guatemala, Shrine of Our Lord of Esquipulas, 41 Gunn, David, 171 Hamaker, Brooks, 227 Harris v. McRae, 168 Hauerwas, Stanley, 254 Hawaii, abortion legislation, 164 Hay, Harry, 121 healing: categories of, 248–52; characteristics of, 246–48; distinguished from curing, 247; health and medical trends in, 241–44; historical perspective on, 238–41; and nature of illness experience, 244–46; at Santuario de Chimayo´, 41, 43, 44 health care trends, 241–44 Helms Human Life Statute, 168 Herberg, Will, 26–27 Hickman, Harrison, 171 Hill, Paul, 67 Hiltner, Seward, 241 Hinduism: civil religion and, 29–30; foodways, 224–25; homosexuality and, 121, 125 Hinn, Benny, 249 Hispanic Americans: 2004 election trends among, 81; abortion and, 89; civil religion and, 29; divine healing and, 249; feminism and, 146; gay rights issue and, 87; La Danza Conchera and, 252

267 historic events. See media events History of Animals (Aristotle), 159 HIV/AIDS, 114–15 Hodge, Archibald Alexander, 65 Hodge, Charles, 65 Hodgson, Jane, 165 Hoechst Marion Roussel, 174 Holiness churches: faith healing in, 240; ordination of women and, 137, 141–42 Holy Hunger (Bullitt-Jonas), 221 Holy Week celebrations, 43–44 homosexuality: bisexual and transgender issues and, 105, 115, 118, 120, 123; Christian Right opposition to gay rights, 68–71, 85–88; current/future issues for, 122–25; demedicalization of, 111–12, 120; ex-gay organizations and, 118, 119, 120; historical perspective on, 107–12; influence of, on organized religion, 106; as moral issue, 112–15; 1960s movement and, 21, 109–11; organizations concerned with, 109–10, 115–20; publications about, 105–6; religious identity and, 112–13, 121–22; and same-sex marriages, media coverage of, 7–8 Hooker, Evelyn, 112 Hope Community, 252 Humanae Vitae, 164, 185 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 114–15 humanistic healing, 251–52 Humphrey, Derek, 254 The Hungry Soul (Kass), 215–16 Hurricane Katrina, divine judgment claims, 32 Hyde, George, 109 Hyde, Henry, 168 identity formation: and association with place, 49; foodways and, 216; individualistic religious identity and, 112–13, 121–22; patterns of consumption and, 45, 48; tourism and, 38–39, 48–53, 54

268 illness, 244–46. See also healing imagined community, 5 Immaculate Conception proclamation, 160–61 immigrants: civil religion and, 28–30; influence of, on American religion, 238, 241 Immigration Act of 1965, 28, 241 inaugural ceremonies, 4–5 inclusiveness: pluralism and, 34, 242; in religious language, 146–49. See also gay rights; ordination of women incrementalism, 89, 90–91 infertility. See assisted reproductive technologies (ART) ‘‘in God we trust’’ on currency, 26 Institutes of Biblical Law (Rushdoony), 63 intelligent design, 97–98 Interchurch Center (New York City), 24 Interfaith Health Program, Emory University, 243 Internet: as source of health information, 244; use of, by Christian Right, 72 Introduction to Christian Economics (North), 63 in vitro fertilization, 183–84. See also assisted reproductive technologies (ART) Iraq war, 72 Islam: abortion and, 175; American attitudes about, 30, 72; attitudes of, about Christians, 30; homosexuality and, 120, 124–25 JCR. See The Journal of Christian Reconstruction (JCR) Jewish Theological Seminary, 140 Jews: homosexuality and, 117–18, 119; ordination of women and, 139–41; and Ten Commandments on government property, 94; vegetarianism and, 222 Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH), 118

INDEX John Paul II (pope): abortion and, 169, 174; death of, ceremonies surrounding, 8; and euthanasia, 254 Johnson, Lyndon, 21, 28 Johnson, Phillip, 98 JONAH. See Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH) Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine, 187 Jordan, James, 63 The Journal of Christian Reconstruction (JCR), 63 Judaism. See Jews Judaism and Vegetarianism (Schwartz), 222 Jung, Shannon, 216 Justice Sunday II, 90 Kansas, anti-abortion activism, 170 Kass, Leonard, 215–16 Kazantks, John Augustine, 109 Kennedy, Anthony: and abortion, 90, 91, 92; and partial birth abortion, 93; Republican Party opinion of, 88; and school prayer, 96; and school vouchers, 82 Kennedy, John F.: and civil religion, 27; and Commission on the Status of Women, 132–33; inaugural speech of, 4 Kentucky: faith-based initiatives in, 84; and Ten Commandments on government property, 94 Kerry, John, 86 Kesten, Deborah, 225 Kitzmiller v. Dover, 97 Krieger, Dolores, 250 La Danza Conchera, 252 Lady of Light Chapel (Loretto Chapel), 41 Lambeth Conference, 184–85 Land, Richard, 91 language, religious, gender issues, 146–49

INDEX Lanier, Sidney, 12 Latino Americans. See Hispanic Americans laughter therapy, 251–52 Lawrence v. Texas, 87 LCA. See Lutheran Church in America (LCA) LDS church. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Leadership Conference of Women, 134 Lee v. Weisman, 96 Leo XIII, (pope), 158 lesbians. See homosexuality Let Me Die Before I Wake (Humphrey), 254 LGBT people. See homosexuality liberalism, homosexuality and, 110 Liebman, Joshua Loth, 241 Life Dynamics, 67 liminal phases, rites and rituals, 4, 6 Lohman, Ann Trow, 156, 157 Loretto Chapel, 41 Louisville Neighborhood Initiative (LNI), 84 Lucey, Robert E., 51 Lusk, Herb, II, 83 Lutheran Church in America (LCA), 138–39 Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), 138–39 Lyne, Andy, 227 Lyon, Phyllis, 109 Machen, J. Gresham, 65 Madison, Deborah, 224, 229 The Madonna of 115th Street (Orsi), 219 magic, Disneyland and, 10–11 Mahoney, Patrick J., 94 Maine, abortion legislation, 163 Mama Lola (McCarthy Brown), 219 Manning, Timothy, 117 marriage: interdenominational, 24–25; proposed constitutional amendment defining, 73, 86; same-sex marriages and, 7–8, 68–71, 85–88

269 Martin, Del, 109 Marty, Martin, 251 Massachusetts: abortion legislation in, 156, 159; same-sex marriages in, 70, 85–86 mass media. See media events Mattachine Society, 110, 121 May, William F., 206–7 MCC. See Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) McCorvey, Norma, 165, 175. See also Roe v. Wade McKinney, Donald, 253 media events, 5–9 medicine: euthanasia and, 252–54, 255; historical perspective on, 238–41; patient rights and, 187; role of, in illness experience, 245–46; trends in, 241–44. See also alternative medicine; healing Meilaender, Gilbert, 254 Menillo v. Connecticut, 166 Mero, Ralph, 253 Mesmerism, 250 metaphysical healing, 249–50 Methodists: homosexuality and, 113, 119; ordination of women and, 136–37 Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), 115–16, 117, 120 Mexican Americans, 249, 252. See also Hispanic Americans Michaels, George, 164 Michigan, abortion legislation, 164 Mifeprestone (RU-486), 173–74 military, gays and lesbians in, 87 Miller, Zell, 172 mind-body healing. See healing miracles: divine healing and, 249; at Santuario de Chimayo´, 41–44 Miriam’s Kitchen (Ehrlich), 227–28 missions, San Antonio, Texas, 49–53 Missouri, abortion legislation, 91, 166, 171, 172 modernists, voting trends, 81 money, ‘‘in God we trust’’ on, 26

270 Moore, Roy, 94 morality: assisted reproductive technologies and, 191–93; contraception and, 164, 185; demedicalization of homosexuality and, 112, 113–14; stem cell research and, 202–3, 209–11. See also abortion; bioethics Moral Majority, 31, 61, 89, 91, 169 Mormons: homosexuality and, 108–9, 118, 119; ordination of women and, 142; tourist visitation of, 53 morning after pill. See RU-486 Mott, Lucretia, 130 Muslims: abortion and, 175; American attitudes about, 30, 72; attitudes of, about Christians, 30; homosexuality and, 120, 124–25 NARAL. See National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) NARTH. See National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) National Abortion and Reproductive Action League, 172 National Abortion Federation v. Operation Rescue, 170 National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), 164–65, 167, 171, 172 national anthem, as public ceremony, 5 National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), 120 National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), 190, 205 National Council of Churches: establishment of, 24; homosexuality issue and, 115 national identity: and the Alamo, 51–52; symbols of, 5. See also civil religion National Institutes of Health, Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 243

INDEX National Organization of Women (NOW), 133, 164 National Organization of Women (NOW) v. Scheidler, 170 National Parks, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, 51–53 National Right to Life Committee, 167 Native Americans: European influence on, 49–50; 1960s movement and, 21; sacred places and, 43–44 NBAC. See National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) Nebraska: partial-birth abortions in, 92–93, 173; same-sex marriage in, 87 New Age movement, 238, 241, 250 New Christian Right. See Christian Right New Jersey: abortion legislation in, 163; Baby M. decision and, 188; same-sex marriages in, 70 New Mexico, Santuario de Chimayo´, 41–44 The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead (Viguerie), 61 news events. See media events New Thought movement, 240, 250 New York State: abortion legislation in, 156, 164; same-sex marriages in, 70 Nightlife Christian Adoptions, 175–76 1960s era: abortion in, 162–65; civil rights movement in, 20–21, 28; contraception in, 184–85; feminism in, 21, 131–33; homosexuality in, 21, 109–11; overview of, 20–24, 27–28; religious movements in, 241–44 Nixon, Gary, 120 North, Gary, 63, 85 Northern Baptists (American Baptists), 135 Northup, Anne M., 84 NOW. See National Organization of Women (NOW) Nueva Esperanza, 84

INDEX OA. See Overeaters Anonymous (OA) O’Connor, Sandra Day: and abortion, 91, 92, 166, 167, 172; and partial birth abortion, 92; retirement of, implications of, 87, 88; and school prayer, 96; and school vouchers, 82–83 O’Donnell, Rosie, 8 Ohio: amendment banning same-sex marriage in, 86; attitudes about abortion in, 167; school voucher program in, 82 On Being a Real Person (Fosdick), 109 One Nation Under God (Walton), 63, 64 online religion, 244 Operation Rescue, 67, 68–69, 170 ordination of women, 133–40 Oregon: anti-gay initiative in, 68; euthanasia in, 253 Orthodox Catholic Church of America, 109 Orthodox Christianity, Eastern, 143 Orthodox Judaism: and exceptions to pro-life principles, 170; homosexuality and, 119; ordination of women and, 140–41 Overeaters Anonymous (OA), 221 paganism, Disneyland as, 10 pain, physical, 245 PAL. See Pro-Life Action League (PAL) parachurch organizations, homosexuality and, 119–20 Parks, Rosa, 28 parochial schools. See Christian schools partial birth abortions, 67, 68, 92–93, 173 pastoral counseling, 241, 250 patients: characteristics of healing, 246–48; illness experience and, 244–46; rights of, 187 Patriot Act, 72 patriotism: Christian Right and, 72; symbols of, 5 Paul (New Testament), 158

271 Paul VI (pope), 164, 185 Peale, Norman Vincent, 241 Pennsylvania: abortion legislation in, 172; faith-based initiatives in, 83, 84; intelligent design in, 97 Pentecostal churches: faith healing and, 240, 249; in 1960s, 241; ordination of women and, 141–42 Perkins, Tony, 86, 87–88, 90 Perry, Troy, 115 Petrini, Carlo, 215 pharmakeia, 158 Phillips, Howard, 65 Physiology of Taste (Brillat-Savarin), 218 pilgrimages: compared to tourism, 37–38; as form of public ceremony, 9; to Santuario de Chimayo´, 43–44. See also tourism pirate utopias, 10 Pius IX (pope), 157–58, 160, 161–62 Planned Parenthood of Kansas City v. Ashcroft, 166–67 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 92, 93, 172 Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, 166 Pledge of Allegiance: addition of ‘‘under God’’ to, 26, 71; as public ceremony, 5 pluralism: Christian Right and, 32; civil religion and, 28–34; immigration and, 28–30, 242; impact of, 45, 242–43; in 1960s, 22 Plymouth Rock Foundation, 63 political ceremonies, 2, 3–5 political protests: Church of Stop Shopping and, 3, 12–15; gay liberation movement and, 109–11; right-to-life supporters and, 66–67, 68–69 politics: abortion and, 167–73; Democratic Party, 73, 79, 80; and relationship with religion, historical perspective on, 59–60; Republican Party, 74, 79–82, 80–81, 98. See also Christian Right Politics (Aristotle), 159

272 postmillennialism, 62, 64 post–World War II period, 24–27, 162–63 Potter, Charles, 253 Powell, Colin, 74 prayer in schools, Supreme Court decision, 22–23, 95–97 Pray Your Weight Away (Shedd), 214 Precious Moments Inspiration Park, 46–48 Presbyterian Church (USA): abortion and, 156; homosexuality and, 119; ordination of women and, 136 presidential elections, 31, 79, 80–81, 86 President’s Council on Bioethics, 205–6 presuppositionalism, 62–63, 64 privacy rights, Supreme Court decisions, 87, 88, 184–85, 186 pro-choice supporters. See abortion Pro-Life Action League (PAL), 170 pro-life supporters. See abortion Promise Keepers, 71, 74 Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Herberg), 26–27 Protestants: 2004 election trends among, 80, 81, 86; abortion and, 89, 156, 169; gay rights issue and, 87; homosexuality and, 118–19; and minimization of denominational distinctiveness, 24–25; ordination of women and, 134–39, 141–42; pluralism among, 242; and Ten Commandments on government property, 94. See also Christian Right; specific denominations psychology/psychiatry: homosexuality, views of, 111–12, 120; union of, with religion, 240–41, 250–51 public ceremonies and events: characteristics of, 1–2, 15; civic and political, 2, 3–5; Disneyland/ Disneyworld and, 3, 9–12; media events and, 5–9; political protests as, 3, 12–15 Pueblo people, 43

INDEX Queer Nation, 115 Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, 67, 170 Radical Faeries, 121 radical feminists, 144–45 Ramtha School of Enlightenment, 244 raw food diets, 223–24 Raw Food/Real Food (Kenney and Melngailis), 223–24 Ray, Harold, 83 Reagan, Ronald: abortion and, 91, 168, 170–71; death of, ceremonies surrounding, 5; role of Christian Right in election of, 31 Reconstructionism. See Christian Reconstructionism Reconstructionist Judaism, 139–40 Reed, Ralph, 71, 89 reformist feminists, 145–46, 147, 149 Reform Judaism, 140 regional influences, civil religion and, 32–33 Rehnquist, William: and abortion, 91, 92, 166, 171; and school vouchers, 82 Reichl, Ruth, 213, 229 religious movements, 1960s, 241–44 Religious Right. See Christian Right reproduction and fertility. See assisted reproductive technologies (ART) Republican Party: African Americans in, 74; constituency of, 80–81; strategies of, for voter realignment, 79–82, 98. See also Christian Right Restell, Madame, 156, 157 resurrection, in postmillennialism, 62 A Return to Cooking (Ripert), 229–30 Reverend Billy, 3, 12–15 Rice, Condoleezza, 74 RICO. See Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes right-to-life supporters. See abortion right wing conservatism. See Christian Right

INDEX Ripert, Eric, 229–30, 231 rituals: civic and political, 2, 3–5; need for, 209; as rites of passage, 4. See also public ceremonies and events Rivers, Eugene, 83 The Road Less Traveled (Peck), 251 Robbins, John, 222–23 Roberts, John, 32, 93, 96 Robertson, Pat, 31, 32, 84, 89 Robinson, Gene, 119 Roe v. Wade: impact of, 88, 155, 186; movements against, 31, 66–67, 68, 91; Supreme Court interpretations of, 87, 88, 91–93, 166–67, 172–73, 186 Rogers, Carl, 241 Romer v. Evans, 87 Roof, Wade Clark, 216, 219 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 132 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 33 RU-486, 173–74 Ruhlman, Michael, 226, 229 Rushdoony, Rousas John, 63, 64, 65 Rutherford Institute, 69, 70 Sack, Daniel, 219, 221 Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Cafe´ (Reinhart), 228–29 sacred places: identity formation and, 49; Santuario de Chimayo´ as, 41–44 St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe, 40 Salt Lake City, Utah, 53, 109 salvation, in postmillennialism, 62 Salvation Army, ordination of women and, 137 Same-Sex Dynamics among NineteenthCentury Americans (Quinn), 108 same-sex marriages: Christian Right opposition to, 68–71, 85–88; media coverage of, 7–8; proposed constitutional amendment against, 73, 86. See also homosexuality San Antonio, Texas, missions of, 49–53 San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), 224 Sanger, Margaret, 157, 168, 253 San Juan Pueblo, 43

273 Santa Fe, New Mexico, tourism, 40–41 Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 96 Santuario de Chimayo´, 41–44 Santuario de Guadalupe, 41 ˜ or de Santuario de Nuestro Sen Esquipulas. See Santuario de Chimayo´ Saveur (magazine), 226–27 Scalia, Antonin: and abortion, 91, 92, 171, 172–73; and school vouchers, 82 Schaeffer, Francis August, 169, 170 Scheidler, Joseph, 170, 174 Schlosser, Eric, 215, 216 school prayer, Supreme Court decision, 22–23, 95–97 school vouchers, 82–83 Scientology, 251 Scopes Monkey Trial, 60, 97 secular humanism, 94 secularism: of public ceremonies, 1–2, 15; secular humanism and, 64 Semana Santa celebrations, 43–44 The Separation Illusion (Whitehead), 64 September 11, 2001, attacks: impact of, on Christian Right, 72; media coverage of, 6–7 Seventh-Day Adventists, 170 sexual orientation, 107–8. See also homosexuality SFZC. See San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) shamanic drumming, 250 Shamblin, Gwen, 214 Shedd, Charlie, 214 Sheen, Fulton J., 241 Shelby, Richard, 94 Sheldon, Andrea, 69 shepherd’s cycle legends, 42 sight-seeing. See tourism silent majority, 31 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, 122 sixties era. See 1960s era slavery: biblical treatment of, 147; role of, in war for Texas independence, 51–52

274 Slow Food Movement, 215, 229 Smith, Jeff, 229 ‘‘snowflake’’ children, 175–76 social contract, 3 social power, political rites, 2 Society for Truth and Justice, 69 Somerville, Annie, 224 Soulforce, 119–20 The Soul of a Chef: Journey to Perfection (Ruhlman), 226 Souter, David: and abortion, 90; and partial birth abortion, 92; and school prayer, 96; and school vouchers, 82; and Ten Commandments on government property, 94, 95 Southern Baptist Convention: homosexuality and, 118, 119; ordination of women and, 135, 141 South Park (television show), 72 Springs of Life Ministries, 68 Stanley, Charles, 72 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 130 stem cell research: and embryo’s status, views of, 176, 191, 202–3, 206, 209–10; public policy issues surrounding, 176, 203–7; role of religion in, 190, 207–11; scientific basis for, 176, 201 Stenberg v. Carhart, 92, 173 Stern, William and Elizabeth, 188 Stevens, John Paul: and abortion, 90; and partial birth abortion, 92; and school prayer, 96; and school vouchers, 82 Stoicism, 251 Stonewall Inn, 21, 111 Storer, Horatio, 156–57 suicide, 252–54 The Supper of the Lamb (Capon), 229 Supreme Court, U.S.: and abortion, 87, 88, 91–93, 166–67, 172–73, 186; and anti-sodomy laws, 85, 87; and balance of power, 88, 90, 92, 95; and partial birth abortion, 67, 92–93, 173; and privacy rights, 87, 88, 184–85, 186; rhetoric against,

INDEX 88, 90; and school prayer and Bible reading, 22–23, 95–97; and school vouchers, 82; and Ten Commandments on government property, 94–95 symbolism: patriotic, 5, 26; in political ceremonies, 2, 4–5; in sacred places, 41–44, 49 systemic healing, 252 Talen, Bill, 12–15 television: America: A Tribute to Heroes, 7; and broadcasts of public ceremonies/events, 5–9; cable, 71, 72; South Park, 72 Temple Square, Salt Lake City, tourist visitation of, 53 Ten Commandments on government property, 93–95 Tennessee: and frozen embryos, 188–89; and Scopes Monkey Trial, 97 terrorism: impact of, on Christian Right, 72; and media coverage of September 11, 6–7 Terry, Randall, 68–69, 170 Tewa people, 43 Texas: abortion legislation in, 88; antisodomy legislation in, 87; intelligent design in, 98; and Roe v. Wade, 165–66; San Antonio missions, 49–53; and Ten Commandments on government property, 94 theonomy, 62–63 Theonomy and Christian Ethics (Bahnsen), 63 therapeutic healing, 250–51 Therapeutic Touch, 250 Thoburn, Rosemary, 64 Thomas, Clarence, 74, 82, 92, 93 Thomas, Richard, 97 Thomas More Law Center, 97 Thompson, Myron, 94 Thornburgh decision, 172 tourism: commercialization of, 45–48; compared to pilgrimage, 37–38;

INDEX identity formation and, 38–39, 48–53, 54; and parallels to religion, 38–39; and search for aesthetic and authentic experiences, 39–44, 53–54 Towey, Jim, 84 traditionalists, voting trends, 81 Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), 69 transgender people, 105, 115, 118, 120, 123. See also homosexuality travel. See tourism Trinity, gender specific language about, 148–49 Tsi Mayoh, 43, 44 Turner, Victor, 6 TVC. See Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) UB. See United Brethren (UB) UFCM. See Unity Fellowship Church Movement (UFCM) UMC. See United Methodist Church (UMC) Unborn Victims of Crime bill, 67, 71 ‘‘unchurched’’ Americans, 23, 33 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 117 Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, 170 Unitarians, 135, 242 United Brethren (UB), 137 United Church of Christ (UCC), 242, 250–51 United Methodist Church (UMC): homosexuality and, 113, 119; ordination of women and, 137 U.S. presidents: deaths of, ceremonies surrounding, 5; election trends and, 31, 79, 80–81, 86; inaugural ceremonies of, 4–5. See also specific presidents U.S. Supreme Court. See Supreme Court Unity Fellowship Church Movement (UFCM), 116 Universalists, 135, 242

275 van Gennep, Arnold, 4 vegetarianism, 221–23 Vietnam War, anti-war activity, 21 Viguerie, Richard, 61 Vines, Jerry, 72 Vineyard churches, 241 violence, anti-abortion movement, 67, 170, 171 voting: and presidential election trends, 31, 79, 80–81, 86; as public ceremony, 5 Walton, Rus, 63, 64 Warfield, Benjamin B., 65 Washington, abortion legislation, 164 Watts, J.C., 74 WCTU. See Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 91, 171 Weddington, Sarah, 165. See also Roe v. Wade Weigh Down Workshop, 214 Wesleyan Methodist Church, ordination of women and, 137 Weyrich, Paul, 61, 71 White, Byron, 91, 92, 166 White, Mel, 119–20 Whitehead, John, 64, 70 Whitehead, Mary Beth, 188 Why Christians Get Sick (Malkmus), 223 Wiccans, 252 Wichita, Kansas, 170 Widdicombe, Judith, 172 Wilder, Doug, 171–72 Willard, Frances, 131 Wilson, Marc, 228 wine, 219–20 Wisconsin, faith-based initiatives, 83 Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, 12 women: Christian Right attitudes about, 60, 74; early women’s rights movement and, 130–31; food and dieting and, 220–21; gender and language and, 146–49; impact of, on

276 women (continued) religious thinking, 143–50; 1960s movement and, 21, 131–33; ordination and leadership of, 133–44; role of, in war for Texas independence, 52; second-wave feminism and, 131–34, 144–46; suffrage, 130–31 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 131 Women’s Ordination Conference, 142–43

INDEX Wood, Robert W., 109 World Council of Churches, 115 World Trade Center attack: impact of, on Christian Right, 72; media coverage of, 6–7 Wounded Knee, 21 Wyoming, women’s suffrage, 131 Young, Andrew, 172 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 82

About the Editor and Contributors CHARLES H. LIPPY has been the LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee since 1994. His interests in American religious life range widely. Among his more recent publications are Do Real Men Pray? Images of the Christian Man and Male Spirituality in White Protestant America (2005) and a new edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (2005), co-edited with Samuel. S. Hill. JONATHAN R. BAER, an assistant professor of religion at Wabash College in Indiana, has been an affiliate visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. There he worked on a history of divine healing among American Holiness and Pentecostal adherents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. THOMAS S. BREMER is assistant professor of religion at Rhodes College in Memphis. A specialist in American religions, he has focused his research on the intersections of religion and tourism at locations such as Temple Square in Salt Lake City, pilgrimage destinations in Mexico, the Lorraine Motel/National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and the Spanish colonial missions in San Antonio. ANTHONY E. COOK is a professor of law at the Georgetown Law Center. A graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, he has completed post-graduate fellowships in ethics and religion at Harvard where his work focused on the intersections of race, law, religion, and politics in contemporary America.

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CONTRIBUTORS

LEE GILMORE completed her Ph.D. in religious studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley in 2005. She currently teaches at Chabot College in Hayward, CA. She is also co-editor of AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (2005). JULIE INGERSOLL is associate professor of religion at the University of North Florida. Her books include Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles (2003) and Baptists and Methodist Faith in America (2003). She has also written numerous articles on religion in America and is currently completing a book on the Religious Right. ALINE H. KALBIAN is associate professor of religion at Florida State University. She is the author of Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism (2005) and several articles on bioethics and Catholic moral theology. CORRIE E. NORMAN received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is currently completing a book on the links between food and faith in American culture. With Don S. Armentrout, she edited Religion in the Contemporary South (2005). She is also a director of the American Academy of Religion. DAVID H. SMITH retired in 2003 as professor in the department of religious studies and director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University. Since then, he has taught at both DePauw University and Yale University. DEBORAH L. VESS is professor of history and interdisciplinary studies and coordinator of the Center of Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Georgia College & State University. She has published articles on medieval theology in journals such as Word and Spirit, Mystics Quarterly, American Benedictine Review, and Modern Schoolman and chapters in several books linking medieval and modern religious issues. She has been joint editor of Vox Benedicta: A Journal of Monastic Studies and is the founding co-editor of Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History. MELISSA M. WILCOX is assistant professor of religion and gender studies at Whitman College. Her interest in individual and communal strategies of identity negotiation, especially in religious and quasi-religious contexts, is evinced in her Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community. She is currently working on a book entitled Spirituality and Sex in the City: Queer Religiosities in Practice and Theory. BARBARA BROWN ZIKMUND received her Ph.D. from Duke University. She has held academic and administrative appointments at Chicago Theological Seminary, Pacific School of Religion, and Hartford Seminary and is the author of numerous books and articles on women clergy in American religious history. Before retiring in 2005, she was professor of American studies at Doshisha University in Japan. She was ordained as clergy in the United Church of Christ in 1964.

About the Advisory Board PHILIP GOFF is director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and associate professor of religious studies and American studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, as well as co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. His recent books include Themes in American Religion and Culture and the Columbia Documentary History of Religion in American Since 1945, edited with Paul Harvey. R. MARIE GRIFFITH is associate professor of religion at Princeton University. She is author of God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission and Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. She is currently writing a book on links between evangelicalism and sexuality and also co-editing a volume on Women and Religion in the African Diaspora. PAULA KANE is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh where she holds the Marus Chair of Catholic Studies. She teaches courses on American religious history, popular religion, religion and film, immigration, and ethnicity. Her scholarly interests include sacred architecture, mystical phenomena, and gender issues in the study of religion. She is presently completing a history of the stigmata in modern Catholicism. ANTHONY B. PINN is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religious studies at Rice University. His research interests include African American religious thought, liberation theologies, religion and popular culture, the aesthetics of black religion, and African American humanism. He is author or editor of sixteen books related to these areas of research.

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AMANDA PORTERFIELD is the Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion and director of graduate studies in religion at Florida State University. She is the author of a number of books, including Protestant Experience in America (2006), Healing in the History of Christianity (2005), and The Transformation of American Religion (2001). With John Corrigan, she edits the quarterly Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. She is a past president of the American Society of Church History. PETER W. WILLIAMS is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he has taught since 1970. A past president of the American Society of Church History, he is author of Popular Religion in America, America’s Religions, and Houses of God. He is also the editor of several reference sets, including (with Charles H. Lippy) the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience.

Faith in America

Faith in America Changes, Challenges, New Directions

Volume 3 Personal Spirituality Today

EDITED

BY

CHARLES H. LIPPY

Praeger Perspectives

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faith in America : changes, challenges, new directions / edited by Charles H. Lippy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-98605-5 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-275-98606-3 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-275-98607-1 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-27598608-X (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. United States—Religion. I. Lippy, Charles H. BL2525.F33 2006 2006022880 200.9730 090511—dc22 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright ' 2006 by Charles H. Lippy All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006022880 ISBN: 0-275-98605-5 (set) 0-275-98606-3 (vol. 1) 0-275-98607-1 (vol. 2) 0-275-98608-X (vol. 3) First published in 2006 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Contemporary Worship: Trends and Patterns in Christian America David R. Bains A Visionary People: Religion and the Visual Arts in America Kelly J. Baker

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Chapter 3

Personal Spirituality Merrill M. Hawkins, Jr.

Chapter 4

Out of the Mouths of Babes: Religion and Spirituality among American Children and Teens Todd M. Brenneman

61

Living Fiction: American Spirituality and Best-selling Novels Amy Johnson Frykholm

81

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

The Footprints of Film: After Images of Religion in American Space and Time S. Brent Plate

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101

Chapter 7

The Internet and American Religious Life Douglas E. Cowan

119

Chapter 8

Workplace Spirituality Lake Lambert

141

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Chapter 9

CONTENTS

Nature Religion and Environmentalism in North America Bron R. Taylor and Gavin Van Horn

Chapter 10 Religion and the Environment in America Lisa Sideris Chapter 11 From Muscular Christianity to Divine Madness: Sports and/as Religion in America Arthur J. Remillard

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Chapter 12 From Faith to Fear: Religion in a World of Terror Darryl V. Caterine

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Index

257

About the Editor and Contributors

273

About the Advisory Board

277

Preface

T

he American religious landscape continues to baffle pundits. The land without a legally established church, analysts long suggested, would rapidly succumb to secularization and modernization. Fewer and fewer would identify with organized religion. Matters of faith and belief would have ever declining importance in public discourse. American men and women would increasingly regard religion as an anachronism. All of that speculation proved wrong. Among the nations of the earth, the United States continues to nurture vibrant religious institutions; millions claim religious faith as vital to their own sense of well-being; politicians freely use religious language when talking about policy; matters of ethical import still stir controversy, often leading to court cases whose resolution frequently pleases no one. If religious faith remains integral to America as a nation and to Americans as a people, that faith is not cut from a single cloth. The dynamics of religious life continue to change, bringing hope to some for an even greater influence of religion in common life and fear to others that should a single religious style gain too much influence, other perspectives will become seen as dangerous falsehood. In 1976, Newsweek proclaimed the ‘‘year of the evangelical,’’ marking the coming of age of one expression of Protestant Christianity in American life.1 In December 2005, in a highly publicized court case, a judge overturned the policy of a local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, that had required biology teachers to read a statement pronouncing evolution just theory and not a proven scientific fact and also to teach what proponents called ‘‘intelligent design,’’ an understanding that detractors saw as injecting a particular theological approach into the curriculum. The thirty years framed by those two incidents mark decades of ferment and sometimes heated discussion about the role of religion in American life. Three years before the ‘‘year of the evangelical,’’ the U.S. Supreme

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Court in Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal in the United States under particular sets of circumstances, sparking a debate over the meaning of life and theological controversies over when life itself began that continued into the years after the courts struck down the required teaching of intelligent design. Along the way, fresh controversy erupted over kindred issues such as euthanasia, stem cell research, and cloning. All those controversies had religious dimensions. Meanwhile, mainline Protestant denominations bemoaned their declining memberships, even as they watched megachurches and unaffiliated congregations mushroom in size. If membership statistics remained relatively constant, there was in the decades since 1970 a shifting in terms of where folks actually became members and also a growing number who eschewed formal affiliation even if they declared themselves to be very spiritual, although not religious. Other issues rocked the religious sector, from the fundamentalist and then Pentecostal resurgence that cascaded across American Protestantism to rancorous debates over whether gay, lesbian, or transgender persons should be welcomed into church membership, given religious blessing to unions on par with marriage, and offered opportunities to serve as clergy. Some continued to struggle with the influence of second-wave feminism; if more and more bodies ordained women to the professional ministry, the nation’s two largest Christian groups, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, remained adamant in their insistence that only men could serve in the ordained professional ministry. Changes in immigration law in 1965 meant that the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of Americans who identified themselves as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or some variant thereof. As Harvard University professor Diana Eck put it, a Christian nation had become the world’s most religiously diverse country.2 Add to this pluralistic mix a growing fascination with the Internet, a passion for nature and its spiritual resources, the horror of charges of pedophilia brought against Roman Catholic priests, debates over whether the wildly popular Harry Potter books and movies etched Satanic impulses into the minds of children, concern over the morality of stem cell research, an awareness that even dietary patterns have religious dimensions, and an array of other issues. It is clear that religion, however defined, and faith, however expressed, remain central features of American life, but features that bring a host of challenges. The thirty-six essays that comprise the three volumes of Faith in America: Changes, Challenges, New Directions probe many of these currents in American religious life. The twelve in the first volume focus primarily on the transformations that have rocked organized religious life in the United States. Those in the second move broadly into areas of challenges that have come to religious practice, while the twelve essays in the third volume focus more on matters of debate and controversy. Together they suggest that faith in America is not only alive and well, but pushing in fresh directions to speak to changing circumstances and conditions of life.

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General readers, scholars, and students will find in these essays summaries of the major trends in American religious life since the last half of the twentieth century. They will also find careful reflection and analysis on the changes and challenges that have come to religious institutions, on the array of new issues that have emerged on the religious scene, and on what the future seems to hold for that unfolding drama that is faith in America.

NOTES 1. Kenneth L. Woodward et al., ‘‘Born Again!’’ Newsweek 90 (October 25, 1976): 68–76. 2. Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘‘Christian Country’’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).

Acknowledgments

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hen Praeger editor Suzanne Staszak-Silva first approached me about organizing these volumes, I knew at once that I could not undertake the task alone. After all, what stands out as a ‘‘must discuss’’ issue or topic to one interpreter of American religious life may seem to another to be peripheral at best. Hence one of my first moves was to invite a cluster of scholars to form an advisory board that would help identify the most pertinent topics for inclusion as well as scholars who might be poised to offer insightful appraisals of those topics. I am grateful to those fellow scholars who agreed to assist in this capacity: Philip Goff of Indiana UniversityPurdue University at Indianapolis, Marie Griffith of Princeton University, Paula Kane of the University of Pittsburgh, Anthony Pinn of Rice University, Amanda Porterfield of Florida State University, and Peter W. Williams of Miami University. Thank you. Countless colleagues offered names of potential contributors, sometimes making an initial contact with them on behalf of the project before I had the opportunity to invite them to participate. Altogether, thirty-nine individuals shared their research, insight, and writing skills to bring these three volumes together. I owe each a great debt, although I am sure that there are a few who are looking forward with great delight to their appearance in print since publication will finally mean that I am no longer hounding them about an endnote reference, deadline, or seemingly awkwardly constructed prose. Much of my work on these three books was completed during the fall semester of 2005, when I was fortunate to have been released from teaching responsibilities. For making that shift in teaching duties possible, I extend my thanks to William Harman, head of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of Tennessee, and to Herbert Burhenn, then dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences and now acting university provost. I have benefited from the wise editorial counsel of

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Suzanne Staszak-Silva and Lisa Pierce at Praeger; one cannot work on a project such as this without editorial support. For more than forty years, the religious culture of the United States has consumed my intellectual interests. It is my hope that the thirty-six essays in these three volumes will stimulate your reflection on the multitudinous dimensions of religion in this most religious of nations.

CHAPTER 1

Contemporary Worship: Trends and Patterns in Christian America David R. Bains

‘‘W

orship wars’’ or ‘‘worship awakening’’? Although Christians debated what to call it, no one disputed that at the turn of the millennium ‘‘worship’’ was a prominent topic of concern.1 This new attention to worship had its roots in the years from 1960 to 1975, but became especially prominent among evangelicals in the 1990s. In the 1960s ‘‘the world’’ was strongly emphasized in American religion. There was a widespread concern for religion to be ‘‘relevant’’ and not separated from secular life. The dominant paradigm of American religion also shifted from ‘‘mainline to nonconformist,’’ as authority moved from traditional practices and denominations to innovative programs and parachurch ministries.2 These developments helped shape a desire for ‘‘contemporary’’ forms of worship. Over the next several decades, a profound sense of cultural change drove many to seek styles of music, ritual, architecture, and speech appropriate to an age of gender equality, rock and roll, television, and the Internet. In addition to this demand for a contemporary style, there were other movements promoting new understandings of public worship. Three movements emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s sought to reshape worship. Started among Roman Catholics and some Protestants in the 1920s, the liturgical movement became much more influential in the 1960s primarily because of the dramatic reforms of Catholic worship authorized by the Second Vatican Council in 1963. The council adopted the movement’s vision of worship’s being centered in a Sunday service consisting of the preaching of the Word and the celebration of the Eucharist in which all Christians actively participated. To facilitate this, Catholics quickly switched from Latin to English and developed rites based on ancient models using contemporary language and music. Spurred by the

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Catholic example, Protestants soon undertook their own extensive liturgical revisions. In the quest for the contemporary, liturgical reformers were joined by others who did not share their theology of worship. Experimentation in worship was advocated by many who were convinced that traditional styles of worship contributed to the church’s irrelevance. This was especially the case among youth ministers working with a generation whose culture was shaped by rock and roll. Evangelical youth pastors in the early 1970s developed high-energy services shorn of traditional churchly language and style in order to attract baby boomers disillusioned by organized religion. About fifteen years later, these so-called ‘‘seeker services’’ became a second major reform movement as churches sought to minister to adult baby boomers. The third movement also originated in the rock-and-roll culture of the 1960s but emerged from charismatic churches. Like seeker services, praise and worship services used contemporary music, but they demanded worshippers’ active involvement in an extended time of singing. A new genre of sacred song developed through which worshippers expressed their personal devotion and entered into communion with God. By the late 1990s, criticism of some of these movements, notably seeker services, developed into what appeared to be a distinct movement. While worship services associated with ‘‘the emergent church,’’ as it was often called, varied widely, they shared a self-understanding of being ‘‘postseeker sensitive’’ and emphasized tradition, mystery, and community.3 In its emphasis on multisensory worship, ritual, the recovery of ancient practices, and alternative settings such as coffeehouses, emergent worship echoed many mainline Protestant experiments of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While these four reform movements were not always separated in practice, through their intersection with one another, a general quest for the contemporary, and older traditions of worship, they shaped much of the ferment over worship.

TRADITIONS OF WORSHIP Surveying the historical development of Christian worship to the late twentieth century, James F. White identified eleven major traditions of theology and practice. In addition to the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic, he arranged the Protestant traditions on a spectrum according to how far they departed from pre–sixteenth century traditions.4 In examining changes in worship in the late twentieth century, it is helpful to group these traditions into three major categories. Those on the conservative end of the spectrum, Lutheran and Anglican, along with Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic may be called the liturgical traditions. At the other end of the spectrum are the free-church traditions: Anabaptist, Separatist/ Puritan, Quaker, Frontier, and Pentecostal. The Reformed and Methodist traditions fall in between and might be termed semi-liturgical. Given the traditions’ internal diversity, some would argue for further delineation such as between the ‘‘revivalist’’ and ‘‘formal evangelical’’ wings of the American evangelical tradition that White termed ‘‘Frontier.’’5 A strong

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case can also be made that the distinctive history and practices of many African American Protestants are best understood as a separate tradition of worship.6 The liturgical traditions seek to preserve the variety of services that developed in the first few centuries of Christianity. They share a strong focus on the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which they regard as the principal weekly service of the church. Historically, they have ordered their services by detailed texts and traditions (known as liturgies) that prescribe the words, actions, and objects to be used. The annual cycle of services is further delineated by a calendar of feasts and fasts known as the liturgical year. Although ‘‘liturgical’’ can serve simply as an adjective for any public worship, these traditions’ particular fidelity to traditional liturgies has made it the most common designation for them. Semi-liturgical traditions have retained liturgical characteristics in their official documents, though often in a simplified form. American Presbyterians have historically ordered their worship by a ‘‘directory’’ that specifies how various services should be conducted, rather than by a more detailed liturgy. In the twentieth century, the denomination has authorized service books as well. American Methodists have always had official texts for sacramental services. In practice, congregations in semi-liturgical traditions have varied widely in how closely they adhere to their tradition’s liturgical practices and sacramental teachings. Free-church traditions dispense with traditional liturgical texts and practices and, to varying degrees, deemphasize the sacraments. They seek to order their worship on what they regard as purer or more primitive norms. The traditions can be distinguished from one another based on whether they have usually found these norms detailed in the Bible (Separatist/Puritan), revealed directly by the Holy Spirit (Quaker and Pentecostal), or discovered through experience (Frontier). The ‘‘Frontier’’ tradition has been the most prominent tradition in American Christianity. Most recent movements have either been shaped by it or reacted against it. White termed this, the principal worship tradition of American evangelicalism, ‘‘Frontier’’ because it emerged from nineteenthcentury frontier revivals. This approach was classically espoused by revivalist Charles G. Finney in his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835). Finney defended his departure from traditional practices and a variety of ‘‘new measures’’ he had used in his career as a revivalist, insisting, ‘‘God has established no particular measures to be used.’’ God’s commission to modern leaders was the same as to the apostles, ‘‘Do it—the best way you can—ask wisdom from God—use the faculties he has given you.’’7 His target audience was not only the unchurched, but also Christians whose spiritual lives needed to be revived. In the Frontier tradition, worship services are understood through the lens of revivals. Their primary purpose is to lead individuals to a new degree of religious dedication. Whatever means effectively accomplish this goal are acceptable. As the tradition developed, it stretched beyond evangelicalism to include churches in many traditions, including liberal Protestantism.8

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Churches in the Frontier tradition developed their own customary practices of worship. Some services were more complex, incorporating traditional liturgical elements that increased the congregation’s participation while maintaining a formal atmosphere. The Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, responsive readings, and the Gloria Patri were often included. The basic structure of the service remained the same. A hymn began the service, followed by prayers, music from the choir, possibly scripture readings, and announcements. The offering was collected and another hymn or anthem sung before the sermon. All this might be referred to as the ‘‘preliminaries.’’ The sermon was the focal point of the service. It was often followed by an invitation to come forward for prayer or to announce one’s desire to join the church.9 The Lord’s supper would be celebrated quarterly, perhaps monthly, at the end of the service (often one with a shorter-than-usual sermon) or at an evening service. Given the tradition’s focus on the individual and its rationalistic approach to the sacraments, baptism was seen chiefly as a means of identifying Christians and the Lord’s supper as a reminder of Christ’s death.10

MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRADITIONALISM The demand for the ‘‘contemporary’’ that began in the 1960s was in part a response to the emphasis on ‘‘tradition’’ in the preceding decades. World War II and the cold war helped cultivate a sense of nostalgia and a desire to connect to history and tradition.11 In earlier decades, Protestants had experimented with theater-style seats, auditorium arrangements, and churches that were difficult to distinguish from banks, libraries, and theaters, but from World War I to the 1960s the demand was for a church that looked like a traditional church. This usually meant an architectural style with significant historical associations whether gothic, colonial, or early Christian. After World War II, more churches in modern styles were built, but towers, steeples, steeply pitched roofs, and long naves with wooden pews ensured that despite the modern style the building would be instantly recognizable as a church.12 In mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, liturgical reformers promoted the recovery of historic liturgical practices. Many Protestant clergy shifted from business suits to black gowns with stoles. Some Catholic churches promoted the singing of Gregorian chant. Protestant hymnals edited in this period, such as the Methodist Hymnal (1966) and the Lutheran Service Book and Hymnal (1958), included more liturgies and hymns from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.13 Fewer recently composed hymns entered congregations’ repertoire.14 Crosses and candles were introduced in churches that had never had them. Most Methodist and Presbyterian churches built or remodeled in this period moved their pulpit to the side to make the communion table the focal point. This evoked medieval churches and signaled that the church was sacred space, separate from the world.15

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THE TURN TO THE CONTEMPORARY In the early 1960s, critiques of this focus on tradition and the institutional nature of the church emerged as church leaders emphasized the worldly, the contemporary, and the relevant. The church, critics argued, should free itself from ‘‘suburban captivity’’ and be active ‘‘in the world.’’16 Proponents of secular theology reflected a new confidence about human culture and achievement.17 Revelation was to be found not only in scripture and tradition, but in the secular world. This perennial theme of liberal theology was not so much new as it was renewed after the turn to tradition in mid-century, but it affected worship more than in previous generations. In part, this was because of a greater concern about the church’s nature and status in society. In 1961, the World Council of Churches commissioned a six-year study of ‘‘the missionary structure of the congregation.’’ Undergirding the study was the rejection of the idea that the church should have a commanding role in society. Rather, as the influential Dutch theologian Johannes Hoekendijk explained, the mission of the church was to be a servant, to cooperate with the mission that God was conducting in the world. The church was better understood as an ‘‘event’’ than an institution.18 The Second Vatican Council expressed a similar view of the church, explaining that the church was the ‘‘people of God’’ called to be ‘‘the light of the world and the salt of the earth’’ while dwelling as a ‘‘Ôpilgrim in a foreign land.Õ’’19 Donald McGavran, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, promoted a very different missiology that also encouraged Christians to adapt their forms of worship to local culture. McGavran’s Church Growth movement emphasized what he termed the ‘‘homogeneous unit principle,’’ that is, ‘‘people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers.’’20 As applied to North America by C. Peter Wagner and others, Church Growth encouraged congregations to evaluate their worship services based on how visitors would see them and remove anything that would discourage a favorable impression.21 Both Church Growth and the servant church demanded that congregations reevaluate traditional practices and explore new forms of worship.

THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT In this context, the liturgical movement began to reshape the worship of liturgical, semi-liturgical, and even free-church traditions dramatically. The movement began in Europe among Roman Catholics in the early twentieth century. It quickly spread to the United States and expanded to include Lutherans, Episcopalians, and, by the 1950s, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other Reformed.22 In the 1960s the movement entered a new period of ecumenical interaction and widespread dissemination of its ideas through dramatic reforms of text and practice. Three factors made these possible: the Second Vatican Council’s authorization of reform of the Roman Catholic liturgy and worship in the vernacular, the idea that

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liturgy consisted of actions rather than of texts, and new ecumenical common ground in sacramental theology. The liturgical movement was shaped by research on the history of Christian worship. This research showed that worship was a communal ritual in which all actively participated. The word ‘‘liturgy,’’ it was explained, was derived from the Greek words for ‘‘work’’ and ‘‘people.’’ Thus, it was the ‘‘work of the people.’’ To Catholics this meant that the mass was not merely a ceremonial sacrifice offered by the priest. To Protestants this meant that worship was not primarily the sermon and prayers offered by the minister. For both, liturgy was a communal celebration through word, prayer, and sacrament of Christ’s work of redemption. Through the liturgy, Christians participated in Christ’s saving acts and were shaped to be his body for the world. Since at least the Reformation, liturgical worship was defined by uniform liturgical texts such as the Book of Common Prayer or the Tridentine Roman Missal. Examining the early church, however, liturgical historians discerned not a fixed text, but sets of actions performed in a particular sequence. These actions included speech-acts, such as prayers. The topics of these might be specified; there also might be some unchanging texts, particularly for congregational responses. Fundamentally, however, liturgy was understood to be determined by the types and sequence of actions, not by set texts. This opened the door to both contemporary language and ecumenical cooperation. No longer were reforms limited to cautious revisions of traditional texts. New texts in contemporary language sanctioned by several denominations were possible. Multiple options could be provided, such as the nine Eucharistic prayers included in the Roman Catholic Sacramentary.23 One could even conduct liturgical services without fixed texts, so long as common liturgical patterns were followed.24 In addition to this common understanding of the form of liturgy, a common understanding of its purpose emerged. The focus of all the various liturgies of the church from the Eucharist, to baptism, to daily prayer was understood to be a celebration of and participation in the ‘‘paschal mystery,’’ God’s work of redemption in the life, death, resurrection, and final coming of Jesus. The focus on all of salvation history replaced the narrower focus on Christ’s atoning death and brought a more joyful tone to all liturgies, especially the Eucharist. Following the German monk Odo Casel, many theologians taught that in the early church, the liturgy, especially baptism and the Eucharist, was understood as making the saving work of Christ mystically present.25 The understanding of sacraments and other aspects of liturgy as signs and actions that disclose the works of God to Christians and enable past actions to become presently effective won broad acceptance and has provided a new common ground for ecumenical agreement in sacramental theology as shown in the 1982 World Council of Churches’ document, Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry.26 It also enabled Protestants to move beyond their historic focus on words to affirm the importance of objects and actions in worship. The new liturgies adopted by denominations beginning around 1970 were very similar in structure and content. The basic service was the

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weekly service of word and sacrament. This consisted of four parts: the gathering, the service of the word, the service of the table, and the dismissal. The rites composing each of these parts typically occurred in the same order, though there was some variation among denominations. Protestant churches that did not observe the Eucharist weekly were encouraged to follow the same order, substituting an alternative thanksgiving rite for the Eucharist. Liturgies for baptism also took similar shapes. Given the focus of the liturgical movement on the early church and its awareness of the church’s existence amid a secular, rather than a Christian, society, baptismal liturgies were reformed to recognize believers’ baptism as typical (even as infant baptism continued to be practiced). This was most fully expressed in the Roman Catholic Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, a program of catechesis that stretched over many weeks culminating in baptism and the other rites of initiation at the Easter Vigil. Other denominations adopted similar programs. In all liturgies, there was an emphasis on vivid symbolic action. The dramatic act of immersion, for example, became a more common form of baptism. Several new practices based on early church examples increased the sense of informality in worship, such as standing for prayer and worshippers greeting one another at the exchange of the peace. While differences among denominations remained, the similar rites and theologies made it more possible than ever before to speak of a single liturgical tradition. The orientation away from liturgy as text and toward liturgy as a structure of action also helped free-churches embrace liturgical worship.27 Perhaps the most broadly influential reform was the new cycle of readings for the various Sundays and feasts authorized by the Second Vatican Council. Whereas the traditional Sunday lectionary provided only two readings (one from a New Testament letter and one from a Gospel) and repeated every year, the new Ordo lectionum missae (1969) provided for more of the Bible to be read by adding a selection from the Old Testament and a psalm for every Sunday and repeating only every three years. This three-year lectionary was quickly adopted in slightly modified form by Protestants beginning in 1970 with the Presbyterian Worshipbook. The Common Lectionary, published in 1983, and the Revised Common Lectionary of 1992 were prepared by the Consultation on Common Texts to replace the various versions developed by different Protestant denominations. The Revised Common Lectionary and the Catholic lectionary generally assign the same readings from the Gospels and New Testament, but use different Old Testament passages in the seasons after Epiphany and Pentecost.28 In its various forms, the three-year lectionary has enjoyed widespread use. Clergy in many denominations have accepted the argument that preaching the lectionary results in a more comprehensive and balanced selection of scriptural texts than any preachers were likely to make on their own. The scores of resources produced to help prepare sermons and worship services based on the lectionary make lectionary preaching even more appealing. Even churches less influenced by the liturgical movement, such as Baptist groups, have taken to using the lectionary. By using the

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lectionary, churches have also adopted a renewed emphasis on the church year. The conception of liturgy as a set of actions performed by a gathered community led to buildings conceived as meetinghouses, rather than as auditoriums or temples. Lutheran architect E.A. So¨vik described the desired building as a ‘‘non-church.’’29 Unlike Puritan meetinghouses, however, these spaces were designed to allow the congregation to gather around the altar, to process, and to shift its attention from the baptismal font, to the pulpit, to the table. In Catholic churches, altars were brought forward in 1964, and priests began to celebrate mass facing the people. The tabernacle containing the reserved sacrament was removed from the altar and frequently placed in a separate chapel so that the presence of Christ in the consecrated hosts would not distract from his presence in the actions of the liturgy. If liturgy was ‘‘the work of the people,’’ then it demanded, in the words of Vatican II, the ‘‘full, conscious, and active participation’’ of the laity.30 To this end the council permitted the translation of the liturgy into vernacular languages. The move into English came quickly, beginning on the first Sunday in Advent in November 1964. While many Catholics wanted the liturgy to remain in Latin, there was relatively little controversy over the style of English used.31 Protestant liturgical English, on the other hand, had been shaped by the King James Version and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In the 1960s, almost all Protestant public prayers were in archaic forms of English. God was addressed as ‘‘thou,’’ rarely as ‘‘you.’’ The Revised Standard Version (New Testament, 1946; Old Testament, 1952) and the New American Standard Bible (New Testament, 1963; Old Testament, 1971) reflected the common practice in using modern English except when God was addressed.32 When Protestant liturgical reformers resolved to use contemporary English like their Catholic counterparts, their efforts sparked some of the first controversies over ‘‘contemporary’’ worship. Only the Lutherans and the United Church of Christ moved directly to contemporary English.33 From the 1970s until at least the early 1990s, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians all continued to publish two forms of their major services, one in traditional and one in contemporary English. Since only the contemporarylanguage rites fully reflected the theology of the liturgical movement, this delayed the movement from affecting the worship of many local churches. Methodists who followed the services contained in their 1966 hymnal, for example, did not encounter reformed services until they adopted the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal.34 Liturgical practice did not change quickly or without controversy. Although the modern liturgical movement was strongly committed in principle to inculturation, the culture of the early liturgical revisions was largely Euro-American and male. After the initial round of revisions in the 1960s and 1970s, the resulting rites were criticized for not being genderinclusive in their language both for people and for God. Indeed in their effort to be contemporary and to avoid relative pronouns, the new rites were often more gender exclusive than traditional ones. Later revisions

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sought to be more inclusive. This sparked controversy in many denominations especially when traditional hymn texts were revised. The revisions of both hymns and liturgies in The New Century Hymnal published by the United Church of Christ in 1995 were especially extensive.35 Despite some opposition, proponents of the liturgical movement succeeded in forming what one termed ‘‘the liturgical establishment.’’ Through institutions such as the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL), an increasing number of seminary professorships, various independent organizations, and the denominations’ commissions on worship, reformers reshaped the official worship resources and much of the actual practice of the liturgical and semi-liturgical traditions. Jews were involved with similar reforms of their own liturgies, and the NAAL became an interfaith organization to include them.36 The reforms were often largely top-down, originating in the scholar’s study, tried in local churches, amended in committee, and then promoted in the churches. Liturgical reformers’ efforts were only partly successful, however, as they contended not only with traditional practices, but also with other new movements.

CELEBRATION ERA The liturgical movement’s reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s took place within what Donald Hustad termed the ‘‘celebration era,’’ a widespread willingness to embrace the contemporary and experimental to make worship a joyful celebration. Hustad noted several factors that influenced this in addition to the desire to break down the division between the church and the world. Marshall McLuhan’s argument that ‘‘the medium is the message’’ and that communication must happen in nonverbal ways was very influential in encouraging multisensory experimentation. A growing ‘‘aesthetic relativism’’ placed popular art on the same level as high art. Churches also embraced a consumer ethos looking to popularity and church growth as primary indicators of the proper worship style.37 The emphasis on contemporary even secular style and celebration is well represented in books with titles such as God’s Party and The Feast of Fools.38 Greater informality and interaction among the congregation were encouraged. Music in folk and rock styles was used. Oftentimes the services were highly creative, featuring interactive drama and new rituals. As an aspect of the pragmatism characteristic of the Frontier tradition, there was a long tradition that emphasized experimental worship. This had always been strongest in ministries to youth. Denominations sought to reach out to the youth culture of the 1960s through ‘‘youth musicals’’ in a rock style such as Good News published by the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board in 1967. Some songs from these musicals such as ‘‘Pass it On’’ from Tell It Like It Is (1969) became a favorite of college and youth groups.39 The lack of an established style of congregational song among Catholics made the folk music style of this era especially influential. The works of Miriam Therese Winter, Joe Wise, and the St. Louis Jesuits quickly became popular as guitar-led ‘‘folk groups’’ formed to lead liturgies that were

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often termed ‘‘folk masses.’’ Some songs such as ‘‘On Eagle’s Wings’’ by Michael Joncas and ‘‘Here I Am, Lord’’ by Dan Schutte, achieved widespread popularity among Protestants. Although musical styles for Catholic worship varied widely from simple said masses to masses led by mariachi bands, the folk style became the most common form of Catholic liturgical music.40 Traditional-style Protestant hymnody also took on new life in the 1970s with many new texts reflecting contemporary concerns by writers such as Brian Wren and Fred Kaan.41 The simple meditative chants composed by Jacques Berthier to accommodate the visitors from many different countries to the Taize´ Community, an ecumenical monastic community in France, also became very popular. Taize´-style services typically cultivate a meditative feel and feature a darkened church, many candles, icons, and the singing of the songs, frequently with soloists singing verses over the congregation’s repetition of the chant.42

SEEKER SERVICES While the liturgical movement was closely linked to denominations, the seeker service originated in nondenominational evangelical youth ministry. There were several pioneer communities in this style of worship, but none more prominent than Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago. Willow Creek was more than a megachurch; it was the center of what some see as a ‘‘postmodern denomination.’’ Its influence grew steadily after 1985 when it held its first conference to promote its practices. It soon achieved national prominence and founded an association of like-minded churches in 1992. By 2005, the Willow Creek Association included approximately 10,500 churches worldwide belonging to 90 denominations in 35 countries, including 5,900 churches in the United States. Some of these churches modeled their ministry closely on Willow Creek’s; others simply joined to avail themselves of the association’s publications and conferences. As the congregations’ relationship to their denominations shifted from a ‘‘corporate or managerial’’ model where resources and authority came from a single source, to that of the ‘‘shopping mall’’ where individual congregations utilized resources from several sources, megachurches such as Willow Creek came to exercise broad influence over worship practices.43 Willow Creek’s approach to worship grew out of its founders’ experience in youth ministry at South Park Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. In 1973, youth pastor Bill Hybels and musician Dave Holmbo began a weekly program called Son City for unchurched teenagers. Since this program was targeted at non-Christians, an additional weekly gathering for Christian youth provided a time of worship and more detailed teaching. The style of Son City was intentionally desacralized in order to attract youth disenchanted by the church. Programs consisted of four basic elements: music, drama, media, and message. The music included secular rock and contemporary Christian songs, often with appropriate slides flashing in time with the music on a movie screen. Although the meetings took

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place in South Park’s colonial-revival sanctuary, several changes helped break down its sacred character. The screen obscured the cross at the front of the church, the communion table and pulpit had been moved away, and games were played in the sanctuary before the program. In order to appeal to the unchurched, only the musical group on stage sang. The loud rock music created a comfortable atmosphere for the youth and contributed to the desacralization. The staff also sought to recognize the work of God in the world by drawing out the positive content of the secular lyrics.44 After the music, a skit dramatized the real-life situation that the message would address. Messages offered an explicitly Christian perspective on everyday issues while avoiding traditional theological language. They were designed to be positive, uplifting, and nonjudgmental, but ultimately to help bring individuals to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Elaborate multimedia presentations occasionally reinforced or introduced the message.45 In 1975, Hybels and Holmbo resigned from the youth ministry and founded Willow Creek Community Church. Though their goal was to create a ‘‘biblically functioning community,’’ they conformed to Frontier tradition in taking no specific guidelines for ordering worship from the Bible. Meeting in a movie theater, they fashioned their Sunday services after their popular Son City weeknight meetings. These came to be referred to as ‘‘seeker services.’’46 As the congregation grew, services moved from the movie theater to a large auditorium on the church’s own suburban campus, but traditional religious symbols were absent. The themes, style, and sophistication of Willow Creek’s services changed as the church grew, its target population aged, and technology advanced, but their basic elements remained constant. Everything was crafted to attract and capture the attention of the seeker by offering relevant messages in a familiar setting. While a segment designated as ‘‘scripture’’ was included, this generally took the form of an individual recounting an event in their life and then reading a passage of scripture that related to it. Some congregational singing took place, but it was not emphasized. When the collection was taken, visitors to the church were asked not to contribute since they were guests of the church and not members. Church members were expected to attend the mid-week believer services. Here there would be more emphasis on congregational singing, and the message would be more explicitly theological, oriented around the exposition of a particular biblical passage or theological theme.47 Other megachurches conducted and promoted similar services. Many, however, did not make the distinction between believer and seeker services and spoke of seeker-sensitive services. Insisting that worship could be a witness to believers, Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, sought to craft worship services that would serve believers but be ‘‘attractive, appealing, and relevant’’ to the target seeker population.48 In order to both accommodate the desires of long-time church members and attract new members, the Community Church of Joy, a Lutheran congregation in Glendale, Arizona, developed a variety of services. In the late

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1970s, Pastor Walt Kallestad introduced an alternative service that abandoned the traditional liturgy and used contemporary music. As the congregation grew, additional services were added. By the mid-1990s, the church offered five distinct weekend services described as ‘‘contemporary country,’’ ‘‘spirited traditional,’’ ‘‘contemporary blend,’’ ‘‘new contemporary,’’ and ‘‘modern contemporary.’’ The services differed in the style of music, the amount of traditional liturgy, and the degree to which worshippers were assumed to be familiar with the church.49 As video projection improved, some churches began holding simultaneous services in different styles, linked by video feed for the pastor’s message.50 This focus on accommodating different tastes was influenced by the Church Growth movement. C. Peter Wagner mentored many pastors of seeker churches, including Kallestad and Warren.51 Both liberal and conservative leaders questioned whether advocates of ‘‘seeker services’’ and ‘‘entertainment evangelism’’ were ‘‘dumbing down’’ worship services in order to ‘‘reach out.’’52 The term ‘‘worship wars’’ emerged in Lutheran circles where many were alarmed by Kallestad’s ‘‘entertainment evangelism.’’53 Many argued that Willow Creek’s distinction between the weekend seeker services, and the mid-week worship services for believers did not work in practice. Seekers wrongly saw the weekend events as worship, and the believer services were too similar to seeker services to be considered worship. Seeker and even seeker-sensitive services were faulted for being focused on the worshipper and not on God. Other critics objected to seeker services’ embrace of the ethos of consumer culture. Those shaped by the liturgical movement concurred with this indictment, but noted that in their explicit focus on emotionally moving the worshipper, seeker services were not different from most traditional services in the Frontier tradition.54 But just as it was thought seekers needed services divested of churchly aesthetics in order to take the gospel seriously, so some evangelicals did not recognize the contemporary forms of these seeker services as preaching the gospel.55

PRAISE-AND-WORSHIP Praise-and-worship services employed a musical style and architectural arrangement similar to those used in seeker services, but their approach to worship was rooted in the Pentecostal tradition’s emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit. A revival in the late 1940s and early 1950s known as the Latter Rain movement brought to Pentecostalism a new focus on the personal experience of God in worship. It also encouraged the singing of short songs known as scripture songs or praise choruses. The work of the Spirit in the congregation was often manifested by spontaneous singing, often in tongues. The movement helped redirect Pentecostals from internal doctrinal disputes toward their common experience of the Holy Spirit. The development of the charismatic movement in the late 1950s and 1960s among non-Pentecostal Protestants and Catholics also helped extend the emphasis on the experience of God in worship as it spread charismatic gifts beyond Pentecostalism.56

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One expression of this spread was the ‘‘Jesus movement’’ of the late 1960s. Emerging out of the counterculture, its gatherings partook of the form of rock concerts, with a band performing and the audience joining enthusiastically in their songs of praise to God. Often the songs were composed on the spot.57 Some of these musicians joined Calvary Chapel, an independent charismatic church in Costa Mesa, California. In response to the demand for recordings of these new artists, the church started Maranatha! Music, which released its groundbreaking The Praise Album in 1974. Among other songs, the album featured Karen Lafferty’s ‘‘Seek Ye First’’ and Terrye Coelho’s ‘‘Father I Adore You’’ that were soon used by many denominations.58 Praise-and-worship was most prevalent in independent charismatic churches, in networks of charismatic churches such as Calvary Chapel and the Association of Vineyard Churches, and in charismatic fellowships within mainline denominations. A typical praise-and-worship service begins with a period of singing lasting twenty-five to forty-five minutes followed by prayer, announcements, a sermon, and sometimes a ‘‘ministry time’’ of prayer and charismatic activity.59 The free-flowing period of singing is usually structured to lead from ‘‘praise’’ to ‘‘worship.’’ There are two common models for discussing this structure. Those more closely aligned with classic Pentecostalism use the image of the biblical temple and speak of worshippers moving from outside, through the courts, into the temple proper, and finally into the presence of God in the Holy of Holies. Those influenced by John Wimber, leader of the Vineyard movement, speak of five phases: invitation, engagement, exaltation, adoration, and intimacy. Fundamental to either approach is the idea that ‘‘praise’’ (a focus on God’s greatness) precedes ‘‘adoration’’ or ‘‘worship’’ (a more personal communion with God’s presence). Songs in the initial phases are upbeat and focus the congregation’s attention on God and his majestic nature. After this the music often becomes softer and mellower. Worshippers may be invited to sit down as they acknowledge God’s presence and adore him. The last phase is the most personal and the quietest as worshippers enjoy a time of personal communion with God. One additional, upbeat song might end this sequence to provide a transition to the next portion of the service.60 Sometimes Vineyard leaders speak of two additional stages. ‘‘God’s visitation’’ can follow intimacy. Here God speaks to the congregation through various actions of the Spirit including exhortations, healings, and causing people to fall or shake. On rare occasions, this may be followed by a period of ecstasy where worshippers are engulfed by the joy of God’s presence.61 Praise-and-worship services are highly participatory; worshippers sing, clap, raise their hands in adoration, and sometimes dance. Words to the songs are usually projected on a screen. On the stage in front of the people, the ‘‘worship team,’’ consisting of the worship leader and other singers and instrumentalists, perform the songs. Worship teams see themselves not as performers, but as worshippers who are leading others toward God. Leaders must be attuned to the congregation’s needs and the work of God’s Spirit among them during the service. The importance of the worship leader often rivals the pastor. They are responsible for finding and

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selecting songs, planning the ‘‘worship set,’’ and adjusting it in response to the worshippers’ reactions. The goal is to help worshippers get to the point where they are ‘‘with the Lord, . . . are just adoring the Lord.’’62 Praise-and-worship has helped make worship a major theme in evangelical life. Many contemporary Christian music artists have released worship albums and some radio stations are devoted to worship songs. Increasingly worship is discussed as ‘‘lifestyle’’ rather than just a periodic activity. As churches with seeker services have given more emphasis to worship, their services are increasingly influenced by praise-and-worship. Congregations describing themselves as practicing contemporary worship are likely to be shaped by both movements, but in more charismatic churches, worshippers’ outward response to the songs will be more extensive and they will exercise charismatic gifts.63

THE CONTEMPORARY WORSHIP MUSIC INDUSTRY Praise-and-worship and seeker services are united in their embrace of contemporary music and the style and ethos of a rock concert.64 A sizable industry has developed to distribute new ‘‘praise choruses’’ or ‘‘worship songs’’ and help worship leaders manage the growing literature. The major publishers of worship music are Maranatha! Music, the Vineyard Music Group, Integrity Music, and WorshipTogether, a division of EMI Christian Music. Each of these companies focuses on facilitating worship by selecting songs suitable for praise teams to play in worship and by offering workshops, instructional videos, manuals, and Web sites to help worship leaders. Begun in 1992, Worship Leader magazine serves as a major forum for disseminating ideas on technical, practical, and theological matters in addition to offering an extensive collection of reviews of new worship albums.65 Worship Leader also publishes the periodical Song DISCovery, a collection of recordings and lead sheets that help worship leaders stay abreast of new music. Since hymnals are not used in praise-and-worship, Christian Copyright Licensing, Incorporated (CCLI) was founded in 1991 to help collect and distribute royalties to songwriters and composers. Congregations pay an annual fee based on the size of their worship services. This gives them the right to use and reproduce most contemporary worship music. CCLI distributes royalties to the copyright holders based on a periodic survey completed by the churches. This survey also serves as the basis for the charts of the most frequently used music published semiannually by CCLI. These charts reveal both the change and stability of the praise music repertoire. In the five years represented by the August 2000 to February 2005 reports, a total of forty-five songs by forty-two songwriters appeared among the top twenty-five songs. Six songs appeared on all ten of the semiannual lists: ‘‘Shout to The Lord’’ by Darlene Zschech, ‘‘As the Deer’’ by Martin J. Nystrom, ‘‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’’ by Graham Kendrick, ‘‘You Are My All In All’’ by Dennis Jernigan, ‘‘Lord, I Lift

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Your Name on High’’ by Rick Founds, and ‘‘Open the Eyes of My Heart’’ by Paul Baloche. Of the top twenty-five songs from August 1997, only six did not appear in the top 100 songs in February 2005. This suggests a fairly stable repertoire of popular songs into which new songs regularly emerge.66 The lyrics of the most frequently used songs focus on a handful of themes. These correspond to the stages of worship in a praise-and-worship set. A few songs invite worshippers to praise God. The greatest number praise God for God’s being, God’s majesty as revealed in creation, or God’s work of salvation through the cross. Others take the form of prayers that God would fill worshippers with the divine presence and conform them to God’s will. A final group requests or celebrates the worshippers’ intimate communion with God. Except for calls to worship and a few songs of general praise, almost all the songs are addressed directly from the individual worshipper to God. The frequent use of ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘you’’ demands worshippers’ emotional involvement. Many of the songs, especially those emerging out of the Vineyard community, use evocative language expressing the worshippers ‘‘love,’’ ‘‘longing,’’ or ‘‘desire’’ for God. In ‘‘Breathe’’ by Marie Bennett published in 1995 by Mercy/Vineyard, the worshipper sings, ‘‘I’m desperate for You . . . I’m lost without You.’’ As the name ‘‘praise choruses’’ suggests, the focus of the songs is generally on the short repeated chorus. Some songs, particularly those that have been popular since the 1970s and 1980s, consist only of the short repeated chorus. Many more recent popular songs, however, have verses in addition to the refrain, but these verses are sometimes sung only by the worship team, not the whole congregation. Worship songs, like seeker services, have frequently been criticized by both theological liberals and conservatives for lacking substance and failing to sustain a language of faith that unites Christians across generations. Among the problems cited with some songs is that they focus not on God, but on the worshippers themselves, on their desires, their praise of God, or their experience of God.67 Others find the songs not so much wrong as thin, lacking in theological substance and biblical allusion. The songs, critics complain, focus on meeting the worshipper at the lowest possible level. They do not demand a higher development of artistic taste, theological sophistication, or historical appreciation.68 The songs also tend to focus on a narrow spectrum of attitudes of worship. Services crafted from praise choruses do not generally emphasize the communal nature of the church, the need for intercessory prayer, the sacramental presence of God, or explicit personal confession of sin. The focus is more narrowly on the praise and experience of God. Defenders of contemporary worship music point to the God-centeredness of the lyrics and the personal dedication and communion with God that singing them honestly demands. What they lack in doctrinal breadth, they make up for in intensity and focus. Defenders also advise that a few traditional hymns played in a contemporary style be included in praiseand-worship services.69 The widespread use of worship songs is reflected in their inclusion in many recent hymnals and hymnal supplements.70

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‘‘EMERGENT’’ WORSHIP Since its peak in the mid-1990s, there has been a subsiding interest in the seeker service for several reasons. First, while ‘‘seeker services’’ appear to work well with formerly churched people who are disenchanted by the church, they work less well with people with no church experience. They do not appreciate the accommodations that have been made for them as outsiders. Fewer people in the generations that followed the baby boom have been raised in the church; thus they are less attracted to these services. Second, many have challenged the assumption that seekers need to be separated from believers’ worship. Worship, many have argued, is an effective witnessing tool. Recent seekers also appear to be different from their predecessors. Seeker church leaders report that seekers no longer need to be convinced of the relevance of Christianity; instead they come to the church with a ‘‘hunger for God.’’71 Third, younger generations who have not been brought up with liturgical worship often encounter it not as boring, but as enticing and interesting. Shaped by a postmodern culture they are much more open to symbolism and mystery.72 In the early years of the new millennium, ‘‘emerging church’’ became a common term for a diverse group of young evangelicals who were critical of the typical praise-and-worship and seeker services. One of the first books to express this critique was Worship Evangelism (1995) by Sally Morganthaler. She ‘‘strongly disagreed’’ with Willow Creek’s operating assumption that ‘‘seekers and worship do not mix’’ and with the confusion created by holding ‘‘seeker services,’’ which she preferred to call ‘‘seeker events,’’ on Sunday morning.73 Morganthaler encouraged more Godoriented, multisensory, and multi-option services. Seekers should be invited to participate in worship, not offered something lesser. The most common characteristics of emergent worship were that it was ‘‘post-seeker sensitive’’ and identified with the generations that followed the baby boom, often termed Generation X and the Millennial Generation. Leaders of the movement, or ‘‘conversation’’ as some preferred to term it, were very intentional about the need to embrace new forms of theology and ministry appropriate to a postmodern culture. Where seeker services were associated with the suburbs, auditoriums, a unified focal point, linear sequencing, and a rejection of tradition, emergent worship was associated with the inner city, living-room-like space, multiple focal points, a nonlinear sequence, and the embrace of ancient practices. Services were often highly participatory, with a strong attempt to cultivate a sense of community and mystery. They included a wider variety of musical styles and more extensive use of the visual arts. Worship spaces tended to be arranged more like living rooms than like auditoriums; they tended to be darker, to include crosses and other traditional religious images (often electronically projected), and to have several worship centers that people could visit during the service. Historic creeds and prayers were included, sometimes sung to contemporary tunes. Many churches included more frequent, even weekly, celebrations of the Lord’s supper.74

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The degree to which the movement had broken with the traditions of ‘‘contemporary worship’’ and the megachurch was debated. At the Emergent Convention in April 2004 some of the movement’s supporters were dismayed by the music and message of the plenary sessions.75 As with many movements to reform Christian worship, those involved shared a vocabulary and were reacting against the same practices, but they did not share the same principles or desired outcome. Robert Webber, who had long promoted the principles of the liturgical movement to evangelicals, celebrated the movement (though not under the name ‘‘emergent’’) in his 2002 book The Younger Evangelicals. The concept of ‘‘ancient-future worship’’ that Webber introduced in 1999 is well-suited to the spirit of the movement and has been taken up by some participants.76 More than praise-and-worship or seeker services, emergent worship was open to ideas from the liturgical movement. Emergent churches varied, however, in the degree to which they espoused a coherent liturgical and sacramental vision. Services in churches that identified with the emergent church movement differed greatly. Megachurches such as the Community Church of Joy added an ‘‘emergent’’ service to their weekend schedule. Other large churches, such as Brian McLaren’s Cedar Ridge Community Church in Maryland, embraced some of the movement’s ideas in all their services by including communion every Sunday and having multiple stations for worship. Some churches met in converted lofts or coffeehouses on Saturday or Sunday evenings. Others organized the congregation into house churches that met weekly, holding services for the whole congregation only monthly. Some congregations were formed out of independent evangelical churches. Others were affiliated with mainline bodies such as Church of the Apostles in Seattle (Lutheran/Anglican).77 The movement as a whole had something of a countercultural ethos with its rejection of traditional labels. In its critique of the traditional and suburban culture of the 1990s, it showed many of the same characteristics that the experimental churches of the 1960s had in their critique of the culture of the 1950s.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS While the worship reform movements were all concerned with adapting Christian worship to contemporary culture, this was often only the culture of white suburban America. The development of multicultural worship has received less attention. Some mainline Protestant and traditional evangelical churches have long included a few songs from other countries in their services. Churches in the Euro-American seeker service and praiseand-worship traditions, however, have included little music from nonEuropean cultures. As the ethnic diversity in the United States increases, it remains to be seen whether churches will diversify their cultural style. Supporting a variety of cultural styles has been a major goal of recent mainline Protestant liturgical books and hymnals. It will remain a major focus as the next generation of liturgical books is developed. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) initiated its Renewing Worship

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project in 2000. Provisional liturgies were published for trial use, review, and study. The denomination’s new primary worship resource containing liturgies and hymns will replace the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978). The new book will be shaped by the basic ideals of the liturgical movement, but use inclusive language and incorporate greater diversity in the cultural style of music liturgies. The Episcopal Church has not authorized a revision to its 1979 prayer book, but began publishing supplemental rites in its Renewing Our Worship series. Most of these new liturgical texts are published in electronic form to aid churches in composing customized worship aids for each service. While some have questioned whether technology has made bound worship books outdated, many denominations may follow the ELCA’s decision to continue to publish a single-volume primary resource as a ‘‘tangible sign’’ of the denomination’s unity, while acknowledging that congregations may supplement it with other sources.78 Although there was opposition, liturgical progressives prevailed in the reforms of Roman Catholic liturgical texts and practices following Vatican II. In the mid-1990s, however, a variety of institutions were founded to redirect American Catholic worship toward a more conservative interpretation of the council. These included a scholarly society (Society for Catholic Liturgy), a broad-based reform caucus (Adoremus), and a graduate program (the Liturgical Institute at Mundelein Seminary). These organizations promoted practices and reforms that they believed would bring a greater sense of reverence, mystery, and Catholic tradition to worship. These included a clear delineation between the roles of clergy and laity, more traditional architectural arrangements, more devotion shown toward the presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine, and more literal translations of the Latin liturgies. The call for more monumental buildings that would serve as a witness to the world and communicate a sense of holiness and beauty was supported by Built of Living Stones, a new document on architecture approved by U.S. Catholic bishops in 2000.79 Considerable controversy erupted in the 1990s over the use of inclusive language and dynamic equivalence by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). Conservatives prevailed in 2001 when the Vatican issued the instruction Liturgiam Authenticam that allowed inclusive language when men and women were clearly intended in the original language but generally rejected dynamic equivalence demanding formal equivalence in translations. The following year, the longtime head of ICEL resigned, and a new committee of bishops was appointed to oversee ICEL’s translations.80 Liturgy is probably a more central concern for Pope Benedict XVI than it was for his predecessor John Paul II. In his writings on liturgy prior to his election as pope, Joseph Ratzinger had supported a conservative position on most issues. Whether or not he changes current liturgical policy, he is unlikely to reverse the recent conservative developments.81 Although liturgical movement, seeker services, praise-and-worship, and the emergent church each had its own emphases, the recent growth of interest in worship reflects ‘‘a clearer realization that worship itself is

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central to the life of any congregation.’’82 The legacy of some of these movements may fade, but if, as many suggest, worshippers’ openness to sacramentality and the multisensory character of worship continues to develop amid a postmodern culture, the renewed interest in various forms of worship is not likely to subside.

NOTES 1. Robb Redman, ‘‘Worship Wars or Worship Awakening?’’ Liturgy (September 2004): 39–44; Redman, The Great Worship Awakening: Singing a New Song in the Postmodern Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002); Terry W. York, America’s Worship Wars (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003). 2. Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 331–32. 3. Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 42, 105. 4. James F. White, ‘‘Liturgy and Worship,’’ in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, 3 vols., ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 3:1269– 83; White, Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1989); White, Roman Catholic Worship: Trent to Today, 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003). 5. Donald P. Hustad, Jubliate II: Church Music in Worship and Renewal (Carol Stream, IL: Hope, 1993), 254–56. 6. Melva Wilson Costen, African American Christian Worship (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993); Jon Michael Spencer, Protest and Praise: Sacred Music of Black Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990). 7. Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 251. 8. White, Protestant Worship, 171–91. 9. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 132–39; Hustad, 254–56. 10. White, Protestant Worship, 181. 11. Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 531–688. 12. Kilde, 203–15; Jeffery W. Howe, Houses of Worship: An Identification Guide to the History and Styles of American Religious Architecture (San Diego, CA: Thunder Bay Press, 2003), 307–12. 13. Service Book and Hymnal of the Lutheran Church in America (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1958); The Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: Methodist Publishing House, 1966); Frank C. Senn, Christian Liturgy: Evangelical and Catholic (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997), 625–28; White, ‘‘Protestant Public Worship in America, 1935–1995,’’ in Christian Worship in North America: A Retrospective, 1955–1995 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 118–21. 14. Harry Eskew and Hugh T. McElrath, Sing with Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Hymnody (Nashville, TN: Church Street Press, 1996), 162– 68, 208–11. 15. David Ralph Bains, ‘‘The Liturgical Impulse in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Mainline Protestantism’’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999),

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71–85, 100–122; Dale Woolston Dowling, ‘‘For God, for Family, for Country: Colonial Revival Church Buildings in the Cold War Era’’ (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2004), 1–169. 16. Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961); Colin W. Williams, Where in the World? Changing Forms of the Church’s Witness (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1963); James Hudnut-Buemler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 17. Harvey Gallagher Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1965). 18. Johannes C. Hoekendijk, ‘‘The Church in Missionary Thinking,’’ International Review of Mission 41 (1952): 334, 336; The Church for Others, and The Church for the World: A Quest for Structures for Missionary Congregations (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1967). 19. ‘‘The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,’’ paragraphs 8–9, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott (New York: America Press, 1966), 22–26. 20. Donald A. McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 163, as quoted in Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 12. 21. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 12–14. 22. John R.K. Fenwick and Bryan D. Spinks, Worship in Transition: The Liturgical Movement in the Twentieth Century (New York: Continuum, 1995); Senn, 609–92; Bains, 112–216. 23. The Sacramentary: Approved for Uses in the Dioceses of the United States of America by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and Confirmed by the Apostolic See (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1985). 24. See for example, ‘‘An Order for Celebrating the Holy Eucharist,’’ Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), 400–405. 25. Senn, 615–20. 26. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982). 27. Wheaton College professor Robert E. Webber promoted liturgical movement ideals to evangelicals in many books and seminars. Among the first was Robert Webber, Worship, Old and New (Grand Rapids, MI: Ministry Resources Library, 1982). See also Webber, ed., The Complete Library of Christian Worship, 7 vols. (Nashville, TN: Star Song, 1994). 28. The Worshipbook: Services (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970); Common Lectionary (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1983); The Revised Common Lectionary (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992); Fritz West, Scripture and Memory: The Ecumenical Hermeneutic of the Three-Year Lectionaries (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997). 29. E.A. So¨vik, Architecture for Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1973); Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 52–56, 267–75, 278–87. 30. ‘‘Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,’’ in Abbott, 144, para. 14. 31. Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of the Counterculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 62–94. 32. Steven M. Sheeley and Robert N. Nash, Choosing a Bible: A Guide to Modern English Translations and Editions (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999), 22, 24– 26, 44–46.

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33. Lutheran Book of Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1978); Services of the Church, 8 vols. (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1969). 34. The United Methodist Hymnal: Book of United Methodist Worship (Nashville, TN: United Methodist Publishing House, 1989). 35. The New Century Hymnal (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1995). 36. White, Christian Worship in Transition (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1976), 102–30; Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, eds., The Changing Face of Jewish and Christian Worship in North America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). 37. Hustad, 265, 267–68. 38. Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); David James Randolph, God’s Party: A Guide to New Forms of Worship (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1975). 39. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 50–52. 40. Jim McDermott, ‘‘Sing a New Song,’’ America (May 23, 2005): 7–10; Oppenheimer, 76–80, 92–94. 41. Eskew and McElrath, 168–73, 211–14. 42. Judith Marie Kubicki, Liturgical Music as Ritual Symbol: A Case Study of Jacques Berthier’s Taize´ Music (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1999). 43. Kimon Howland Sargeant, Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 134–61; ‘‘About the Willow Creek Association,’’ Willow Creek Association, http:// www.willowcreek.com/wca_info/. 44. Fred W. Beuttler, ‘‘Revivalism in Suburbia: ÔSon CityÕ and the Origins of the Willow Creek Community Church, 1972–1980,’’ in Embodying the Spirit: New Perspectives on North American Revivalism, ed. Michael J. McClymond (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 173–74, 179–81. 45. Beuttler, 181–83. 46. Sargeant, 194–95; Beuttler, 175–76. 47. Sargeant, 54–76. 48. Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Church: Growth without Compromising Your Message & Mission (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995), 253. 49. Walt Kallestad, Entertainment Evangelism: Taking the Church Public (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), 71–73. 50. ‘‘Try One of Our Worship Venues!’’ Saddleback Church, http://www. saddlebackfamily.com/home/todaystory.asp?id=5700. 51. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 12–14; Nancy Beach, An Hour on Sunday: Creating Moments of Transformation and Wonder (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004); Joe Horness, ‘‘Contemporary Music-Driven Worship,’’ in Exploring the Worship Spectrum: 6 Views, ed. Paul A. Basden (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 99–116. 52. Marva J. Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995). 53. Walter P. Kallestad, ‘‘Entertainment Evangelism,’’ The Lutheran 3 (May 23, 1990): 17ff.; Ted Peters, ‘‘Worship Wars,’’ Dialog 33 (Summer 1994): 166–73; York, x–xi. 54. Todd Johnson, ‘‘Heads Up,’’ Liturgy 19, no. 4 (2004): 37–38. 55. Oppenheimer, 25–27. 56. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 30–34. 57. Robert E. Webber, ‘‘The Praise and Worship Renewal,’’ in Twenty Centuries of Christian Worship, vol. 2: The Complete Library of Christian Worship, 131–34.

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58. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 52–53; Steve Rebey, ‘‘The Profits of Praise,’’ Christianity Today (July 12, 1999): 32. 59. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 34. 60. Barry Wayne Liesch, The New Worship: Straight Talk on Music and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), 47–70; Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 35–36. 61. Andy Park, To Know You More: Cultivating the Heart of the Worship Leader (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), 256–57. 62. Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–88. 63. Don Williams, ‘‘Contemporary Music-Driven Worship: A Charismatic Worship Response,’’ and Joe Horness, ‘‘Charismatic Worship: A Contemporary Worship Response,’’ in Basden, 125–28, 160–62. 64. Davin Seay, ‘‘Rooted in Rock: The Origins of Contemporary Worship Ritual,’’ Worship Leader (November/December 2003): 19–20. 65. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 55–59. 66. Christian Copyright Licensing, Incorporated, ‘‘Top 25 Songs,’’ http:// www.ccli.com/WorshipResources/Top25.cfm. 67. A. Daniel Frankforter, Stones for Bread: A Critique of Contemporary Worship (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 133; Brian McLaren, ‘‘Open Letter to Worship Songwriters,’’ Worship Leader (January 2001): 44. 68. John M. Frame, Contemporary Worship Music: A Biblical Defense (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1997), 48–51. 69. Ibid., 30–42, 75–128. 70. The Celebration Hymnal: Songs and Hymns for Worship (N.P.: Word Music/ Integrity Music, 1997); The Faith We Sing (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2000); Sing! A New Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: CRC Publications, 2001). 71. Redman, Great Worship Awakening, 20–21. 72. Senn, 690–91. 73. Sally Morgenthaler, Worship Evangelism: Inviting Unbelievers into the Presence of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995), 46. 74. Kimball, The Emerging Church, 26, 105; Doug Pagitt, Reimagining Spiritual Formation: A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 49–66. 75. Scott Bader-Saye, ‘‘The Emergent Matrix,’’ Christian Century (November 30, 2004): 20. 76. Webber, The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2002); Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999). 77. Chuck Smith, Jr., ‘‘What Is Emergent?’’ Worship Leader (March/April 2005): 22–26; Scott Bader-Saye, 20–27; Andy Crouch, ‘‘The Emergent Mystique,’’ Christianity Today (November 2004): 36–41. 78. ‘‘Renewing Worship Project—Plans, Core Values, and Background’’ Report to Church Council, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, April 8–11, 2005. http://www.renewaingworship.org/about/PDF/CC0405ExhL1.pdf; Renewing Worship Liturgies (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2004); Enriching Our Worship 1: Morning and Evening Prayer, the Great Litany, the Holy Eucharist (New York: Church Publishing, 1998); Enriching Our Worship 2: Ministry with the Sick or Dying; Burial of a Child (New York: Church Publishing, 2000). 79. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Built of Living Stones: Art, Architecture, and Worship (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000).

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80. White, Roman Catholic Worship, 154–58; Peter Steinfels, A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 189–91. 81. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000). 82. Robert Wuthnow, All in Sync: How Music and Art Are Revitalizing American Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 182.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Basden, Paul A., ed. Exploring the Worship Spectrum: Six Views. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004. Fenwick, John R.K., and Bryan D. Spinks. Worship in Transition: The Liturgical Movement in the Twentieth Century. New York: Continuum, 1995. Redman, Robb. The Great Worship Awakening: Singing a New Song in the Postmodern Church. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. Senn, Frank C. Christian Liturgy: Evangelical and Catholic. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997. Webber, Robert E., ed. The Complete Library of Christian Worship. 7 vols. Nashville, TN: Star Song, 1994. York, Terry W. America’s Worship Wars. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003.

CHAPTER 2

A Visionary People: Religion and the Visual Arts in America Kelly J. Baker

Sooner or later, if you love art, you will come across a strange fact: there is almost no modern religious art in museums or in books of art history. —James Elkins All around us in our daily lives, in public and in private, in our homes and our churches and even in schools; in the books we read, the television we watch, and the websites we surf; in museums and galleries, and in the neighborhoods through which we travel to reach them, we see abundant evidence of art’s intersection with religion, of religion’s engagement with art. —Sally M. Promey

T

he relationship between religion and visual arts, as seen in the differing perspectives of these two art historians, is at best ambiguous. In America specifically, dictates of Western religious traditions against the use of idols or graven images make it seem as if religion is antagonistic to art objects. Yet religious images are created in the forms of Orthodox icons, paintings, devotional cards, mass-produced images and objects, photographs, and missionary materials, and these images are disseminated all over the world and abound in the United States as well. Images of Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1940) might be found in the house of an elderly aunt or grandmother. Catholic devotional cards might reside in the purses or pockets of relatives. The Hindu temples that grace American cityscapes have their own vivid visual culture that their Christian neighbors might find offensive or might embrace as a faith of a different religious culture. The visual culture of American religions can be uncovered in roadside memorials, church signs, and murals as well as in galleries and museums.

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Thus, how can art historians believe either that religion has a relationship with the visual arts or that religion might be found in other historical periods but not in contemporary art? Is there modern religious art or was there ever a religious art? What is the interaction between religion and the arts? The difference of opinion partially comes down to definitions of ‘‘art’’ and ‘‘religion.’’ For Elkins, art is ‘‘high’’ or ‘‘fine’’ art rather than ‘‘low’’ art and kitsch. He claims that religion cannot be found in contemporary (‘‘high’’) art. On the other hand, Promey argues that religion occurs in fine art, but that the distinction between high and low art, mass culture, and artifacts is not helpful for the study of religion and the arts because this distinction obfuscates more than it clarifies. Promey instead relies upon the term visual culture, which encompasses art forms as well as artifacts, advertisements, and such to describe her study of American religions. Visual culture is employed to eliminate the hierarchy of fine art and expand the study to include more subjects. In a similar vein, David Morgan also employs visual culture, which ‘‘refers to the images and objects that deploy particular ways of seeing and therefore contribute to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality.’’1 Religious belief occurs through visual processes as well as textual practices. For both Promey and Morgan, religious images are important, whether illuminated canvases or mass-produced images, because seeing is part of the religious experience. Thus, this chapter relies upon a broader definition of art as visual culture to include a wider array of art objects and artifacts as religious art. Art objects as well as other artifacts have three points of reception: the creator, the art object, and the audience, and the interaction of religion and the arts can be found in each point of reception. With art loosely described, defining religion can be a more complicated enterprise. Religion could be defined as a belief system, as an institution, or as a system of practices. David Morgan has pointed out that belief is primarily a Christian way of thinking about religion, but he prefers the term as opposed to dogma, faith, or creed because ‘‘[b]elief is something one does.’’2 Morgan’s definition of religion strives to encapsulate belief as both noun and verb, both as doctrine and as action and practice. Morgan’s definition is more flexible than that of Promey, who thought that art needed to be affiliated with a religious institution. The institutional definition of religion has been employed the most in art history, and thus, works of art are often not considered religious without institutional affiliation. With religion understood as belief as both noun and verb, the exploration of religious art can be expanded and approached more clearly. Religious art is often considered separate from spiritual art. Spiritual art is characterized by its lack of institutional foundation, and this art is concerned with the more mysterious, the natural, the self, and possibly based on something ultimate, possibly God.3 The spiritual/spirit in art is not necessarily defined as religious and instead reflects the perceptions of the artist and the viewers. However, this distinction between religious art and spiritual art might not be as efficacious as it once seemed. It is possible to

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reconsider the dichotomy in light of Morgan’s definition of religion as belief(s). If religion is belief as action, then spiritual art might be religious art because it is not only the perception of the artist and the audiences in action but also the display of these perceptions of mystery, the world, nature, and even God. Yet the spiritual and the religious in art seem to have the same purpose and reflect similar goals. Relying only on institutional definitions of religion hinders the understanding of the religious in American arts and artifacts, which may be spiritual or may be more accurately described as religious for both artist and audience. The interactions of both the religious and the spiritual in the arts, artists, and audiences are woven throughout American culture in conflicting and often ambiguous threads that pull and tug against each other, tangle, and interweave to create a rich tapestry of ‘‘visual religion’’4 that portrays stories of belief in America.

GRAVEN IMAGES The second commandment, which prohibits the creation and use of idols, seems to create an antagonistic relationship between Judeo-Christian traditions5 and the visual arts. Art historians and others have noted the iconoclastic tendencies of both Christians and Jews. However, this prohibition has not led to a lack of religious images within either tradition. Nor does it suggest a prohibition of all images. Rather, it concerns what one does with an image. S. Brent Plate argues that images become idols when said images are used to replace the ‘‘invisible’’ or the deity.6 Moreover, this prohibition did not halt image-making among Christians or Jews. This commandment has obscured the practice of making images by both traditions, and focusing on this commandment has caused scholars to agree with the suggested iconoclasm, the destruction of images, and iconophobia, the fear of images. Plate additionally suggests that Christian practice might be best described as the creation of an icon, which ‘‘bears religious significance in that it brings worshipers into relation with God through representations of sacred stories and persons,’’7 rather than merely an image. Yet icons have an ambivalent place in Christianity with copious amounts of doctrine and theology surrounding the place of icons. The iconoclastic controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries concerned the place of images within the church, and the Eastern church won the battle at the Second Council of Nicea (787) in which images were declared orthodox. However, the war over images continued on, and it might be possible to interpret the first major schism of the Christian Church (1054) as a dispute over images in which the Eastern Orthodox Church supported the use of icons as divine manifestations and the Western Latin church (the Roman Catholic Church) believed images to be only aids to worship.8 The impact of the second commandment on histories of religion and art should be apparent, in that this commandment and the ambivalence over images has often caused historians and art historians to ignore the image-making that occurred in early Christianity.

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CATHOLIC IMAGES AND THE REFORMATION Despite the schism, Catholics continued to make images, but they envisioned religious images differently from Orthodox views of icons. For Catholics, images were aids to devotion. Interestingly, they made the resurrection the subject of many art objects during the Middle Ages, whereas Byzantine works depicted Christ’s ‘‘harrowing hell or rescuing humanity from the prison of the house of limbo.’’9 The body was becoming more important in understanding one’s relationship with God within devotional practices, and thus Christ’s body became a crucial focal point for the art of this period. Christ was displayed with the Virgin Mary, as resurrected, suffering, and sometimes dead. The suffering of Christ in art became a vehicle for Catholic viewers to empathize with their battered savior. ‘‘This new form of piety, effected through visual means, sought a vicarious participation in Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection.’’10 This ‘‘visual piety’’ allowed Catholics to connect with the experiences of their savior in public spaces and in private devotion. For these Catholics, such images provided a religious experience that transcended place and time to make their religious history real for them. Catholic images became a point of contention during the Protestant Reformation, and attacks on the arts were often attacks on Catholics, Protestant attempts to distance themselves from what they saw as Catholic excesses. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was not as critical of the arts as other reformers like Andreas Karlstadt, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, but his thought was not primarily concerned with the role of the arts. Karlstadt’s desire for iconoclasm forced Luther to reflect on the role of images. Luther focused primarily on the living Word of the Bible, which could be augmented by the visual and the liturgical. For Luther, the Bible was full of images, and he therefore did not necessarily support images or call for their destruction, but hoped that the scripture would render them ineffective.11 Luther did oppose excess devotion to images that became idolatrous, but he also admitted the usefulness of images in pedagogy and of illustrations of the Bible. The debate over the arts during the Protestant Reformation is central to the perception of the arts in America particularly because of one reformer, John Calvin (1509–1564). The supposed antagonism in America toward religious images is often traced to the thought of John Calvin, who was highly influential on the American Reformed tradition. Calvin believed that images could not convey Christian truth because images were only products of the human imagination.12 For Calvin, the only allowable image was the text of the Bible. The biblical text could present divine intention, but images produced from the human imagination could not. According to Sally Promey, art in churches presented two problems for Calvin: It violated a biblical commandment against idolatry, and it diverted money from ministries to luxuries.13 Additionally, Calvin suggested that Catholic images were idolatrous; Protestants were thus distinct from Catholics in rejecting this idolatry. Promey further argues that the Reformation could be considered a debate about true and false images as

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representations of true and false religion. What is crucial is that in spite of the debates about images, Christians continued to create and use images. These debates did not cause the end of religious art nor did Calvin’s iconoclasm create a void of religious art in America.

VISUAL RELIGION FROM THE PURITANS TO THE 1940s Visual religion has appeared on American soil in a variety of forms and functions, with religion and the visual arts interacting in different ways depending on the context and time. Puritans arriving in the New World did not create much fine art as a result not of iconoclasm inherited from the Reformed tradition but rather of the colonists’ interest in survival and in the economic development of their colonies.14 Scholars defined Puritans by their penchant for words and often overlooked their visual culture as a result. In the mid-seventeenth century, portraiture as well as gravestone carving became popular. Puritan portraiture, according to Sally Promey, followed Calvinistic teaching of moderated prosperity as a path to godliness. Puritans did inhabit a visual landscape despite the lack of a fine art tradition. Although for some scholars the lack of a visual arts tradition among Puritans meant that the Puritans were construed as iconoclasts, there is an assumption of iconoclasm rather than historical evidence of such.15 Puritans did not lack an aesthetic; rather, their aesthetic, which focused on the beauty of God, has been ignored.16 Moreover, the focus on fine art has obscured the Puritan visual practices from portraiture to the painting and carving of pulpits. Puritans were not the only colonists to create visual landscapes. Spanish Catholic missions in the Southwest also created a visual display of their faith. According to theologian and art historian John Dillenberger, ‘‘[w]hereas Protestants did not settle without bibles, Spanish Catholics did not travel without the visual symbols of faith.’’17 Spanish missions were built both by the missionaries and Native American workers. One San Antonio mission, Mission Nuestra Senora la Purisma Concepcion (completed 1755), was painted in color. Its fac¸ade had carved geometric and floral designs, a Franciscan coat of arms, and a painting of the Five Wounds of Christ.18 Spanish missionaries changed the visual landscape of Native Americans by adding Catholic symbols and often destroying indigenous art. French Jesuits also changed the landscape of New France to mirror their colonial vision with crosses planted to contest religious space between the Jesuits and their potential converts, the Algonquin-speaking tribes. At the mission of Sault Sainte Marie, Jesuits not only implanted Christian symbols but also effaced the existing indigenous religious symbols. The Jesuits hoped that the crucifixes they planted would provide Christian order that they sought to impose on the these tribes.19 These French Catholics, much like their Spanish counterparts, hoped to visually alter the landscape of indigenous people as a method of conversion. Of

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course, this imposition of Christian symbols also meant the destruction of native symbols and images. Images were crucial to religious conversion and devotion, and the destruction of indigenous artifacts was a method to damage Native American beliefs. Yet missionaries were not completely successful in this endeavor because Native Americans incorporated their beliefs and symbols into Christianity. In the mid-nineteenth century, religious art departed from an institutional function and found its expression in the landscapes of artists, particularly the Hudson River School.20 These artists were influenced by the thought of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Ruskin, who each described God’s presence in nature and how the natural environment could portray the hand of God.21 Thomas Cole’s large landscapes expressed the awesome power of nature and often showed how small humanity could be in its presence. His paintings presented nature as peaceful as well as capable of much violence. For Cole, nature might have been the harbinger of God’s message. Cole painted several paintings with biblical themes, including St. John in the Wilderness (1827), Expulsion of Adam and Eve (1828), and The Subsiding Waters of the Deluge (1829). In each of these paintings, nature is dominant and presents the possibility of hope as well as the potential for the ominous. One art historian deems Cole’s paintings as offering a ‘‘theology of nature’’22 because of the implicit morality in them, a morality mirrored in nature. The will of God could be found in seas, craggy mountains, and bent and broken trees. The experience of God was also found in the depiction of biblical incidents in the work of African American artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) and William H. Johnson (1901–1970). Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first African American artist of international acclaim, painted biblical narratives with the keen purpose of demonstrating the interaction between humans and the divine.23 Tanner, who exiled himself from America because of racial prejudice, hoped his paintings would transcend this-worldly problems and present the importance of God’s love. His paintings depicted the presence of God in mundane and ordinary situations. The Annunciation (1898) is quite different from other renditions of this scene in that there are no winged angels or halos marking Mary’s task. Rather, Tanner’s Mary appears ordinary and nervous. Gabriel, the messenger of God, is not an angel but a warm light that appears on the left side of the painting. For Tanner to make Mary so ordinary and human is to suggest that all humanity has the potential for a relationship with divinity. Yet his work relied on white figuration, which has led some to believe that Tanner’s work, because of the biblical stories selected, possibly contained a racial subtext, which represented the struggles and hopes of African Americans.24 William H. Johnson, on the other hand, constructed biblical incidents in racial terms. Johnson wanted to develop a style for the portrayal of African Americans. His style found its expression in the depiction of spirituals and biblical stories with figuration derived from African themes. Although Johnson is not considered particularly religious, he had been raised in the Southern black Baptist church and understood that African

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Americans identified with religious themes, like the crucified Jesus.25 One critic, Adelyn Breeskin, suggested that Johnson could have turned to religious themes as a source of comfort from the racial prejudice that he encountered in the United States.26 Johnson’s work cannot be characterized with the hope that imbued Tanner’s paintings. In both his The Three Marys (1939) and Mount Calvary (1944), Johnson’s Jesus is African American, and he bears the weight of his burden heavily. The Jesus of Mount Calvary bears the pain of the crucifixion with contorted features and a bowed head. Blood oozes from the wounds inflicted by the nails. His followers weep and pray as they surround him. On each side of Jesus, there is a crucified criminal, demonstrating the similarity to Jesus’s punishment. Johnson believed that the crucified black Christ demonstrates how African Americans despite their noble acts are also crucified in American society.27 Johnson used these religious images as an indictment, a protest, of the treatment of African Americans. The work of Tanner and Johnson demonstrates that religious art can be a conduit for both religious devotion and protest over injustice. The use of art by Tanner and Johnson presents only one side of the coin of religion’s interaction with the arts, and their efforts are extraordinary because their art could be seen by audiences, reflected upon by art critics, and publicized. But what of ordinary folks? How did they relate religion and the visual in their everyday lives? In the 1930s and 1940s, while religious life was supposedly declining, photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) discovered that ordinary religion was flourishing in the most unexpected of places. In her work, Picturing Faith, Colleen McDannell explores the world of Depression-era religious practice, and she concludes that the assumption of religious decline was inaccurate. Religious institutions might have been losing members, but the American people were still practicing their faith. Ordinary folks created their religious worlds wherever they were. The photographs of FSA show small prayer meetings, automobiles painted with bible verses, religious images that graced tattered homes, and religious objects people used to keep in touch with their faith. These photographs documented the visual and material dimensions of faith. For example, Jack Delano photographed an interior of a home built by the FSA, and his photograph depicted not only books of hymns but also reprints of an Ecce Homo and The Infant Samuel.28 This family’s home made their faith visible. FSA photographers documented the religious lives of these people in visual forms, and they also created what they believed were religious images. In particular, Walker Evans was fascinated by the simplicity and grace of Southern churches. He created works of art by photographing empty churches to show spiritual spaces.29 These vignettes demonstrate the interaction of religion and the visual arts and demonstrate the variety of expressions of religion in art and art as a medium for religion. What becomes clear is that there is no essential definition of this relationship. Instead, there is a multitude of possibilities. However, these possibilities have been obscured by a scholarly focus on secularization in American religious history and art history.

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SECULARIZATION AND RELIGIOUS ART FROM THE 1950s TO THE 1970s According to art historian Sally Promey, secularization theory suggests that modernization leads to a decline of religion, and this theory assumes that the religious and the secular cannot coexist.30 Thus, Americans should have become increasingly more secular in the twentieth century with modernization, but this was not the case. Religion has survived in the increasingly secular United States. However, McDannell’s work conveys what I want to portray: that the interactions of religion and visual arts occur, and these interactions do not happen only in galleries and museums but also in homes and in the lives of ordinary folks. Her work also points to the problem of secularization for religion and the arts, in that art historians and others have assumed that secularization of American culture has occurred (or is occurring) and that religion is slowly losing its hold on society. Instead, what McDannell’s work makes clear is that secularization often involves an institutional focus and ignores the ordinary piety that occurs outside of these institutions. The supposed secularization, much like the supposed iconoclasm of Americans, has ignored how religion has remained a dynamic force that continues to influence all facets of society, including the visual arts. Americans have continued to be religious, and they have continued to make art. Moreover, American culture has also pressed upon the aesthetic standards of religious groups. For instance, the art of Catholicism has changed quite a bit during its long history on American soil. Colleen McDannell has traced the changing visual aesthetic of Catholic churches, and she argues that the turn to a style that prefers simplicity rather than realism and ornamentation demonstrates an attempt to masculinize what was seen as an effeminate church. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, l’art Saint Sulpice, often used as a derogatory term for objects and books that were cheap and presumptuously pious,31 was the art of the Catholic church. This art form was flashy and sentimental with prints, statuary, and lavish altars, and Catholics decorated their churches to provide places for the presence of God. This art form was tied also to the rise of extraliturgical devotions: novenas, missions, and membership in religious societies. By 1952, l’art Saint Sulpice was under attack by the Vatican, which forbade bishops to keep these statues and effigies, even if they drew the veneration of the faithful.32 Catholic art critics quickly jumped on the bandwagon of critiquing this art form, which they considered nothing more than kitsch. Catholics turned to the modern arts and suggested that Catholic art should move beyond the ornamental to a more transcendent, simple style. This new aesthetic was termed l’art sacre´, hieratic art, which ‘‘retain[ed] the representational quality of art while instilling in it an abstract formality.’’33 This art was not fully abstract, but adopted some qualities of modern art. L’art Saint Sulpice had lost popularity in the church. The statues were removed from churches, and the woodcarvings and banners that replaced them had symbols of Christ rather than literal depictions. In the 1960s, some churches went even further, and banners were removed, and

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the altar draped in plain cloth became the focus of the sanctuary. The simplicity of l’art sacre´ potentially forced the viewer to move away from the everyday and focus on transcendence, although the sentimentality and realism of l’art Saint Sulpice was steeped in the mundane. For McDannell, this new aesthetic supported by the Second Vatican Council portrayed the attempt to remasculinize Catholicism in the face of its supposed effeminacy. While the Catholic visual landscape changed, the so-called spiritual abounded in art. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the abstract expressionists34 with their large blocks of color, lines, and monochrome paintings were considered spiritual artists. Barnett Newman (1905–1970) and Mark Rothko (1903–1970) hoped for their canvases to present a new creation of art. Newman’s work was concerned with the sublime, and his later work had explicitly religious titles, including fourteen paintings that comprised his Stations of the Cross (late 1950s–late 1960s). Newman’s Stations were black and white paintings with vertical lines. John Dillenberger suggested that Stations and 13 Untitled Drawings (1960), additional black and white paintings, personified Jesus’s cry while on the cross about why God has forsaken him.35 Rothko, on the other hand, focused on bold colors and did not consider himself an abstractionist. Rather he hoped his paintings portrayed basic human emotions. He felt that he had a religious experience as he was painting his large colored canvases.36 In 1962, he completed red murals for Harvard University that impressed Dominique De Menil so much with their spiritual power that she commissioned Rothko to create paintings for an ecumenical chapel in Houston, Texas.37 In the chapel (1965–1967), his paintings were a deep, dark red, which appears almost black, and his patron felt that these paintings flirted at the ‘‘threshold of transcendence; the mystery of the cosmos, the tragic mystery of our perishable condition.’’ Moreover, these paintings reflected ‘‘the silence of God’’ and a sense of mystery.38 Both Newman and Rothko’s works provided the viewers with a sense of mystery and likely spirituality. Interestingly, one art historian, Ori Soltes, noted that these two prominent artists were both Jews, though not observant, and their paintings should be viewed as the Jewish obligation of tikkun olam, repairing the universe.39 Soltes argued that their canvases unify and center. These canvases presented a ‘‘secular messianism,’’ the world not as it is, but as it has the potential to be.40 For Soltes, these particular abstract expressionists were not merely spiritual, but religiously utopian and hopeful. The crises of the 1960s might have been what these artists were responding to in their attempts to unify. The tumult of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and various social movements—provided many challenges to the white Protestant consensus. The challenge of the 1960s led to new theological movements, including black liberation theology and feminist theology, which provided different renderings of God and Jesus. In 1967 after the Detroit race riot, St. Cecelia’s Roman Catholic Church presented ‘‘a striking dome of a thick-lipped, kinky-haired Black Christ, surrounded by a veritable United Nations of angels of different races and ethnicities.’’41 The priest at St. Cecelia’s claimed that the church was not claiming that Christ was

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only black but also black. The representation of Jesus as black caused quite a controversy, and one leading spokesperson in the debate, Albert B. Cleage, Jr., asserted that there had never been a white Jesus.42 The issue at hand was whether African Americans could be liberated in a religion that presented a white Christ. The presentation of a black Jesus provided a savior that understood the unique struggle of African Americans and provided a conduit for not only salvation but liberation. In 1969, James Cone published Black Theology and Black Power, in which he claimed that Christianity was a religion of the oppressed. For Cone, blackness was not literal but symbolic. Blackness became a symbol for all of those who fought oppression. Therefore, Jesus was black. Feminist theology emerged during the same period when black liberation theology was radically critiquing the existing religious status quo. Feminist theologians presented a similar challenge to Christianity by suggesting that Christianity was a patriarchal system, which was harmful to women. God became a symbol for re-presentation. Some feminist theologians, notably Rosemary Radford Ruether, hoped to reform the traditions. On the other hand, Mary Daly suggested that if God was represented as male, then male, in turn, became God. Thus, women could not find redemption in this system. Some feminist theologians rejected the patriarchy of Judeo-Christian religions and turned to the Goddess and her imagery for religious expression. Although black liberation theology and feminist theology sought to refigure their respective religious worlds, Native American artists used their art to reclaim a spiritual heritage that had been taken away from them. In 1883, the federal government outlawed their practice of the Sun Dance. Although the practice was outlawed, the presentation of the Sun Dance continued through paintings by Lakotas. According to Harvey Markowitz, Sun Dance painting had a long history with the Lakotas as a method to present wakan, spirit.43 However, after the banning of the Sun Dance, the paintings were sold to non-Indian customers. These paintings represented the ritual with figuration. In 1912, Short Bull (1845–1915) was one of the original depictors of the Sun Dance, and his works served not only to reproduce the ceremony, but to show the importance of this religious observance to future Lakotas. A later Sioux artist, Oscar Howe (1915– 1983), also depicted the Sun Dance in an attempt to communicate Sioux history and its richness. In the early 1980s, his later work on the Sun Dance moved away from idealization to a dynamic portrayal that depicted the spiritual ecstasy of the ceremony. Markowitz noted that these depictions were not merely illustrations but attempts to show the sacred, the spirituality of the Sioux, and the importance of this ceremony for their religious faith. These paintings thus function as a way to reflect on the religious lives of a people and to preserve a religious tradition against all odds. These artworks, as the varied portrayals of God and Jesus, present a refiguring of religious worlds and a new characterization of visual landscapes that yearn for something more than what has been given. These artists, theologians, and adherents tweak the visual to tweak the religious. They change symbology to find a place for themselves and others like

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them because changing the visual becomes a method for molding the religious. Art and artifacts became conduits for devotion, religious teachings, and the divine. However, in the late twentieth century, the role of religion in the arts was questioned and redefined by artists, but the place of faith in the arts remained.

NO RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY ART? Andy Warhol, the king of Pop Art, created a series of works based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Warhol’s Last Supper series and his Crosses (Twelve), created respectively in 1986 and 1981–1982, have been considered an artistic innovation rather than religiously motivated. What is intriguing is that this prominent interpretation ignores the religious impulses of Warhol, a Catholic, who remained devout throughout his life.44 Warhol’s religious life and dedication were overlooked, even though a large part of his work from the late 1960s until the 1980s portrayed religious themes. Why was Warhol’s burgeoning piety ignored? A central component to this ‘‘religious ignorance’’ is the popularity of secularization theory among art historians, who did not align the avant-garde with religious thought or belief. Thus, the religious meanings that many artists, like Warhol, ascribed to their work were overlooked. Some art historians, like James Elkins, have even suggested that there is no religion in contemporary art, but this assertion flies in the face of artists who are religious and the audiences who find their art to be religious. Religious art has been considered decidedly unmodern because of its subject matter, and thus the presence of religion and faith has not been explored in the work of contemporary artists. Art historian Erika Doss confirms that religion and faith are overlooked in the works of contemporary artists such as Warhol. She suggests that artists use their media in ‘‘visualizing faith,’’ defining their beliefs, or interrogating belief systems.45 She defines religious art as art that affirms and interrogates. Moreover, religious art has also been wed to ‘‘outsiders’’ of the art world. ‘‘Religion in art’’ in galleries has focused upon African American, Jewish, Native American, Latino/a, women, and queer artists. Doss writes, ‘‘Yet by centering on artists already marginalized by the art world, such shows perpetuate the idea that only America’s multicultural ÔothersÕ and ÔoutsidersÕ are particularly attentive to spiritual subjects and issues of faith.’’46 This pigeonholing of faith to outsider, or preferably self-taught, artists recreates the bifurcation between high and low art, modern and unmodern. What should be recognized is the prevalence of faith, religion, and belief in the art of many American artists rather than the bias that is reflected in these categorizations. In the 1980s and 1990s, the relationship of the visual arts and religion has been characterized as antagonistic. Postmodernism flourished in art with juxtapositions, challenges, and attacks on previous artistic styles and certain topics. Artists pushed the limits of the visual arts often using religious imagery in their different mediums. Many have been accused of being heretical and blasphemous because of their use of religious symbols. Art critic Eleanor Heartney has explored the art of many contemporary

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artists and their relationship to Catholicism including the three infamous artists, Andres Serrano, Christopher Ofili, and Robert Gober, whose exhibits have caused much controversy. Detractors declared Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989), a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, as a violent act committed on a religious symbol. The funding by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) of Serrano’s work led to a campaign against the NEA by religious conservatives. This work was considered anti-religious and anti-Catholic despite Serrano’s explanation of his work. Piss Christ was one in a series of works in which Serrano used body fluids as religious symbols. Heartney argues that Serrano was relying upon the incarnational theology of the Catholic church and the church’s emphasis on the body as the inspiration for his work. Serrano was reflecting upon Christ’s human body: the flesh, blood, and excrement. He was also attempting to elevate a bodily process (and the body), which had been degraded, and Piss Christ was intended to be a celebration of the body, not blasphemy.47 Christopher Ofili’s work, The Holy Virgin Mary, also caused considerable uproar from both Protestants and Catholics, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani cancelled funding for the Brooklyn Museum when the museum displayed it, although funding was later restored after a legal battle. Ofili’s painting was part of ‘‘Sensation,’’ an exhibition of other shocking works by British artists. The Virgin was portrayed as African, with one breast created out of elephant dung and highlighted by rhinestones and two other dung balls were covered in rhinestones at the bottom of the painting. The excrement, of course, was what Giuliani found offensive, and he believed that the painting was attacking a sacred symbol of the Catholic church. What Giuliani and other detractors ignored was that Ofili was a practicing Catholic and that he had used dung in other works. Some have suggested that Ofili used dung to connect with his African heritage, in which dung is a symbol of fertility, but others have contested this interpretation.48 What is key is how the artist muddles sacred and profane, the purity of the Virgin with the profanity of dung. Moreover, behind the Virgin, there were small images of buttocks from pornographic magazines, which playfully commented on the sexuality, or lack thereof, of his subject. Ofili was reinterpreting Catholic theology in what he considered his ‘‘hip hop version.’’ According to Brent Plate, ‘‘Ofili, some of his defendants would claim, tests the limits of theological perception for a contemporary age, offering new ways of seeing old subjects.’’49 Robert Gober’s untitled (or ‘‘Virgin’’) installation (1995–1997) at the Geffen Contemporary, a Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, had at its center a concrete sculpture of the Virgin Mary with a bronze culvert pipe sticking through her midsection. Storm drains were placed around the room, with pools filled with aquatic life inside. The drain by the Virgin contained Lincoln-head pennies dated 1954, and suitcases located by drains contained a picture of a man’s legs and a baby’s legs dangling.50 Gober’s work was an intricate assemblage and an expression of his spirituality. Gober, a Catholic, created an installation that reflected on his Catholic roots and his conflicted relationship with the church.51 He critiqued

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the institution, which condemned him for being homosexual, although he also affirmed the church’s life-giving potential, represented in the water flowing from the Virgin’s culvert. He also focused on the body and its relationship with the divine as did previous Catholic artists. His Virgin is rough and scarred, yet his drains present an Edenic realm, and she represents his conflicted hope for the Catholic church. Yet like Serrano and Ofili, his installation was found offensive. Some critics believed it a desecration of a holy image, although others experienced the installation as sacred. Linda Eckstrom, who wrote a defense of the installation in the National Catholic Reporter, argued that Gober’s installation pointed to the ambiguity in the relationship between art and religion.52 Moreover, she pointed out that no one can claim complete control over a religious symbol, like Mary, and she believed that the tension between art and religion was healthy because of the new responses it provoked.53 Eckstrom’s acceptance of this ambiguity and the multitude of ways to interpret religious symbols presents an interesting query for both the religiously faithful and artists. Are Serrano, Ofili, and Gober pushing theology to its limits or were they blasphemous? Or the most basic question, is their work religious or not? By just examining their works out of context, it might be possible to question their religious intentions. However, within context, it becomes clear that their works are reflecting upon their religious beliefs and become a way to represent their faith. Eckstrom’s discussion of Gober’s work also leads to the question: Who has interpretive power over religious symbols? How can one distinguish between desecration and a reworking of these symbols? Should art that interrogates religion be accepted by religious organizations? Is the relationship antagonistic or ambiguous? Moreover, self-taught artists present a different relationship with religion, which is often affirming and prophetic. Howard Finster (1915/ 1916–2001) was a Baptist minister who believed that God wanted him to make ‘‘sacred art’’ as a method to save souls.54 He produced thousands of works, which were mostly mixed media; his most famous were Paradise Garden and the World’s Folk Art Church in Georgia. Finster can be characterized best as a visionary, who created his idea of the heavenly realm and God’s Word on earth. Finster’s Paradise Garden is his representation of heaven complete with ‘‘glittering junk, winking angels, Elvis, flying saucers, and rusting tools, and Co’-Cola bottles lodged within the swampy pine brambles of North Georgia.’’55 Finster hoped his works would beckon sinners to salvation; he thus presented heaven and its delights as well as the path where sin would lead: hell and damnation. For instance, his A Feeling of Darkness (1982) is warning about the evil that is multiplying in the world. Snakes and other beasts populate the foreground of this dark painting while frowning clouds and the black sky contain written examples of evil. Messages of the clouds include broken marriages, war, rape, molesters, killers, ‘‘lazy deadbeats,’’ and fornicators, to name a few. The mountains and landscapes also contain his descriptions of the downfall of humanity. On the bottom left of the painting, Finster places his message of salvation: ‘‘A feeling of darkness. Creeping up on the world.

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Increasing evils multiplying. The age for a turn around or face a dead end. It is now up to all the earth people to choose.’’ His painting was signed Howard Finster, Messenger from God. Finster, like many other evangelical self-taught artists, participated in the process of creating the Word of God through his art. His art became a way to make an intangible divine realm concrete. This visionary made his religious faith visible. This practice, of course, is not new because Finster, and other like artists, adherents, and religious groups, participated in the process of ‘‘imaginary world building.’’56 Their art and their use of art made their religious worlds more tangible to them. Their religious worlds can be seen, modified, and commemorated through this process. The visual arts become processes of making the unseen seen. Seeing is a crucial part of believing. This religious seeing, as we have noticed, does not necessarily affirm a religious worldview but can critique and create a worldview that resonates more with an individual believer or group of believers. The visual is an important way to express invisibility of religious worlds. Art becomes the way to make and remake these worlds. Art also fosters religious praxis in everyday life. Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist, argues that the arts are revitalizing religion in America. Pottery classes allow participants to experience what it means to be a creator. The use of icons assists believers in prayer. Churches have employed arts programs, and many churches are turning to the arts as conduits of spirituality. Thus, religious practitioners might use the arts on their own terms to foster their personal spiritualities or institutions might provide programs for groups to explore creative spirituality. The arts become personal and corporate phenomena. Wuthnow argues that ‘‘[s]eeing is not simply being able to visualize better by virtue of looking at a painting or sculpture.’’ Rather, it ‘‘involves participating in the presence of God and in God’s activity in the world.’’57 These believers he surveyed confirmed this notion, and they affirmed the importance of the arts as a venue to the divine. Religious imagination was crucial to this process because these believers made the invisible visible. People were seeing and creating as a way to experience God and practice their religions.

THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND THE VISUAL ARTS The relationship of religion and the arts, as we have seen, is ambiguous at best and in recent years has become more complicated in increasingly religiously pluralistic America. The visual culture of Christians cannot be equated as the visual religiosity of America because of the diversity of religious traditions on American soil. No longer can the study of religion and arts in America reflect only Christian views, but there needs to include an understanding of other views as well, such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and the arts. What are the visual landscapes of these traditions and how are they different in America? What is the place of religious seeing in these traditions? Are the arts appreciated, underplayed, or neglected? How do

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believers visualize these faiths? For instance, in Hinduism, darshan, the practice of seeing the images of the deity, is a crucial part of the tradition. In India, religious images abound in bright colors and lavish detail. According to Diana Eck, a scholar of Hinduism, the deity is present in an image, and seeing the image is an act of worship.58 In Hinduism, seeing is charged with religious import, but what about Hindu visual culture in America? How has the religious seeing of Hinduism been affected by the Christian influence in America? Are religious images as abundant or have they changed? One example of the artistic interaction between Christianity and Hinduism in America is the portrayal of Jesus as a yogi. The Vedanta Society was established by Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) in 1894, and this marked the first organized Hindu presence in the United States. Vivekananda’s guru, Ramakrishna, had a vision of Christ that caused him to worship Christ as a deity. Thus, his disciple Vivekananda, was charged to spread the ‘‘Jesus-friendly gospel of Ramakrishna’’ after his guru’s death, which worked well within the predominantly Christian America of the late nineteenth century.59 Moreover, Christ was incorporated into the practice of darshan. In the 1920s, a Catholic painted the image of Christ the Yogi for the Vedanta Society, in which Christ is depicted in white robes as a holy man sitting in the lotus position with animals surrounding him.60 Christ is clearly portrayed as a Hindu. The visual landscape of Hinduism incorporated this Christian symbol, and, according to Stephen Prothero, this image can be found today in Hindu homes and temples all across the United States. This example is one of many that would demonstrate the visual faith of other religious groups, and thus, attention must be paid to visual faiths of other traditions. How have other groups reacted to these new visual landscapes currently and historically? How have these groups crafted American spaces to create religious landscapes? How have they incorporated symbols and rituals from other groups? Are they iconoclastic or ambivalent? The interaction between different religious groups and their varied forms of religious seeing needs to be studied to determine if these groups assimilate, blend, or ignore the visual religion of other groups. This plurality of religions means shifts in the visual landscape of America, which is quite different today from the visual landscapes of the Puritans. America’s religious art is no longer dominated by Christian renderings of the divine; this predominance is waning because of new visual pieties being expressed from other religious groups and religious peoples. Symbols of the world’s religions have found a place in the American visual vocabulary, allowing for the bridging of religious cultures.61 For instance, Jesus might be a part of visual faith, but Jesus could be black, a rabbi, a guru, or a woman. For Stephen Prothero, Jesus becomes a symbol that represents both the Christian facets of America and America’s pluralism. Christian symbols are already being incorporated into different visual faiths, and the visual faiths of America, thus, have come to represent both Christian predominance and new pluralism. What this suggests, of course, is that there will no longer be a dominant religious imagery, but instead a multitude that represents our individuality

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and our diversity in this nation. Faith in America can no longer be categorized by one religious system, and religion and the visual arts can be characterized by the diversity of religious seeing rather than unity. However, this diversity should not obscure a similar impetus between artists, religious groups, and believers to create their religious worlds in concrete terms, to make them visible, and to change these systems visually to find a place for one’s self. However, the presentation of visible religious worlds is not met always with acceptance but sometimes with disdain and contempt. The religious images of Ofili and Serrano sparked public controversy because of their ‘‘anti-religious’’ sentiment and debates over public funding of the arts. Should the public fund work that some find offensive or derogatory? Do artists have a right to free expression when they receive public funding? The NEA was attacked for many years because of its funding of Serrano’s work and also the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, argued that the NEA should not fund any works with obscenity, homoeroticism, sadism, or denigration of the ‘‘objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion.’’62 Of course, Helms’s statement reflects issues of personal taste, individual morality, and a lack of understanding of the religious context in which these artists work. Moreover, art historian Dawn Perlmutter argues that the battle over funding of religious art masks a conflict between competing moralities and ‘‘political exploitation of people who embrace ideals other than one’s own.’’63 Funding of this art would be more about what was the appropriate public morality because funding would legitimate the morality of the art. Competing moralities is part of the problem with the public funding of religious art. The diversity of religious groups in America presents another challenge for public funding of religious art: How is it possible to fund religious art of a certain group in a pluralistic society? Does funding legitimate the religious worldview of one group and not other groups? With increasing pluralism, public funding of religious art will continue to be challenged not just because of its moral vision but because of preferential treatment for one religious group over another. This is not to say that public funding will cease. Nor does this suggest that religious art might not be displayed publicly. Rather, religious arts in America are and will continue to be contested and disdained, but these works will continue to flourish in more syncretistic and dynamic ways. The interaction of religion and the visual arts in America will remain vibrant, antagonistic, and cooperative, characteristics of the ambivalent nature of this relationship. Americans will still rely on the arts to make their religious worlds visible, to create these worlds anew, and to contest other versions of these worlds. Americans will continue to visualize their faiths. This art might no longer reflect the predominance of Christianity but present an array of religious traditions and religious hybrids. The arts will remain a venue into understanding the religious imaginations of artists, religious groups, and believers. Americans were and still are a visionary people, and seeing, after all, is believing.

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NOTES I would like to thank John Corrigan, Michael Gueno, Michael Pasquier, and Howell Williams for their contributions. 1. David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 27. 2. Ibid., 7. 3. Jane Dillenberger and John Dillenberger, Perceptions of the Spirit in TwentiethCentury American Art (Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1977), 1. 4. David Morgan coined the term ‘‘visual religion’’ to describe religious visual culture. See Morgan, ‘‘Visual Religion,’’ Religion 30, 1 (2000): 41–53. 5. This chapter focuses primarily on Christian reactions to the arts because of the influence of Christian tenets on the visual. In doing so, I do not discount the influence of other religious traditions on the arts. The final section of the chapter treats the influence of religious pluralism and the arts in greater depth. 6. S. Brent Plate, ed., Religion, Art, & Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 55. 7. Ibid., 54. 8. See Ibid., 53–61. For more on the image in Christianity, see Margaret Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1985). 9. David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 60. Morgan terms this ‘‘visual piety.’’ 10. Ibid., 64. 11. For more on Luther and the arts, see John Dillenberger, A Theology of Aesthetic Sensibility (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 61–66. 12. Morgan, Sacred Gaze, 12. 13. Sally M. Promey, ‘‘American Protestantism and Pictorial Ambivalence,’’ in Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life, ed. Alberta Arthurs and Glenn Wallach (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 195. 14. Promey, relying upon Neil Harris’s work The Artist in American Society, asserts that Puritan New England lacked the three conditions for the creation of a fine arts tradition: industrialism, nationalism, and urbanization. See Promey, ‘‘American Protestantism and Pictorial Ambivalence,’’ 197–98. 15. Promey characterizes this as a set of ‘‘cultural suspicions’’ about iconoclasm that function ‘‘in shaping and regulating the production and reception of images, privileging some, castigating or dismissing others, within a single religious expression.’’ See Promey, ‘‘American Protestantism and Pictorial Ambivalence,’’ 193. 16. See Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), for further explanation of the Puritan aesthetic of beauty and its implications for gender. 17. Dillenberger, A Theology of Artistic Sensibility, 22. 18. Ibid. 19. See Tracy Leavelle, ‘‘Geographies of Encounter: Religion and Contested Spaces in North America,’’ American Quarterly 56:4 (December 2004): 913–43. 20. The Hudson River School artists painted grand landscapes of the Hudson River valley and other natural phenomena, and they focused on the terrifying power of nature. The most well-known artists of the school include Cole, Asher B. Durand, George Inness, Frederick Church, John F. Kensett, and Albert Bierstadt. 21. Promey, ‘‘American Protestantism and Pictorial Ambivalence,’’ 203–4.

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22. Dillenberger, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America, 99. For more on Cole, see ibid., 97–103. 23. For more information on Tanner, see Marcus Bruce, Henry Ossawa Tanner: Spiritual Artist (New York: Crossroad, 2002); and Kelly J. Baker, ‘‘Henry Ossawa Tanner: Race, Religion, and Visual Mysticism’’ (M.A. thesis, Florida State University, 2003). 24. For additional interpretations of Tanner’s work, see Dewey F. Mosby, Across Continents and Cultures: The Art and Life of Henry Ossawa Tanner (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1995); and Mosby and Darrel Sewell, Henry Ossawa Tanner (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991). 25. Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 193. 26. Adelyn D. Breeskin, William H. Johnson (Washington, DC: National Museum of Art, 1972), 11, as quoted in Bearden and Henderson, 193. 27. Ibid., 194. 28. McDannell first discussed the FSA photographs in her Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 1. 29. See Colleen McDannell, Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 56, 63. 30. Sally Promey, ‘‘The ÔReturnÕ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art,’’ Art Bulletin 85:3 (September 2003): 584. 31. McDannell, Material Christianity, 170. 32. Ibid., 171. 33. Ibid., 178. 34. According to John Dillenberger, it is possible to trace a line to Abstract Expressionism from Cezanne through Cubism and then abstraction, but he prefers to begin with Caspar David Friedrich and total abstraction, which had theological underpinnings, and American artists, including Georgia O’Keefe and her abstract forms of nature. See Dillenberger, Visual Arts, 190–91. 35. Dillenberger and Dillenberger, Perceptions of the Spirit, 104. The biographical entries were written by John Dillenberger. 36. Mark Rothko, quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1957), 93–94, as quoted in Erika Doss, ‘‘Visualizing Faith: Religious Presence and Meaning in Modern and Contemporary Art’’ in Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South, ed. Carol Crown (Memphis, TN: Art Museum of University of Memphis, 2004), 41. 37. Ibid., 108. 38. Dominique De Menil, address at opening of Rothko Chapel, February 7, 1971, as quoted in Dillenberger and Dillenberger, Perceptions of the Spirit, 110. 39. Ori Soltes, ‘‘Contexts: Jews and Art at the End of the Millennium,’’ in Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millennium (Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000), 107. 40. Ibid. 41. Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became A National Icon (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003), 200. 42. Ibid, 201. 43. Harvey Markowitz, ‘‘From Presentation to Representation in Sioux Sun Dance Painting,’’ in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 170. 44. Doss, 46–47. Also see Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004), 26–41.

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45. Doss, 42. 46. Ibid., 43. 47. Heartney, 116. 48. For support of this theory, see ibid., 143. For a more critical reading of Ofili’s work, see Plate, ed., Religion, Art, and Visual Culture, 4. 49. Plate, 2. 50. Erika Doss, ‘‘Robert Gober’s ÔVirginÕ Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art,’’ in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 129. 51. Ibid., 136. 52. Ibid., 144. 53. Ibid. 54. Crown, Coming Home!, 188. 55. N.J. Girardot, ‘‘Where There Is No Vision the People Perish: Visionary Artists and Religious-Based Environments in the American South,’’ in Crown, Coming Home!, 89. 56. Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 69, as quoted in Girardot, ‘‘Where There Is No Vision the People Perish,’’ 91. 57. Robert Wuthnow, All in Sync: How Music and Art Are Revitalizing American Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 240. 58. See Diana Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 59. For more on Jesus and the Order of Ramakrishna, see Prothero, 269. 60. Ibid., 267. 61. Kathryn McClymond, ‘‘Religion and the Arts,’’ in Eric Mazur, ed. ‘‘Art and the Religious Impulse,’’ Bucknell Review 46:1 (2002): 37. 62. ‘‘The Helms Process,’’ New York Times, July 28, 1989, 26, as quoted in Matthew Moen, ‘‘Symbolic Politics: Public Funding of the Arts,’’ in Mazur, ed., 149. 63. Dawn Perlmutter, ‘‘The Subjugation of the Spiritual in Art,’’ in Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art: Contemporary Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Dawn Perlmutter and Debra Koppman (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1999), 15.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in History and Theories of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Morgan, David. Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Morgan, David, and Sally M. Promey, eds. The Visual Culture of American Religions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Plate, S. Brent, ed. Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

CHAPTER 3

Personal Spirituality Merrill M. Hawkins, Jr.

S

idney Mead once described America as the nation with the soul of a church. Indeed, the United States is a pervasively religious nation. Despite the secularization predictions yielded by many—that the United States was just a generation behind Western Europe—the United States has seen an increase in faith, rather than a decline. This increase is of a certain type of faith, though. The preferred self-description of practicing religious people is spiritual. In fact, many describe themselves as ‘‘spiritual, but not religious,’’ a statement with multiple and varied meanings, one of which is that a person is on the one hand, nonsecular, and on the other hand, nonsectarian. The phrase also means that a person derives spiritual or ultimate values from something other than a traditional religious institution and may in fact have no connection to such an institution. However, many more people in the United States, perhaps a majority, are both spiritual and religious. This phrase, which really is not a phrase that people use as a self-description, does capture the spiritual identities of many. A spiritual and religious person has some identity with a religious institution, perhaps even a primary identity. That institution, though, is a place where spirituality or ultimate values are lived out. It is not a place from which those values are derived or where they are instilled. Clearly, the self-description of being spiritual is part of the American religious landscape. People who are religious are careful to add that they are spiritual as well, not merely religious. Many nonreligious people in this country are not hostile to religion. Moreover, while being unreligious or secular, they think of themselves as spiritual. This chapter will explore various ways that people experience and describe spirituality and it will explore the role of spirituality in the American religious landscape.

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DEFINITIONS OF SPIRITUALITY With so many people preferring to be described as spiritual and choosing not to be described as religious, gaining some definition is important for clarity. Just how is spirituality defined and what do people mean by describing themselves as spiritual? And how congruous are definitions for spirituality and the meaning people intend in describing themselves as spiritual but not religious? Spirituality is understood in many ways. The term is multifaceted, as multifaceted as the practices that are connected to the definition. Related to the definition of spirituality is religion. The two are understood in connection with each other. Several scholars associated with the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality set out to offer definitions. First, spirituality is connected to behavior and lived religion. The concept is thus connected to values and judgments. In many ways, spirituality is the application of beliefs and propositions, not just their theoretical formulation. To be spiritual is to put into daily, lived practice the values and doctrines one has. It is to take the teachings of an institution and live out those teachings in praxis. Douglas Burton-Christie, for example, has stated that spirituality must involve several aspects: daily living, application of beliefs, ‘‘integration’’ or the elimination of a disconnect between daily life and religious dogma, a sense of the ‘‘communal,’’ and a ‘‘quest for ultimate value and meaning.’’1 This definition closely matches the historicalcontextual approach of Bernard McGinn, who sees spirituality as ‘‘the lived experience of Christian belief.’’2 Spirituality from this angle is the living out of one’s faith and that faith is directly connected to, for Christians, the institutional church. Large numbers of Americans have little connection to the institutional church, yet see themselves as spiritual, rather than secular. Many more people with strong connections to the institutional church experience a disconnect between the institutions to which they belong and their lived faith. A historical-contextual definition of spirituality does not capture the faith as practiced by these types. An anthropological definition of spirituality that defines the term primarily as relating to human experience and ultimate values reflects the practice of many Americans today. This definition of spirituality accepts the existence of a nonreligious, unchurched spirituality, as well as of a secular spirituality.3 Spirituality from an anthropological standpoint is ‘‘the project of selfintegration through self-transcendence.’’ The term refers not just to something that humans experience. Spirituality refers to the meaning that humans construct out of their own lives and values. The act of constructing values and living these values out is spirituality.4 Anthropological definitions and descriptions of spirituality capture what the word means to many, if not most, people today. The aims of spirituality are about a ‘‘spiritual quest’’ and about behavior and treatment of people. As a quest, spirituality is more about the process than the end result. The definition of spirituality is more of a description than a definition. One learns spirituality by describing it, rather than by defining it. To be spiritual, then, is to

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journey, to care, to develop a more integral self, and to be open and fluid, rather than fixed and static. In fact, most people who prefer the term spiritual to religious as a self-description (and that would be most people) cannot define the term ‘‘spiritual’’ with any clarity. This inability to define precisely is strong, although these same people are clear that they reject religion or even being labeled as religious, but they do embrace spirituality.5 Spirituality thus points to an interest in ultimate values or transcendence. The term refers to all the ‘‘beliefs and activities by which individuals relate their lives to God or to a divine being or some other conception of a transcendent reality.’’6 Although those who describe themselves as spiritual cannot define the term well, they insist on their preference for the term, and they can articulate what it is that they actually do in order to be called spiritual. The descriptions people give about spirituality center around four poles. First, such people are adamant that they mean one thing by the word religion and something altogether different by the word spiritual. Second, the use of the word spiritual includes an emphasis on ‘‘personal power.’’ The term implies opportunities and vistas; by contrast, religion implies limitations. Third, spirituality offers tangible benefits. The term is connected to what the devotee receives, rather than what is demanded of the devotee. Finally, the term spiritual carries the implications of being relativistic and universalistic, while religion carries images of being propositional and exclusivist.7 Related to this description of spirituality are a concomitant description and definition of religion. Those who describe themselves as spiritual are very clear that the word ‘‘spiritual’’ is not a synonym for the word religion. People mean something different by the two words, even if the concepts are compatible. This perspective that the two words are different concepts began to emerge especially in the 1960s when many people stated an intense disapproval of the word ‘‘religion.’’ Religion can, among other things, refer to fixed doctrinal systems and orthodoxies. To be religious means to belong to a particular religion and to be accountable to its beliefs and institutions. To be religious is also to be exclusivist. One belongs only to one religion. Although this understanding reflects a Western construction of religion, it is the one out of which religious and spiritual Americans operate. Those who are spiritual, but do not regard themselves as also religious, see their spirituality in a different manner. They experience spirituality in subjective and nondoctrinal terms.8 Although many may feel that religion is antithetical to spirituality, many— perhaps most—do not share that idea. In fact, for many, being spiritual denotes ‘‘a personal way of being religious.’’9 The key perspective here is that religion and spirituality are different, though not necessarily in conflict. In fact, many of the practices of spirituality are rooted and grounded in religious institutions. These practices are in some way a means to put the values of institutional religion into practice. One group that has particularly embraced the word ‘‘spiritual’’ as a self-description is college students. Many describe themselves as spiritual, and the meanings they attach to that word may offer some insight into the larger population. For this segment of the population, to be spiritual is to affirm the sacredness of

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life. To be spiritual also means that one is interested in searching for meaning and purpose in life, rather than merely existing. Spirituality for the college student includes an embrace of tolerance and an acceptance of others who are different, including those of different religions. To be tolerant for the college student is thus not to be disconnected from spirituality or dismissive of spiritual concerns. Although embracing tolerance and religion might require persons to compartmentalize their views and perhaps even to see some religions as less valid than others, spirituality is not incongruous with a broad tolerance. In fact, one necessitates the other. Moreover, the spiritual affirm that the nonreligious can be both moral and spiritual. To be spiritual does not require one to proselytize, but attempting to persuade others of the viability of its belief system may be integral to some religions. Spirituality is thus classically postmodern. The person committed to spirituality is at the same time both liberal and ‘‘evangelical.’’ The liberalism of the spiritual person is connected to that individual’s relationship with an institution and that person’s beliefs about other people; a single institution and its apparatus may simply not provide a framework of meaning and purpose in life for all persons. The ‘‘evangelical’’ aspect of the spiritual has to do with the primacy of experienced faith, an experience similar to conversion.10 Like conversion, spirituality is affective or felt within. The notion that spirituality is vitally connected to experiential faith is probably critical to an understanding of the term. As noted, numerous studies indicate that one can actually be both spiritual and religious, and that just such a perspective may be the one shared by most Americans. For many, to be spiritual is to abandon what is seen as negative in organized religion. In particular, it is to reject ritualized and routine expressions of religious forms that lack any corresponding internal feeling or passion. For many, especially American youth, religion without spirit is shallow and negative. To be spiritual, though, does not require withdrawal from institutional religion, but it does infuse vitality into one’s participation in that institution. The spiritual person accepts much of the institution and its prescribed beliefs and practices, but does so in a deeply personal, experiential, and tolerant manner. In this understanding, spirituality refers to the ‘‘intrinsic dimensions of religion,’’ while the word religion itself refers to the ‘‘substantive, extrinsic’’ dimensions of religion. Religion always involves some connection to an institution. Spirituality may or may not involve a close connection to an institution, but it will always be about lived, experiential faith. In fact, spirituality may not always involve a relationship with any institution. Although many are both spiritual and religious, a significant number of people are spiritual, but not religious. However, these nonreligious but spiritual people arrive at their position through remarkably similar pilgrimages. One does not typically embrace spirituality and then become dissatisfied with institutional religion. The path has been just the opposite. Those who reject institutional religion discover spirituality and embrace it. They are spiritual because they have left religion.11 Spirituality, then, is connected with religion, and to describe one requires a description of the other. The term religion refers to an

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institution and to something that is fixed. Spirituality, which grows out of religion for most Americans, is not chained to an institution and may even be divorced from it. Moreover, spirituality is fluid, with the focus being on the journey and the process. Religion is about settlement. Spirituality is about migration.12

THE PRACTICES OF PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY Contemporary spirituality in America in the early years of the twentyfirst century may best be described as a ‘‘reflexive spirituality.’’ Reflexive spirituality describes a situation of mixing and borrowing from many different, even contradictory, traditions and cobbling them together to create something that serves an individual on a spiritual quest. This quest, and the focus is truly on the quest rather than the end result, is a search for spiritual formation. It is formation, though, for the individual’s benefit or self-actualization. It is not formation, necessarily, for service and submission to an authoritarian institution, nor does it necessarily include altruistic service to benefit one’s fellow human beings or to being about social change.13 The practices of modern spirituality can also be captured through the word ‘‘bricolage,’’ a word that describes much of youth spirituality. Youth spirituality, especially that of college age students, in many ways mirrors the practices of the larger culture. Spiritually practicing college students are very comfortable borrowing symbols and messages from diverse backgrounds without regard to any traditional boundaries. This bricolage is a piecing together of various bricks or stones, with the mortar as the student’s own identity. This approach to spirituality might mean, for example, that many college students, along with others from different backgrounds, are comfortable attending both a conservative Intervarsity service and a Roman Catholic service. The difference in the theological propositions of those two institutions could not be more pronounced. Yet, the spiritually practicing college student is neither drawn to propositions nor repelled by them; indeed, students may be almost oblivious to them. The student is governed by experiences, especially multiple positive religious and spiritual experiences, wherever he or she might find them.14 How is it that spirituality in America arrived at its present shape? And what precisely is that shape? What is the context that produced twentyfirst-century contemporary spirituality and what does that spirituality look like? American spirituality began to take much of its present shape in the upheaval and social transformations of the 1960s, even as institutional religion took some significant turns. Spirituality and religion became much more personal and individualistic during the 1960s. This change probably reflected how people were becoming much less corporately and communally oriented as social change became the order of the day. This sense of individualism contributed to the rise of ‘‘a new sovereign self,’’ a self that answered to no one for ultimate concerns. Such radical individual autonomy in turn helped give birth to a personal spirituality.15

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Specifically, what were some of those changes in the larger society that shaped the change in spirituality? One social change that affected spirituality was the shift in the economy. In the 1960s, Americans ceased to have an economic identity as producers and increasingly saw themselves as consumers. Consumers are in the market for goods that satisfy their perceived needs. They believe they need those things that feed and nurture them and, as consumers, they are the final arbiters of what actually feeds and nurtures them.16 Another significant change underway in the 1960s concerned formal church construction and membership. The 1950s, in many ways, marked the zenith of congregational growth and church building construction as the nation moved away from the Great Depression and World War II. This growth reflected the dominant cultural position of the white Protestant mainline denominations. That position of dominance started to wane in the 1960s; membership in mainline churches first started to decline then and church construction also slowed. Yet, the shadow of religion remained.17 The family experienced significant social changes in the 1960s, all of which affected institutional religion and personal spirituality. Urban areas experienced tremendous population shifts, with families in large numbers relocating to the suburbs. The bedroom community became the site for much of the American family. This family was a different looking family, as well. It was smaller, with fewer children because of the declining birth rate and the increasing divorce rate. The 1960s marked a significant increase in the number of single-parent families, a change so connected with religious identity that shifts would certainly take place in spirituality to accommodate the change.18 The civil rights movement also fueled change in society that influenced changes in religion and spirituality. This movement challenged the values of the status quo and the power of the authorities at all levels. The civil rights movement emphasized the prime ethical values, such as God’s universal love for humanity. The test of a religious institution became its lived theology, not its articulated theology. That is, what a group actually did showed what that group truly valued and believed. Hence, churches and denominations that claimed to believe in God’s universal love for humanity, but practiced racial discrimination and failed to act against racism and discrimination were seen as hypocritical. They lost their authoritative status as spiritual agencies. Along with the move for racial justice in the civil rights movement came the rise of second-wave feminism and a massive change in the understanding of traditional gender roles. Women gained legal rights and economic power, which in some ways contributed to the divorce rate and shifts in family structure. No longer were women forced economically to stay in marriages that were physically or emotionally abusive. The 1960s also witnessed an increase in college enrollment, as the postwar baby boom generation began to mature, as well as a rise in the mobility of the labor force. People did not have a sense of connection to their town of origin; nor did they have to live with a sense of psychological imprisonment in communities that offered few opportunities. They could simply move elsewhere.19

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Finally, the 1960s saw what for America were nontraditional religions gain prominence and acceptance. For example, Zen Buddhism, Hare Krishna, EST, Scientology, and a host of other movements, gained devotees and admirers, but also critics. Many people accepted these traditions exclusively. Many more, however, embraced some of the practices of these faiths and applied them to individual practice, adding them to their personal package of spirituality.20 As a result of these various changes in the larger culture in the 1960s, religion and spirituality also began to look different. Spirituality increasingly became an individual project that focused on the journey as much as the destination. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow has referred to this change as one that abandoned a spirituality of dwelling for one of seeking. Yet another way of describing the change in spirituality is the phrase noted earlier, ‘‘spiritual, not religious.’’ Among the many things this phrase means is that large numbers of Americans are loosening their connection to religious institutions, yet becoming more connected with non-Enlightenment, nonrational experiences. In one way, people are becoming more religious, while becoming less involved in religions. The better self-description, though, is ‘‘spiritual.’’ To be spiritual is not necessarily to reject any association with institutional religion, but it is also to seek spiritual grounding from sources other than those in one’s own background. Spiritual Americans view their faith like a ‘‘patchwork quilt,’’ seeking garments from any number of places as long as they work. Moreover, spiritual people take charge of their development and do not rely on an institutional church to tell them how. The religious institution does not dictate one’s faith. Instead, spiritual people pick and choose from many resources to develop a metaphysic that works for them and may move from one to another if a package of beliefs and practices ceases to provide meaning and purpose in life. This movement makes spirituality a seeking, rather than a dwelling in a single habitation. A seeker’s spirituality is tentative, personal, and autonomous. Seekers do not settle into any one pattern or tradition. Moreover, seekers who are part of one tradition have no problem or disconnect with drawing resources from other faiths and bringing them back into their respective institution. In a seeker’s spirituality, boundaries between traditions are moveable, as well as porous.21 The social acceptance of noninvolvement in formal religious institutions increased dramatically in the 1980s and was firmly established by the 1990s. Although 90 percent of Americans claim to hold a belief in God, 40 percent are not connected with formal religious institutions. Most of these 40 percent, though, see themselves as spiritual or even religious. This statistic certainly reflects the rise of the spiritual but not religious person or, as Robert Fuller describes it, the faith of ‘‘unchurched religion.’’ A person with ‘‘unchurched religion’’ has spiritual values and even practices, but cultivates these values and practices without a firm connection to a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple.22 The context of religion at the end of the 1960s, a context which set the stage for religious and spiritual practice through the early 2000s, is one of searching and seeking, noninstitutional settlement, and ambiguity.

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Those who are spiritual are comfortable with questions and uncomfortable with answers that stifle seeking and questions. They move boundaries as they need to and when they erect boundaries, they do so with materials that allow dismantling them and erecting new ones. The spirituality of contemporary America is not neat and well-defined, except in its rejection of institutions, authority, and finality. American spirituality is a ‘‘complex, multilayered American religious terrain,’’ with no ‘‘rationally consistent conception.’’23 The quintessential spiritual person could well be Shirley Knight, a person who in 1960 attended a different church each Sunday, was confirmed as an Episcopalian, attended a Catholic church in college, later took courses in Jungian depth spirituality, and then discovered the thought of Rudolf Steiner. Knight did not see each of these exposures as stages brought to closure. Instead, each spiritual venture somehow led to the next venture, and all these experiences are with her in her adult self, one layered on the other.24

LEADERS OF UNCHURCHED SPIRITUALITY What is the delivery system for modern personal spirituality? As noted, although many have an unchurched spirituality, many others retain some connection to institutional religion. Yet institutional religion does not provide the only sustenance for spirituality. Other places and sources give strength to spirituality. The personal spirituality of contemporary America is delivered through ‘‘workshops, seminars, conferences, and retreat centers.’’25 This spirituality is also delivered through the publishing industry. Books like the Chicken Soup series,26 as well as writings by Thomas Moore and Scott Peck, all nurture this personalized spirituality more than anything produced by a traditional religious institution. The new spirituality in many ways is a fusion of a popular psychological therapy with spiritual language, and Moore and Peck provide books that became best-sellers that reflected this union. Both these men, along with people like Robert Sardello and his spiritual psychology, emphasize that spirituality is found in ordinary, everyday life and experience. In fact, what makes something spiritual is recognizing it as such. Recognition requires deliberation, though. A devotee must seek the spiritual in the ordinary. That person is not likely to stumble upon it. While spirituality is everywhere, it must be sought and the seeking is ‘‘more important than the destination.’’27 The canon for personal spirituality is varied, but Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled is certainly part of it. Published in 1978 by Simon and Schuster, The Road Less Traveled sold seven million copies, was a perennial bestseller, and in many ways set the stage for later works of noninstitutional spirituality. The book used therapeutic language and spiritual language and attempted to speak to a popular audience. The Road Less Traveled was a call for self-actualization and a nonmaterialistic perspective on life. The perspective of the book was directly from the experiences of Peck himself. A psychiatrist with limited formal connections to religion yet no hostility to it, Peck called on the reading audience to embrace that which is

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‘‘healthy’’ in religion. But the individual is the arbiter of the healthy. Peck’s own pilgrimage bore out this process. As a psychiatrist Peck espoused something of a secular outlook until early middle adulthood when, at the age of 42, he was baptized in a private nonsectarian ceremony by a United Methodist minister. Thomas Moore’s 1992 Care of the Soul is likewise a part of the canon and delivery system of personal spirituality. The book, with influences from Jungian psychology and traditional religion, provides a path for personal spirituality that sounds very therapeutic, all the while denying that it is therapy. Moore’s journey is similar to that of Peck, although he started from a different vantage point. Moore entered a Roman Catholic seminary at age thirteen. Shortly after turning nineteen and immediately before he was to be ordained, he chose not to become a priest. Instead, he pursued a Ph.D. in religious studies and taught for several years at Southern Methodist University. More interested in popular writing than academia, and more interested in nurturing personal spirituality, Moore left the academy and eventually published Care of the Soul.28 The approaches to spirituality taken by Peck and Moore embody noninstitutional spirituality. The unchurched spiritual people ‘‘value curiosity and religious freedom,’’ as well as experimentation in religion.29 Religious establishments are ‘‘stifling,’’ although people may participate in them on their own terms. The kind of person attracted to the religious approach of a Peck or a Moore tends to be college-educated, professional, politically liberal, from a secular original family, and placing little significance on social relationships. For example, this person will be comfortable attending church and engaging in occult practices consulting astrology and fortune tellers. Although the unchurched with these spiritual practices have no issue with a contradiction, the churched certainly have the potential for contradiction. They deal with this disconnect quite well, however, by compartmentalizing their worldviews. Modern personal spirituality does not need to be systematic. The key operating factor is eclecticism.30 The core practice of spirituality is captured in a question that is rooted in therapeutic culture. A settled spirituality is certainly focused on the question, ‘‘How can I be saved?’’ A seeker spirituality has replaced that question with the more therapeutically oriented, ‘‘How can I feel good about myself?’’31 In many ways, asking and answering that question is the heart of personal spirituality. That approach to spirituality, perhaps the dominant approach, could be labeled ‘‘moralistic therapeutic deism.’’ The basic beliefs and practices of this approach to spirituality are that God exists and is involved in human life and that God wants people to be ‘‘good, nice, and fair, and those who are good, nice, and fair go to heaven.’’32 The phrase ‘‘moralist therapeutic deism’’ can be broken down easily. This approach to spirituality is ‘‘moralistic’’—that is, it focuses on what people do. It is ‘‘therapeutic’’ in that the goal is the sense of wellbeing of the practitioner. It is ‘‘deistic’’ because the devotee believes in a real God, but that God for all practical purposes only rarely intervenes in any traditional, orthodox sense. Smith and Denton explore this approach to spirituality with regard to teens, but contend that the teen embrace of

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this spirituality reflects their appropriation of the religious world of the adults.33 Personal spirituality is also pluralistic; it is not exclusivist. The embrace of pluralism illustrates better than any other characteristic the porous nature of the boundaries. The modern interest in Native American religion is a case in point. Large numbers of white Americans not only admire Native American religion, they work to follow aspects of it in a syncretistic manner. Americans can do this both because they admire Native American teachings and because they will not view their own religious traditions in an exclusivist manner. To engage in practices associated with one religious tradition and to be a member of one religious group does not preclude seekers from adopting the practices of another tradition or traditions. Belief structures really are not boundaries that mark off territory for modern spiritual types. The idea of belonging to one group exclusive of any other group is a modern, Western view that many are rejecting, if not in theory, at least in practice.34 Teen religion, which is a mirror of the larger religious and spiritual culture, is also pluralistic in practice, if not in theory. To be certain, most teenagers are not ‘‘spiritual, but not religious.’’ Those who are spiritual live that spirituality out in a traditional religious institution. They express their religion within a church, synagogue, or mosque. The spirituality they express, though, is not narrow and particular. The majority of teens are inclusive.35 They do not see truth as contained only in one institution. They are pluralist, meaning that they are open to the spiritual identities of others who differ from them. Finally, they are individualist with regard to authority. Although they live out their faith in a congregation, they do not look to that congregation to guide or govern them. They look to that congregation to provide a space for them to express their faith in community with other seekers. Furthermore, lacking among teens is any fundamental hostility toward religion in the secular sense. European-style anticlericalism is not the style of American teens. Even the nonreligious view religion and spirituality in positive terms.

INDIVIDUALISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY The eclecticism of personal spirituality reflects the postdenominational and postmodern practice of lived theology and faith. For Americans, denominational labels and group identity are less important than ‘‘an authentic inner life and personhood’’ and the search for meaning. Religion as a force for ‘‘social belonging’’ has declined, though its role as a force to shape meaning has increased.36 The postmodern approach to religion and spirituality has a new language that emphasizes personal meaning. This language reflects ‘‘inwardness, subjectivity, the experiential, the expressive, [and] the spiritual.’’37 Postmodern spirituality is shaped by ‘‘popular religion,’’ which, among other things, is committed to the metaphysical while not committed to

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formal boundaries and institutions.38 Traditional religion might provide some ‘‘scaffolding,’’ but in the end the traditional institutions leave ‘‘big gaps’’ that the practitioner must fill. These gaps are with the inner life or experienced faith. In postmodern, personal spirituality, a person fills in the gaps that religion leaves empty for the interior self. A seeker is a ‘‘bricoleur’’ who selects many different pieces to create a new spirituality. This pieced-together spirituality serves the seeker, as well as strengthens the institutions to which seekers belong.39 As early as the mid-1980s, Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart raised questions about this approach to spirituality, with its emphasis on the individual and deemphasis on communal accountability. Probably the key example of individual spirituality is the ‘‘Sheilaism’’ of Sheila Larson, one of those interviewed by Bellah and his colleagues. Larson described herself as deeply and seriously spiritual, with an abiding faith in God. Yet she also stressed that she was ‘‘not a religious fanatic’’ and that she did not attend church at all. Larson’s self-understanding is a classic example of being spiritual, but not religious, and it seemed perfectly appropriate for her. For Bellah, however, Sheilaism signaled a decline in vital religion with the potential to undermine cultural stability as a whole. Among other things, Bellah stated that a religion and spirituality that were so highly individualized as what he saw emerging could not be good for the fabric of society, for there was no sense of commitment, no stake in the larger commonweal. Moreover, it was a departure from the collective pattern of American society to date.40 The individualism could be seen in another light, however. People who borrow and mix religious/spiritual practices are ‘‘serious about their decisions.’’ Perhaps these people are more serious than those who remain fixed in a tradition and who submit to the authorities of their traditions when the trend is so different. Borrowing from other traditions and being postmodern in the approach to spirituality are signs that one’s faith is living and ‘‘open . . . to continuing narration’’ and growth and change and fluidity. Those signs indicate life rather than stagnation.41 Moreover, fluidity actually can be seen as an extension of the American Puritan tradition, rather than a departure from it or from earlier patterns as Bellah had feared. Amanda Porterfield argues that the eclecticism of modern spirituality stands in the experiential, introspective tradition of the early Puritans, with their calls for self-examination and conversion. Add to the Puritan tradition the experience of American Pragmatism in philosophy and the eclecticism of postmodern American spirituality stands in a tradition with deep roots.42 Postmodernism and individualism also affected spirituality by rejecting metanarratives, a rejection that surely influenced the rise of the personal and the individual in religion. Robert Ellwood proposes that this change began in the 1960s, with the rejection of an idea of universal truths, the acceptance of multiple interpretations in giving meaning to life, and a shift from modern, Enlightenment modes of thinking. With this shift in worldview came a necessary shift in religion and spirituality. One of those shifts involved new understandings of the self or core identity. Freudian

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metanarratives viewed the self as a single ego or a single core identity, buried beneath layers and discovered by peeling away these layers. Somewhere, deep within, there was a single ‘‘solid entity.’’ The postmodern effect on psychology changed understandings of the self, ending the dominance of Freudian understanding. From the postmodern perspective, a person has multiple selves that may be in tension with each other, especially if one attempts to force uniformity. Uniformity for the postmodern person, though, is unnecessary because for the postmodern there is a ‘‘triumph of experience over logical consistency.’’43 For spirituality, this focus on experience and the rejection of the need for logical consistency fuels the type of spirituality most practiced in contemporary society. Postmodernism for religion also means the end of Protestant hegemony that started to wane in the 1960s, and the rise of personal autonomy and subsequent decline of parish involvement. The mainline institutional church once had the role of a ‘‘collective-expressive’’ institution, meaning that for its members, the church was a primary group. As a primary group, the church commanded full allegiance from its members and shaped how its members would respond to other groups and memberships. The mainline institutional church does not have that kind of role in society today, with fewer members on its rolls and a change in the meaning the church has for those who still belong. For those who remain in the institutional church, the influence of the organization is limited. People have multiple allegiances to different groups; there is little overlap between or among the groups to which people belong, and the church is simply one of several groups for its members. A church, mosque, or synagogue ‘‘can be entered and left with little or no impact on . . . other relations.’’44 The postmodern attraction to religion and spirituality has people coming to institutions not out of ‘‘collective-expressive’’ motivations, which entail obligation on the part of the adherent to the institution. Instead, the postmodern relationship to religion and spirituality is ‘‘individual-expressive.’’ A person comes to religion and spirituality looking for what those forces can do for the adherent. Spirituality is shaped by a person’s ‘‘privately chosen goals—for example, to commune with God, educate their children religiously, enjoy music, or get therapy.’’45 A person with an individualexpressive or postmodern understanding of spirituality leaves a movement when goals are not met or if the movement does not deliver or provide. The personal agenda of the adherent or the devout is paramount. The pragmatic approach to spirituality, held by so many to be a result, for good or ill, of the postmodern perspective, also entails choice. For a postmodern spirituality, choice and selection are not merely options, they are imperatives. If spirituality is about having personal needs met and if the value of an institution or practice is proportional to how well that institution meets needs, then people must expand their horizons. The personal autonomy of a postmodern perspective allows such choice. The reality is that people have ‘‘an enlarged arena of voluntary choice and enhanced freedom’’ and that they act on this enhanced freedom. Practitioners of spirituality feel free to choose from multiple options and that freedom of choice has much to do with the changed world perspective of postmodernism.46

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Although the decline of Protestant hegemony and the loss of institutional power as ‘‘collective-expressive’’ are in many senses the products of postmodernism, there is the sense that the quest for what works stands squarely within much of the heritage of American religion and spirituality. American religion has a tradition of ‘‘spiritual idealism’’ and ‘‘pragmatic concern.’’ America also has a tradition of privatized and individual spirituality, a tradition that has always caused people to shift allegiances from a movement that does not work to one that does work, with the devotee making the decision of what works. Although there have always been critics of individualism, there have always been those committed to individualism and the rejection of external authority. The seventeenth-century New Englander Anne Hutchinson, with her antinomian, personal approach to religious experience, stands as a case in point.47 To be sure, the increase of ‘‘the authority of internal experience,’’ the increasing dominance of that perspective, is new as a majority perspective. It has many implications, not the least of which is the decline of institutional power and the rise of relativism. Rather than being a break from the past, though, it could well be that radical individualism stands firmly in the American Puritan tradition. Puritans, with their emphasis on conversion and individual experience and their congregational polity, set precedents that are continued in modern personal spirituality. Today, much of American spiritual life is carried by institutions that are not churches. These institutions include photography and dance classes, as well as sports leagues. These are the places ‘‘where people find community, spiritual inspiration, and moral development.’’ Although the role of these institutions as spiritual forces is new, their influence is with the grain of American religion, rather than against it.48

NOTES 1. Quoted in Elizabeth A. Dreyer and Mark S. Burrows, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xv. 2. Bernard McGinn, ‘‘The Letter and the Spirit: Spirituality as an Academic Discipline,’’ in Dreyer and Burrows, eds., 31. 3. Ibid., 32–33. 4. Sandra Schneiders, ‘‘A Hermeneutical Approach to the Study of Christian Spirituality,’’ in Dreyer and Burrows, eds., 51, 71. 5. Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, Alyssa Bryant, Shannon Calderone, Jennifer Lindholm, and Katalin Szele´nyi, ‘‘The Spiritual Life of College Students; A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose’’ (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, 2005), 6; Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 81. 6. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), viii. 7. Roof, 81–84. 8. Ibid., 81; Wuthnow, 72; Philip Jenkins, Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12–13.

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9. Charles H. Lippy, Do Real Men Pray? Images of the Christian Man and Male Spirituality in White Protestant America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 4. 10 Astin et al., 4; Robert S. Ellwood, The Sixties Spiritual Awakening; American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 329. 11. Penny Long Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, ‘‘Being Religious or Being Spiritual in America: A Zero-Sum Proposition?’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41 (June 2001): 2, 6, 8; Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81. 12. Conrad Cherry, Betty A. DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield, Religion on Campus: What Religion Really Means to Today’s Undergraduates (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 275. 13. Roof, 75. 14. Cherry, DeBerg, and Porterfield, 276–77. 15. Roof, 130. 16. Wuthnow, 7. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. Ibid., 65, 67–68. 20. Ibid., 53. 21. Ibid., 3, 5. 22. Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–4. 23. Roof, 261. 24. Wuthnow, 52–53. 25. Fuller, 7. 26. For example, see Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, comps., Chicken Soup for the Soul (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Publications, 1991); and Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Kimberly Kirberger, comps., Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Publications, 1993). 27. Wuthnow, 158–60; Roof, 98, 100. 28. Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). 29. Fuller, 4. 30. Ibid., 4–9. 31. Roof, 67. 32. Smith and Denton, 162–63. 33. Ibid., 166. 34. Jenkins, ix, 12–13. 35. Smith and Denton, 259–64. 36. Roof, 7. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 37, 59. 39. Ibid., 131. 40. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), vii–xi, 220–27.

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41. Roof, 153, 165. 42. Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late-Twentieth-Century Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7. 43. Ellwood, 10. 44. Ibid., 327; Phillip E. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment in America, Studies in Comparative Religion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 2–4. 45. Hammond, 2–4. 46. Ibid., 11. 47. Porterfield, 7, 13. 48. Ibid., 18–20.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Dryer, Elizabeth A., and Mark S. Burrows, eds. Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Fuller, Robert C. Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Roof, Wade Clark. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 4

Out of the Mouths of Babes: Religion and Spirituality among American Children and Teens Todd M. Brenneman

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he religiosity of children and teenagers remains in many ways a mystery. It is an enigma to clerics, a puzzle to scholars, and an important facet of life to children and teens. Why should the spiritual life of children and teens be a great unknown in religious studies? Part of the reason for this is the small number of studies that have been done. While many studies exist about children and teens in general, only recently has religious life been a substantial part of those studies. Prior to the 1990s, religiosity remained only a minor portion of studies on youth. Perhaps it has been the assumption of scholars that religion as a category is not developed enough within the lives of youth to be extensively investigated. It is also possible that many have assumed that younger Americans simply reflect the beliefs of their adult parents or guardians. Within the past fifteen years, however, researchers have turned to examining religion as a separate aspect of young life, one worthy of study on its own. As scholars continue to develop newer (and perhaps better) ways to investigate religiosity, they are better understanding this important aspect of young American life. Conjoined with this interest in youth religion in the academy has been the ubiquitous concern for youth religiosity among religious practitioners. Perhaps no other issue is as indicative of this concern as conflicts over the Harry Potter novels and movies. While the novels have been a true literary phenomenon, their reception among certain religions, particularly among certain conservative Christian groups, has been the source of vociferous contention. The investigation into religiosity among children and teens is filled with much information that remains to be investigated. Just as children and teens must navigate the unclear terrain of ‘‘growing up’’ in America, so also must those interested in their religious lives attempt to understand

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both the terrain and the journey. The paths recently opened in scholarship provide some insight, but they also demonstrate how much may lie uncovered, not only in the religious lives of young Americans, but in the study of American religion. After laying out pieces of what has been uncovered in prior studies, the current status of youth religiosity will be examined prior to approaching ways to traverse this terrain in the future (with a brief look at how Harry Potter and his [mis]adventures provide us an example of what is at stake in this quest for knowledge) that will help provide more light on this subject.

CONSTRUCTING THE RELIGIOSITY OF AMERICAN CHILDREN The religious life of American children, as noted before, has been a subject that only recently has garnered some scholarly attention. Most of these studies, however, have focused on either developmental aspects of child psychology and religious issues or children as a larger part of religious family life. Those studies that have examined religious family life are about historical situations that may or may not be relevant to understand the religious life of children in the contemporary United States. While it is impossible to cover the entire spectrum of studies and theorists, this chapter will try to identify some important figures and trends in the study of childhood religiosity. Jean Piaget was one of the most famous developmental theorists. Piaget in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, created a theory that the mental life of children developed over time in specific stages. These stages marked a progression in the thought capabilities of children from concrete thinking to abstract thinking. The application for religious understanding would be obvious. Many religious concepts would be something that would have to be acquired over time because children simply would not be able to understand them.1 Drawing on Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg offered a similar stage-based psychology of morality, and James Fowler has explicitly connected Piagetan concepts of childhood psychological stage development to religious development, what he calls ‘‘faith consciousness.’’ Fowler argues that those who acquire faith (which in Fowler’s construct does not necessarily mean religious faith or religion) undergo a series of six developmental stages. The first four are of interest for the religious development of children and teenagers.2 According to Fowler, the earliest stage of faith is ‘‘primal faith.’’ In this stage, faith is developed without language, but not without important interaction between infant and parents. While it is a ‘‘primal’’ type faith, Fowler argued that this type of faith allows infants to ‘‘offset the anxiety resulting from separations that occur during infant development.’’ In early childhood, individuals progress to an ‘‘intuitive-projective faith,’’ which combines imagination with perception to create a faith that, while still not based on logical thinking, is important in the moral development of children.3

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The third stage of faith development, ‘‘mythic-literal faith,’’ usually occurs during the elementary school years. The development of logical thought as well as abstract thinking (in terms of ‘‘causality, space, time, and number’’) allows children to ‘‘sort out the real from the makebelieve.’’ Fowler further described this stage as a time when children ‘‘can enter into the perspectives of others, and . . . [capture] life and meanings in narrative and stories.’’ It is also a stage when children can experience some crisis of belief as they begin to shift in their terms of interaction with the world and their own experience.4 The final stage for children occurs in early adolescence. Fowler styled it ‘‘synthetic-conventional faith.’’ In this stage children engage in ‘‘formal operational thinking’’ because they are finally to understand and use abstract ideas for communicating and for ‘‘making sense of one’s world.’’ Children also begin to make more personal relationships with ‘‘significant others.’’ The forming of bonds with others provides a framework for children to begin to contemplate personal relationships with a deity (if, of course, they have been led to believe such could and should exist). Finally, they form worldviews that shape their lives and orient their belief systems to the world around them.5 Not everyone has accepted either Piaget’s theories or the theories of Kohlberg and Fowler, which are heavily based on Piaget. Several researchers have questioned these assumptions, specifically the tenets concerning logical thinking that form the foundations of these theories. Many also have serious concerns that labeling a child’s personality according to Piaget’s categories (what he called ‘‘preoperational, concrete operational, or formal operational’’) is an inaccurate model of how people actually think. According to some research, both children and adults can operate across several of Piaget’s categories depending on the situation. Further research has demonstrated that mental structures thought necessary for certain stages are available in some cases much earlier than had been previously thought.6 Studies continue to address how children comprehend religious concepts, such as God. Several researchers have argued that the conceptualization of religious concepts is very similar (although obviously not identical) among children and adults. Some have further argued that age six is an important turning point in childhood cognitive development as children begin to acquire certain mental principles (for example, understanding the concept of ‘‘false belief’’) that enable them to understand religious beliefs. Further research has begun to explore the possibility that ‘‘religion’’ is imagined through the use of several cognitive domains, as opposed to what Piagetan theories held previously.7 The field of psychology has also taken a more phenomenological approach to discussing children’s religious conceptions, again primarily about God, although some work has been done with other parts of ‘‘religion.’’ David Heller in his book The Children’s God explores how children across various religious traditions (Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and Hindu) develop a concept of ‘‘God’’ and how they interact with this concept. In forty interviews Heller used a variety of methods to determine how children think about God. He not only questioned them, but also asked

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them to draw ‘‘God’’ and write letters to their deity. From these interviews Heller developed several themes concerning child-deity relationships. Children’s concepts of God, according to Heller, are influenced by their level of association with a larger religious community, the child’s age as children gradually move from literalistic understandings of ‘‘God’’ (ages 4–6) through mystical ones (7–9) to an abstract conceptualization that leaves room for doubt (10–12), and how a child is socialized with respect to gender and personality. For Heller, though, familial socialization provides the most important impact (although not in an all-encompassing way) on conceptualization of God.8 Socialization, however, is not the only force in Heller’s work. Heller delineates several ‘‘common themes’’ that he saw in his interviews. First, the children understood a deity to have limited powers. While the concept is ambiguous, children seem to believe that deities cannot accomplish everything, and there is room for human agency. Second, the children imagined a deity with whom they could be intimate. While this intimacy varied in degree, the children Heller interviewed described the deity in terms of closeness. Third, the child’s deity was an omnipresent one. Fourth, children expressed some anxiety towards their deity. Transformation, connectedness of society and the deity, as well as the concept of ‘‘light’’ were also connected to ideas of ‘‘God’’ and form the remainder of Heller’s themes. While Heller stopped short of expressing these themes as ‘‘universals’’ among children cross-culturally, he does seem to argue that such could be a possibility.9 Psychologist Robert Coles has also taken a more phenomenological approach (although still informed by a psychoanalytic framework). Coles has offered a broader examination of childhood religiosity. While including Christian and Jewish children as Heller did, Coles also addressed the experience of Islamic children, while also briefly exploring the phenomenon of ‘‘seeking’’ among children. Coles concluded that children tend to be interested more in spirituality rather than in religion (in the sense of organized, institutional religion). Using the image of a pilgrim, Coles argued that children are similar to adults because they use their imagination, past experience, feelings, and problems to form their spirituality.10 Psychologists and cognitive scientists for the most part have made up the large majority of researchers into the religion of children until recently. Some newer work has been done in the fields of sociology and psychology as well as anthropology and cultural studies that can be more correctly classified as ‘‘religious studies.’’ While these studies have been done by scholars throughout the variety of fields listed previously (as well as scholars specifically classified as ‘‘religious studies’’ scholars), the approach taken by many has not been primarily to reduce the religious experience of children to something psychological or sociological. Instead, these scholars, drawing on the tools of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, have sought to understand childhood spirituality and religion as a product of cultural, as opposed to a primarily internal, experience. Most of these ‘‘religious studies’’ explorations have been more historical than contemporary. Instead of attempting to discuss the current status of

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children and religion in America, these studies have focused on American children in the past. They provide insight into how children historically have experienced religion. One example is Colleen McDannell’s The Christian Home in Victorian America. Although the aim of McDannell’s work was not to describe the religious lives of children in the Victorian home, she does offer some insight into the religious life of Victorian children. Victorian home life was constructed by attitudes toward architecture, devotional literature delineating family worship, and the models of gender roles that permeated American culture. For Victorian children, religious life was shaped by families intent on mediating the pressure of religious communities and personal lives.11 Protestants (and, toward the latter nineteenth century, Catholics) attempted to use the family and family devotionals as opportunities to cultivate religiosity in children. While commitment to Christian doctrine was an individual choice, the family was to shape a child’s life so that when it was time to make a choice, children would make the ‘‘right’’ one and commit to Christianity. ‘‘Family life for middle-class Protestants, by the late nineteenth century, was thoroughly child-centered.’’12 Margaret Lamberts Bendroth picked up where McDannell left off. Bendroth’s Growing Up Protestant begins with the end of the Victorian era and continues through the late twentieth century. Bendroth’s work, like McDannell’s, focuses on how ministers and parents constructed childhood and childhood spirituality with Bendroth focusing on ‘‘mainline’’ Protestant groups.13 Because of the material that both McDannell and Bendroth had to work with, they were unable to discuss specifically what kind of religiosity children experienced. They do, however, open up an important avenue to the study of youth religiosity. It must be understood within a larger context. Much of the religiosity that children engage in is shaped by the influence of others, particularly (though not always) parents. Whether in family devotions, prayer, or biblical instruction, the (mostly Protestant) family life McDannell and Bendroth present is one of constructed ambivalence. While developmental theorists present children as going through a process of acquiring tools to understand the religious world around them, McDannell and Bendroth note that that world is constructed by the parents and adults in those children’s lives. The world that is constructed for children in religious families, however, is ambivalent because children are saintly and at the same time in need of moral instruction and control. Robert Orsi took up this theme in a chapter on Catholic childhood in his book Between Heaven and Earth. Orsi examined the construct of ‘‘childhood’’ among American Catholics in the early to mid-twentieth century, noting that children occupied an ambiguous place in American Catholicism. They were the hopes and dreams of the future. They were connections between earth and heaven. They were spiritually pure. Yet, while adults held these convictions about children, they also had to deal with a reality of childhood: Children did not always act in the ways expected of them.14

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Adults expressed this ‘‘doubleness’’ of Catholic children in the attempt to control children’s bodies, specifically in worship. A ‘‘hyperphysicality’’ dominated American Catholicism as adults attempted to bring children in line with the proper comportment for worship. Orsi noted articles in the Junior Catholic Messenger that described the proper ‘‘manners in church’’ (ways to behave, postures to take, and preparations to make with regard to worship) as evidence of this attempt to control while still trying to romanticize the place of children.15 Orsi, however, did not simply discuss how adults (parents as well as priests and nuns) construct childhood for children. He also attempts to get at the experience of the children themselves. Through an examination of material culture as well as the reminiscences of adult Catholics, Orsi argues that children accepted this worldview and made it their own. They navigated through American Catholicism and its ambiguity as they were steered along by the adults to whom they were connected. The experience of this control made religion real for these children.16 As scholars continue to develop new methodologies to understand religion, these methodologies will help us understand the religiosity of children. Other trends in American religious studies will also help this understanding. Most of the studies to date have focused mainly on the experience of children in Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) and sometimes Judaism, although very rarely. This has led to the criticism of some scholars that bias infiltrates the study of childhood spirituality. As the interest in exploring the religious diversity of America infiltrates the investigation of children’s spiritual lives, more work will be done that examines the experience of children in other groups.17 One work that has begun an investigation into the religious diversity of children is Susan Palmer and Charlotte Hardman’s Children in New Religions. Published in 1999, Children in New Religions is an examination of how children experience religion, how religious movements shape children, and how society interacts with religions on the question of children and spirituality. The work is not focused specifically on the experience of children in the United States, but several of the essays address the experience of American children. It is the editors’ hopes that ‘‘looking at how children are raised in marginal spiritual groups will expand our ways of thinking about the social, psychological, moral, educational, and legal dimensions of family life.’’18 Despite the newness of much of the work on the religiosity of children, scholars have shown an interest in children and religion across a variety of fields. While further work will continue to build on, and perhaps replace, the work mentioned here, there remains a vacuum in knowledge on what religion is for children and how they experience it. The same can be said for the religious lives of American teenagers as well.

THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF AMERICAN TEENAGERS Inquiry into the religious experience of American teenagers has been almost as limited as, if not more so than, the study into child religiosity.

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Work within the past twenty to thirty years has followed similar patterns as the study of religion and children. Many previous studies have focused on how religion works for teenagers. In the present state of investigation, however, scholars have begun to bring an adolescent voice to understanding the religious experience of teenagers.19 Although there have been many studies on religion and spirituality among teenagers in recent years, prior studies have basically focused on how gender, age, and class have affected religious involvement, with black girls being the most involved in religion, at least among conservative Protestant groups. Studies have also focused on how religion helps with teenage psychological well-being; teenagers who are religious, according to studies, have better self-esteem.20 Other studies have shown that teens who have religious parents are less likely to be delinquent. Religious teens are less likely to engage in ‘‘alcohol, tobacco, and drug use.’’ They are also more likely to be less sexually active and ‘‘begin having sex later and have fewer sexual partners than less devout adolescents.’’21 The most recent and perhaps most comprehensive studies on teenagers and religion have come from the National Study on Youth and Religion (NSYR). Operating out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sociologist Christian Smith and his team have put together a substantial amount of research on religion and adolescence. Through a series of phone surveys and personal interviews, Smith and his associates compiled a foundation to discuss teenage spirituality. This information has been reported in a variety of publications as well as a book titled Soul Searching.22 The initial survey results demonstrated that a majority of American teenagers claim some affiliation with Christianity. This affiliation, argued NSYR, comes from, among other influences, parents. Teenagers ‘‘tend to share similar beliefs, tend to be situated in the same general religious traditions, and tend to attend religious services with one or both of their parents.’’ Teenagers’ affiliations are not simply the result of parents making them participants in a specific religious tradition. According to the results of the surveys, most teenagers practice religion ‘‘only sporadically or not at all,’’ but the same teenagers, at least about half, express that religion is important in their lives.23 The NSYR did not, however, limit its research to what teenagers said in phone surveys. Several hundred personal interviews were done to broaden the information gathered in the surveys. These interviews tended to qualify their previous results substantially, although they did not necessarily contradict them. Smith and the NSYR argue that the ‘‘dominant religion among contemporary U.S. teenagers’’ is not any one historical religious tradition (including Christianity), nor even an amalgamation of several religious traditions. Nor is the religion of American teens an eclectic mixed-bag of pick-and-choose spirituality. Instead, the religion of American youth should be understood by the cumbersome moniker ‘‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.’’ Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, according to the NSYR,

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although not a religion any teenager would explicitly ascribe to under that label, represents the religious thinking of American teenagers and has a specific creedal formula made up of five points: (1) There is a God who created and ordered the world; (2) God wants people to be good—as reflected by most religions; (3) The meaning of life is happiness and feeling good about oneself; (4) God needs to be involved only when needed, (5) There is a heaven that good people go to after death.24 The NSYR further concluded that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is not simply a facet of the spirituality of self-described Protestant teenagers. It is an ideology that spans across religious and nonreligious boundaries.25 Other recent works offer different insights into teenage religion. Researchers not approaching the topic primarily through the tools of psychology or sociology have tended towards a ‘‘pick-and-choose spirituality’’ picture of adolescent religion. Instead of looking at what religious organizations teenagers belong to or how religion keeps them from breaking the law, these scholars have begun to examine the way a multitude of cultural forces (including religion) construct the religious experience of teenagers and the way that teenagers themselves construct their religious experience. Two of these studies used Generation X as the sample to discuss religious life: Tom Beaudoin’s Virtual Faith and Richard Flory and Donald Miller’s compilation titled Gen X Religion. While Generation X was in adulthood at the time these works were written, both works examine briefly the experience of Generation X in the 1980s, when that generation was teenagers. Both present Generation X as being interested in spirituality and not religion, although many found a place within established, institutionalized religion.26 Beaudoin presents the teenager years of Generation X as a time of flux, not only for the teenagers, but also for their parents who attempted to process their own ideology of the 1960s in the reality of the 1980s. The impact of Watergate, the early years of the Reagan administration, the prevalence of media expansion, and the cultural changes occurring across the globe provided an ‘‘absence’’ for Generation X. This absence of ideology and absence of interest in social movements (among other ‘‘absences’’) was fostered by a parallel absence of strong parental guidance in things religious, leaving teenagers to fend for themselves when it came to religion.27 Miller and Miller in an essay for Gen X Religion expressed these absences in terms of several themes they saw as prevalent in Generation X religion. The ubiquity of the media as a force not only for information expression, but also as a babysitter, conjoined with the laissez-faire attitude of parents toward their children’s religion, provided an atmosphere of freedom in which teenagers had the opportunity to explore their own religiosity, or, as Miller and Miller argue, their spirituality.28 The political upheaval and economic uncertainty of the early 1980s provided a cultural milieu that made it difficult for Generation X to find its place in organized religion. Instead, the religiosity that was expressed was one of cynicism, realism, materialism, and pluralism. Miller and Miller note that ‘‘[i]n a broad stroke, there are individuals with a generic interest in

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spirituality, but who find it a bit confining to attend a church, temple, or synagogue.’’ Because of their interest in spirituality in their teenage years, Generation Xers in their adult lives focus on religious expressions that venerate the authority of the individual, while still maintaining, in some cases, tenuous connections to institutional religion.29 As noted previously, the studies on Generation X have been primarily written after these persons reached adulthood and focused on the adult experience. In 2004, however, Lynn Schofield Clark offered an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the media and the supernatural in its impact on teenagers’ religious beliefs. Clark argued that teenagers were open to believing in supernatural events and beings, and many considered themselves spiritual. She noted, however, that a majority of teenagers appeared to be disaffected with ‘‘organized religion,’’ focusing instead on those beliefs that they found useful and rejecting what they found too authoritative or constricting. At the base of adolescent spirituality, for Clark, there is a deep distrust for governmental and religious authorities that attempt to legislate ‘‘truth’’ for the masses.30 The findings of the NSYR, however, somewhat contradict Clark’s findings which were based on a limited sample of teenagers in the Southwest. The NSYR’s findings suggested that most teenagers are still connected to ‘‘organized religion,’’ specifically in most cases to their parents’ religion. The spiritual lives of teenagers, according to the NSYR, are ‘‘extraordinarily conventional’’ and do not demonstrate the ‘‘spiritual but not religious’’ qualities that scholars like Clark, among others, have claimed for them.31 Questions about the religious lives of teenagers continue to abound. Should we see teenagers as interested in spirituality but not religion, or is it the other way around? What methods should be used in determining an answer—sociological or cultural?

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE The problem with the study of religion and spirituality among children and teens devolves into a basic problem with religious studies: the question of definition. Unless a definition of what constitutes religious experience or practice is delineated, the results of a study cannot be considered definitive. Religious life is not something that can be determined by a questionnaire. The work done so far has been limited primarily to questions with multiple choices for responses. How do you identify yourself religiously? Which of the following practices do you engage in and how often?32 The researchers of the National Study of Youth and Religion recognized that surveys may not be completely effectual when they noted the disparity between their survey results and their personal interviews. How one self-identifies and what one actually practices may be two distinct concepts, or at least modifications of each other. A more inventive approach may be necessary. One area that may be particularly fruitful for investigation is the connection between religion and emotion in the lives of children and teens.33

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As the investigation of emotion in religious studies continues to burgeon, the religio-emotional life of teenagers is ripe for exploration. The National Study of Youth and Religion has laid the groundwork for the beginnings of such a field of inquiry. Although emotion does not figure prominently in their analysis, the researchers did pay attention to how teenagers ‘‘felt’’ in comparison to their religious involvement. Smith and his team noted: ‘‘The more religiously serious teens are more likely than the Disengaged to feel very happy and less likely to feel very unhappy about their body and physical appearance. The Devoted and the Regulars are likewise significantly less likely to feel sad and depressed, alone and misunderstood, and invisible as a result of nobody paying attention to them.’’ They further found that self-identified religious teens do not experience guilt on a higher level than their less religious counterparts, despite common conceptions of teenagers, religion, and guilt.34 Even the label used by the NSYR to describe teenage religious lives (‘‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’’) speaks of the connection between religion and emotion in the lives of religious youth. Smith and the NSYR noted that American teenagers (and adults as well) are looking for a religious experience that will allow them ‘‘to be happy and to feel good about’’ themselves.35 Many questions immediately spring to mind when faced with such results. How do teenagers conceptualize ‘‘happiness,’’ ‘‘sadness,’’ and ‘‘guilt’’? Are these conceptions similar to or different from those of their parents and others within their religious worlds? While the work of the NSYR has provided excellent groundwork, there is more work that can be and needs to be done on the question of emotion and the religious lives of children and teenagers. Religious practice is another aspect of youth religion that needs investigation. One of the weaknesses with the NSYR study is that a majority of the research is focused around questions of belief. While they argue early in Soul Searching that ‘‘faith for these teenagers is also activated, practiced, and formed through specific religious and spiritual practices,’’ they never observed teenagers to see how this faith is activated.36 This absence is disappointing. If we are to accept that the dominant ideology among American teenagers is this enigma called ‘‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,’’ how is this practiced? What does this mean to these teenagers as they engage in the rituals they so frequently attend? There is more to be said about this new religion than that it is the ‘‘misbegotten stepcousin’’ of current religions.37 An investigation into the actual practice of youth religion is important to help expand the demographic work done by Smith and the NSYR. Ethnographic work on the lived practice of religious life (the so-called ‘‘lived religion’’) is needed to understand youth religion better. Lynn Schofield Clark’s From Angels to Aliens is a good start to such work. Although Smith and his team may be concerned that ethnographic studies cannot be generalized as well as sociological data, clearly sociological data do not tell the complete story when it comes to youth religion. The NSYR recognized this when they conducted interviews that nuanced the statistical data that they had gathered. In order to understand teenage religiosity, scholars need to rely on more than percentages and statistics.38

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Another area that will help us better understand youth spirituality, particularly among children is the area of material culture—objects and artifacts imbued with religious significance whether through their use in ritual or because of the meaning attached to them. As the study of material culture expands, more will be explored on the material religious experience of children in the United States. In her seminal work on the religious aspects of material culture, Colleen McDannell argued that material culture is the way to get to the experience of the ‘‘illiterates’’ of religious systems. Individuals like women and children were and are often overlooked in studies of American religion. While excellent work has been done and continues to be done that is reestablishing the place of women in American religious history, children remain on the margins. The marginalization perhaps stems from the inability of children to speak to their religious experience in cogent ways because of cognitive development. Material culture, however, is able to speak where the children are not. While McDannell does not offer an extensive look into the religious experience of children in Material Christianity, she does offer some starting points. Much remains to be said about the religious objects—be they funeral kits, toys to play mass with, or heroes of the Book of Mormon—that children of religious families are given. Through examination of these objects, the lived experience of children may come to light in deeper and more meaningful ways that cannot be excavated through questions of psychology and cognitive development.39 Robert Orsi has mapped out an opening into the world of youth religion and material culture in Between Heaven and Earth. While Orsi is concerned with the materiality of Catholic youth, his insight demonstrates how fruitful such an investigation can be in any religious tradition. If children cannot express their religious lives in words, their material lives can provide an avenue to investigate how not only parents and clerics construct their religious world, but also how children take those material objects and make sense of the world, religious and otherwise. More work on the material culture of youth needs to be done.40

LIVED RELIGION AND CHILDREN AND TEENS ‘‘Lived religion’’ (formerly called ‘‘popular religion’’) points to a field where scholars seek to focus their exploration upon how people take religious systems and actively engage them and exploit them in their expression of their religious convictions in everyday life. Lived religion is not about theology, for example, but it is about how a theology is expressed by those who subscribe to it. Sometimes this expression is consistent with the theology those individuals espouse; sometimes it is in conflict. Lived religion, then, is ‘‘religious practice and imagination in ongoing, dynamic relation with the realities and structures of everyday life in particular times and places.’’ It is an attempt by scholars to understand religion and religious experience within cultural frameworks situated within certain historical periods.41

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If one will accept this definition of what qualifies as lived religion, it is not a great stretch of the imagination to see that the study of religion and spirituality among children and teens is an ideal field to examine through the methodological lens of lived religion. As has been seen in the exploration of how people have imagined religious experience among youth, to understand how children and teenagers interact with religion is best explored through understanding the relationships children have with religious figures (priests, rabbis, ministers, as well as parents) and religious structures (mosques, denominations, temples) as they develop (or have developed for them) the religious beliefs and practices that constrain as well as direct youth in specific historical periods and places.42 Although much can be gleaned from examining religious experience through the fields of psychology and sociology by themselves, a fuller picture would emerge from studies that take into account those aspects of lived religion that help situate psychological and sociological forces and trends within the context of history, place, and religious structures. In turn, studies of religion among children and teens using lived religion as a methodological framework must take psychological and sociological trends into account. Neither map shows the entire territory, but the use of multiple maps may help religious researchers get a clearer picture of the religious experience of youth. Harry Potter may provide some insight into this matter.

ON HARRY POTTER Ever since Harry had come home for the summer holidays, Uncle Vernon had been treating him like a bomb that might go off at any moment, because Harry Potter wasn’t a normal boy. As a matter of fact, he was as not normal as it is possible to be. Harry Potter was a wizard—a wizard fresh from his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.43

How is it that such an inauspicious young man by the name of Harry Potter has caused such a widespread sensation? Yet, a sensation is exactly what he has brought about or more accurately, what J.K. Rowling, the billionaire British author of the Harry Potter series, has brought about. The books have all been best-sellers worldwide. It is appropriate to speak of the ‘‘Harry Potter phenomenon.’’ Because it is possible that there are some who do not know who Harry Potter is, it is important to get a broad picture of Harry Potter and his world, before examining the religious response to Harry. Harry Potter is the orphaned child of two wizards who had defied an evil wizard by the name of Lord Voldemort. Voldemort attempted to kill Harry and his parents, but something went wrong, and Voldemort was left in an incorporeal state. Harry, for his own protection, was left to the care of his nonmagical aunt and uncle who did not care for wizardry or for Harry. When Harry turned eleven, he found out the truth about himself—he was a wizard, just like his parents. He was enrolled in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft

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and Wizardry under the tutelage of headmaster Albus Dumbledore. Through his years at Hogwarts, Harry has faced several challenges. As he has attempted to relate to the wizarding world, he has been separated from it. He has also fought to remain alive despite Lord Voldemort’s repeated attempts to kill him. In his fight against the evil Voldemort, Harry relies on the talents and support of his two close friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. These three, along with various supporting characters, stand firm against the evil witchcraft of Voldemort through their love, friendship, and good magic. This is the basic story behind the worldwide phenomenon. Despite the success of the novels, press about Harry Potter has not all been positive. Many people, especially some evangelical Christians, have been less than optimistic about the Potter influence. Criticism has ranged from attempts at gracious opposition to outright labeling the books as ‘‘satanic.’’ It would be completely inaccurate, however, to represent all evangelical Christians as anti–Harry Potter. Many find the books interesting and enjoyable, and these evangelical parents have few, if any, problems allowing their children to immerse themselves in the world of Hogwarts. Even evangelical publications like Christianity Today have presented favorable articles on the books. The loudest voices in the resistance to the books, however, have come from other evangelicals. This stridency has gotten them an enormous amount of publicity and has mistakenly presented the impression that there is a unified front of Christian antiPotterism. Yet, there seems to be an almost desperate need for evangelicals to come to grips with the Harry Potter phenomenon. A quick perusal of the religious section in a retail bookstore or a local Christian bookstore reveals a variety of books directed at addressing Harry Potter and the Christian’s response to him. These books come with titles like Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick; Fantasy and Your Family: Exploring The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Modern Magick; God, the Devil, and Harry Potter: A Christian Minister’s Defense of the Beloved Novels; What’s a Christian to Do With Harry Potter?; The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the World’s Most Famous Seeker; Looking for God in Harry Potter; and Frodo & Harry: Understanding Visual Media and Its Impact on Our Lives. More books continue to be published as the Potter phenomenon continues.44 Some of these books, as noted above, attempt to take a positive stance toward Harry Potter. Many writers who support evangelical acceptance of the Potter books often take an accommodating stand towards them. Individuals who hold such a viewpoint do not accept the series as universally commendable, but they do find themes or principles in the novels that can be extracted and given a Christian spin. The books are presented as morality stories telling of the great struggle between good and evil. Often there is an attempt to see the gospel story as foundational. Others are not so kind. Both of Richard Abanes’s books, Harry Potter and the Bible, and Fantasy and Your Family, are antagonistic to Harry Potter. Although he attempts to present his anti-Potterism graciously,

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Albanes definitely sees the books as potentially harmful and feels they should be handled with the utmost care. He even goes so far as to attack his fellow evangelicals for their pro-Potterism.45 Why is Harry Potter such an important issue for some evangelicals? The answer given most often is connected to the immorality of witchcraft in the Christian tradition, but the question of the occult and Harry Potter in the context of teenage spirituality is also a matter of concern for it highlights issues of both community and power. It is Harry’s search for a family that resonates so well with children, teenagers, and even adults, as society becomes more individuated. The surrogate family that is created when Harry enters the wizard community fills the vacuum left when Voldemort killed Harry’s physical family. Religion functions in the same way. The surrogate religious family provides connections to larger society.46 The battle over Harry Potter, however, is more than simply a question of familial relationships. At its heart, the questions surrounding Harry Potter and the spirituality of children and teens are a matter of power and control. What is at stake is determining who will control the future of American religion. The ultimate concern, for some evangelicals, is that there will be no continuation of religion. Many titles coming from evangelical publishing houses, even those not related to the Potter books, are concerned about the future of American religious youth. Many of these books attempt to offer some sort of stop-gap program or paradigm that is intended to focus on keeping youth a part of particular religious traditions.47 The NSYR plans continue their study into young adulthood to observe how the youth from their original study progress to document whether such fears are valid.48 If such fears are the reason for the evangelical response to the Harry Potter novels, what is the explanation for the popularity of the Harry Potter books among teenagers, even among those who have evangelical parents or refer to themselves as evangelical? Harry Potter is the quintessential liminoid teenager. Already set apart by the wizarding community and considered as ‘‘holy’’ because of his albeit unwitting and unintentional defeat of the evil villain Lord Voldemort, Harry’s experience at Hogwarts further alienates him not only from family, but also from community as well. Finding some sort of bond with Hermione and Ron, as well as surrogate parentage not only from Headmaster Dumbledore and the Weasley family, Harry constantly finds himself in situations that further heighten his separation from the larger society, including his closest friends. At the end of each book, Harry undergoes some sort of trial, constantly on his own and left to his own devices. His alienation is further aggravated by Dumbledore’s revelation at the end of book five that either Harry will become a murderer or another of Lord Voldemort’s victims. Harry is thus a prime literary figure for understanding the plight of the teenager. Trapped in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, teenagers have a profound desire for community—the sharing of experience, emotion, and, simply, humanity. It is no wonder that Harry has such a large following among teenagers. In many ways, he speaks to the separateness that all teenagers in some sense face.

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Should, then, the Harry Potter novels be considered morality literature? Without a doubt, the characters in the novels make moral judgments about other characters and events. Hagrid, the part-giant, part-human groundskeeper of Hogwarts, notifies Harry in the first novel that some wizards like Voldemort can go bad, ‘‘As bad as you could go. Worse. Worse than Worse.’’49 The events that surround Harry’s activities in school call upon him to make moral decisions: Is lying to a professor acceptable? Is disobeying rules sometimes permissible if the disobedience serves some higher good? These are moral questions to which Harry and others must craft moral answers. The definite message in the Potter novels is that there are some things that are morally correct and some that are morally wrong. Occasionally, however, it is appropriate to engage in things that are morally wrong in order for the greater good to be accomplished. For example, it would be right to disobey school rules in order to save someone’s life. Understanding Harry Potter and other cultural trends can help scholars visualize young American religion.50 The Potter world is based on a morality that youths and adults imbibe. It thus reflects, but also creates, this world. Harry Potter is an important religio-cultural artifact because he reflects the way religion acts in teenage life and demonstrates the potential issues and what is at stake in the religious lives of youth and the study of them.

THE SPIRITUALITY OF CHILDREN AND TEENS The study of religion has been and will continue to be a field fraught with potential pitfalls. When this study is focused on religion and spirituality among children and teenagers, the difficulties multiply. Teenage and childhood years are years in which individuals attempt to make things, especially ideology, their own. They gradually move from the religious systems their parents may impose upon them to accepting (or rejecting) those beliefs or others as their own. Pre-adult years are years of flux bodily, mentally, and spiritually. This flux yields ambiguity that makes it difficult for researchers to come to definitive conclusions. It is theoretically possible for a teenager to answer a survey question in a particular manner in a phone interview and give a contradictory answer in a face-to-face interview. Which answer is correct? Are both? How do scholars of American religion attempt to work through the ambiguity of the pressure and changes of those early years of life? This ambiguity may explain how some research can suggest teenagers are more interested in spirituality than organized (institutional) religion while other research can suggest that teenagers have ‘‘conventional’’ religious beliefs. The dispute over the function of Harry Potter is another area that demonstrates the ambiguity religious youth face. While J.K. Rowling may feel that she is attempting only to tell a good story, in many ways she is no different from evangelical pastors. Both are shaping the worldviews of youth.

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As the NSYR notes in its study, the impact of adults (whether parents or religious experts) cannot be overestimated. Much of what youth, even as teenagers, experience in religion is shaped by the worldview of the adults that are influential in their lives. Adult scholars of religion, then, need first to remember that they were children and teenagers at one point. Second, they must also pay attention to more than what is said, by observing practice and being aware of material culture. As especially scholars who attempt to understand teenagers realize, subjects may not always be honest, but they may attempt to answer questions in ways they think will please observers. Childhood and adolescent religion, however, are in need of continued study and provide rich avenues to think about religion in general. Understanding how children and teenagers assimilate into religious movements will broaden the understanding of how particular movements function. It may also open other doors into understanding how people attribute religious significance to events, people, places, objects, and ideas. Not only may we discover more about American religion, but we may shed new light on what it means to be religious. In the end, it may be that the children will lead us.

NOTES 1. See, for example, Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1954); and The Child and Reality (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 2. Fowler has written several books and articles on faith development. I have chosen to base this discussion on his overview in James W. Fowler, ‘‘Stages in Faith Consciousness,’’ in Religious Development in Childhood and Adolescence, New Directions for Child Development, no. 52, ed. Fritz K. Oser and W. George Scarlett (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991), 27–46. 3. Ibid., 34. 4. Ibid., 35–36. 5. Ibid., 37–38. 6. One critique of Piaget and Kohlberg can be found in Richard A. Shweder, ‘‘Anthropology’s Romantic Rebellion Against the Enlightenment, or There’s More to Thinking Than Reason and Evidence,’’ in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 49–57. 7. See Justin L. Barrett, ‘‘Do Children Experience God as Adults Do?’’ in Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience, ed. Jensine Andresen (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 173– 90; and Pascal Boyer and Sheila Walker, ‘‘Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Input in the Acquisition of Religious Concepts,’’ in Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children, ed. Karl S. Rosengren, Carl N. Johnson, and Paul L. Harris (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130–56. Similar work can be found in nearly every issue of the International Journal of Children’s Spirituality. 8. David Heller, The Children’s God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 9. Ibid., 105–29.

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10. Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 334. 11. Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). 12. Ibid., 105–6. 13. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 14. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 77–84. 15. Ibid., 94–99. 16. Ibid., 106–9. 17. Boyer and Walker, ‘‘Intuitive Ontology,’’ 132. 18. Susan J. Palmer and Charlotte E. Hardman, eds., Children in New Religions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 8–9. 19. The summary of studies into adolescent spirituality is based on Mark Regnerus, Christian Smith, and Melissa Fritsch, ‘‘Religion in the Lives of American Adolescents: A Review of Literature,’’ A Research Report of the National Study of Youth & Religion (November 3, 2003), http://www.youthandreligion.org/ publications/docs/litreview.pdf, accessed January 1, 2005. 20. Ibid., 10–15. 21. Ibid., 30–34. 22. Christian Smith with Melinda Lindquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also the National Study of Youth and Religion’s Web site: http://www.youthandreligion.org. 23. Smith with Denton, 68. 24. Ibid., 163. The Moralistic Therapeutic Deism thesis is qualified in a couple of ways. First, the NSYR is not arguing that all teens are Moralistic Therapeutic Deist. Second, teens have not abandoned traditional religion, but it does appear this deistic belief is ‘‘colonizing’’ traditional religion. Third, they argue that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a trend among U.S. adults, not just teens (Smith with Denton, 165–66). 25. Smith with Denton, 166. 26. Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998); Richard W. Flory and Donald Miller, eds., Gen X Religion (New York: Routledge, 2000). 27. Beaudoin, 10. 28. Donald E. Miller and Arpi Misha Miller, ‘‘Understanding Generation X: Values, Politics, and Religious Commitments,’’ in Gen X Religion, ed. Richard W. Flory and Donald Miller (New York: Routledge, 2000), 4. 29. Ibid., 9. 30. Lynn Schofield Clark, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 204–23. 31. Smith with Denton, 260. 32. See National Study of Youth and Religion, ‘‘Survey Instrument,’’ http:// www.youthandreligion.org/publications/docs/survey.pdf. 33. See John Corrigan, ‘‘Introduction: Emotions Research and the Academic Study of Religion,’’ in Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. John Corrigan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–31, concerning the status of research on the connection between emotions and religion. 34. Smith with Denton, 225–26.

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35. Ibid., 163. 36. Ibid., 27. The closest observation of religious practice comes in a chapter on Catholicism. Smith records his attendance at a National Catholic Youth Conference, including brief comments from attendees (Smith and Denton, 193–95). 37. Ibid., 171. 38. See Ibid., 312n1, for concerns that the NSYR had with ethnographic studies like Clark’s. Flory and Miller, Gen X Religion, and Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith, also approached religion ethnographically in their study of Generation X, but their studies were published looking back onto a generation that was already moving through young adulthood into almost middle age. 39. See Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Especially promising are the discussion and photographs on 52–57. See also pages 222–69. 40. Orsi, 73–109. 41. Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880 –1950, 2d. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), xiii. 42. Scholars have created a good methodological foundation to explore the field of lived religion. One of the first to use the term in an American context is David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Previous work in American religion using the term ‘‘popular religion’’ had been done by Charles H. Lippy, Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); and Peter W. Williams, Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historic Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Other works have broadened the methodological field as well as demonstrated its use in understanding religious communities. The works listed here, however, provided good background for those interested in understanding the development of lived religion as a field of research. 43. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 1999), 3. 44. Richard Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick (Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 2001); idem, Fantasy and Your Family: Exploring The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Modern Magick (Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 2002); John Killinger, God, the Devil, and Harry Potter: A Christian Minister’s Defense of the Beloved Novels (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002); Connie Neal, What’s a Christian to Do With Harry Potter? (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook, 2001); idem, The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the World’s Most Famous Seeker (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002); John Granger, Looking for God in Harry Potter (Wheaton, IL: SaltRiver, 2004); Theodore Baehr and Thomas Lee Snyder, Frodo & Harry: Understanding Visual Media and Its Impact on Our Lives (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2003). 45. Abanes, Fantasy and Your Family, 183–87, takes on Chuck Colson, Connie Neal, and Alan Jacobs for attempting to mediate between their Christianity and the Harry Potter books. 46. See Amanda Porterfield, The Power of Religion: A Comparative Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165–67. 47. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 77. American Jews have faced similar concerns about the continued survival of their religion and ethnicity in America. Since their arrival during the colonial period, Jews have worried about the dissolution of Jews and Judaism in the United States (see the discussion of this concept and the

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question of its validity in Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004], 356–74). Similar fears may plague the Muslim community (among others) in a few years. 48. The NSYR plans to continue the study into young adulthood to observe how the youth from its original study progress. See ‘‘NSYR Becomes Longitudinal: Following Teens into Young Adulthood,’’ http://www.youthandreligion.org/ news/2005-0126.html, accessed June 8, 2005. This study will probably be of as great benefit as the first phase was. 49. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 1997), 54. 50. The abundance of films and television shows with a spiritual or religious slant aimed at teenagers is an indicator both that those in the media are shaping youth religiosity while also reflecting an interest on the part of teenagers in religious media. Movies like The Lord of the Rings, Narnia (based on C.S. Lewis’s explicitly Christian-based novels), and television shows like Joan of Arcadia demonstrate this trend.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Clark, Lynn Schofield. From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Coles, Robert. The Spiritual Life of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Orsi, Robert A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Smith, Christian, with Melinda Lindquist Denton. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Also of value are the reports and publications of the National Study of Youth and Religion found at http://www.youthandreligion.org.

CHAPTER 5

Living Fiction: American Spirituality and Best-selling Novels Amy Johnson Frykholm

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n 1993 when The Celestine Prophecy, a nominally fictional book about a spiritual journey to Peru, was self-published by therapist James Redfield, few in the publishing industry imagined that a transformation was at hand and that religious fiction of a wide variety was about to take a strong place within it. Ten years later, publishers and booksellers were searching for a new vocabulary to name this phenomenon, calling such fiction ‘‘inspirational fiction’’ and ‘‘visionary fiction’’ and struggling to fit together diverse worldviews into one category.1 Putting The Celestine Prophecy and its many imitators on the same shelf with the now ubiquitous Left Behind series published by evangelical press Tyndale House seems incongruent, but the two were a part of the same movement: the emerging popularity of fiction that explicitly advocates a certain form of truth. The American public has an enormous appetite for fiction that mingles claims about metaphysical and spiritual truth with stories of adventure— fiction that is part sermon, part action. More recently, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has broken publishing records with its strange combination of suspense thriller, history lesson, conspiracy theory, and spirituality teacher. Although not quite as sermon-like as The Celestine Prophecy and Left Behind, The Da Vinci Code still plays with the boundaries among metaphysical truth, historical fact, and playful fiction that strike a deep and resonant chord with American readers. Taken together these three bestsellers can tell us much about the dynamic and contradictory landscape that creates religious publishing phenomena and helps to define contemporary spirituality. These are eclectic and unique books, not dominated by a single religious tradition, but at the same time sharing enough in common that from them we may begin to extrapolate a worldview that teaches us about the religious formulations of American culture.

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BEST-SELLING FICTION OLD AND NEW Religious best-sellers that tell a fictional story while conveying a religious message are not new to the United States or the American continent. In the early colonies, one of the most popular works of literature was an imaginative poem by a Puritan minister named Michael Wigglesworth. ‘‘The Day of Doom’’ was a depiction of Judgment Day that the author and his contemporaries called truth in a form ‘‘pleasing’’ and ‘‘sweet.’’2 Although Wigglesworth begins with a kind of fictional scenario, his primary preoccupation is with theological arguments about whom God will save and why, trying to answer prying spiritual questions about God’s wrath and God’s mercy. Wigglesworth was a minister, and like today’s ‘‘visionary fiction,’’ his text contains as much sermon as it does story. But Wigglesworth was not alone in trying to express explicit religious truth in the vehicle of an invented narrative. Such literature was rife in the New World. Captivity narratives, another extremely popular form of literature in the colonies and extending into the new nation, also contained fictional and fictionalized stories, a theological message, and at least some reference to historical fact. These stories of capture by Indians were the most defining national literature that the United States developed in its early years. People turned to them for tales of sin, redemption, and salvation, as well as for stories about self and national understanding. These were adventure tales, with sermonic episodes, meant both to edify and entertain their readers.3 Still, among the earliest innovators of the technology of publishing, there was a strong sense that fiction and religion were ill-suited to each other. What troubled the American Tract Society and the American Bible Society in their early years in the nineteenth century was the reality that what people most wanted to read was not good for them and what was good for them, in the minds of these publishers, they did not want to read. In chronicling the early years of these innovative organizations, David Paul Nord says that by the 1820s, evangelical publishers viewed the secular market as a ‘‘wily and dangerous foe,’’ intent on spreading corruption. In order to save the country from this evil force, they proposed to put tracts in the hands of everyone who could read and to teach those who could not in order to spread the Gospel and restore the nation. Ironically, the tracts that they produced bore a striking resemblance to the sentimental, sensationalized literature they heartily opposed. In order to capture the public’s attention, they imitated secular style and added a religious message.4 What occurred then was an early blurring of the line between fiction and religious truth, but with a strong adherence to the idea, at least in principle, that religious truth was the far more important of the two. Long into the nineteenth century, the American Tract Society held a deep disdain for novels and for popular fiction. They accused novels of spreading moral decay, insanity, and ‘‘mental dissipation.’’5 Yet some of the most influential books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben-Hur, and In His Steps, played with the line

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between fictional narrative and theological statement that readers found so compelling. Whether or not those passionate about evangelizing America and developing institutions to accomplish this task saw religion and fiction as a meaningful combination, readers clearly did. Late in the nineteenth century a novel called In His Steps became what book historian John Tebbel called ‘‘one of the great publishing successes of all time.’’6 In His Steps told the story of a modern-day Jesus acting as a kind of entrepreneur who returns to earth but none of his purported followers recognize him. By 1924, Charles Sheldon claimed that his book had sold more than eight million copies. Scholars contest this number, but there is no doubt that In His Steps appealed to a broad audience. Sheldon’s book is often discussed as an exemplar of the open relationship between Christianity and capitalism that was developing in the early twentieth century, a relationship that was shedding a good deal of the anxiety expressed by early innovators like the American Tract and Bible Societies. Sheldon’s Jesus is a good capitalist, at once shrewd and generous, and he is able to transform poverty and backwardness into prosperity and progress. But after In His Steps, it is difficult to point to another novel that continued in the tradition of the others. Explicitly religious fiction appeared less frequently or did not gain the notoriety of previous books. Joan Shelley Rubin points out that by the war years denominational publishers and general trade publishers were freely sharing practices, influencing and informing each other. Consumer economy allowed for a permeability of boundaries that could be used to disseminate religious values, while at the same time appearing to undermine them.7 Yet this activity, this shared sphere, was subtle enough that the rise of religious fiction beginning with The Celestine Prophecy at the end of the century could come as a surprise to nearly everyone in the industry. Ten years later, religious fiction made its mark, and well-grooved paths to bookshelves, retail outlets, and bestseller lists have been forged. Henry Carrigan of T&T Clark International suggests that these book-buying practices point to deeper conditions of culture. ‘‘The vigor in religious publishing is simply helping make more and more explicit how deeply grounded in religion our cultural forms really are.’’8 The three novels that have made the most significant impact on popular religious fiction in the past fifteen years come from seemingly diverse parts of the American religious landscape. The Celestine Prophecy is clearly a New Age title, the story of a man in search of ancient documents that teach quasi-scientific interpretations of the world. The ultimate goal of the story’s protagonists is to help usher in a new, more spiritual age of deeper understanding. Left Behind comes from nearly the opposite end of the political spectrum. It is grounded in an evangelical worldview that draws on century-old fundamentalist beliefs about how to read the Bible and about the end of time. The Da Vinci Code highlights yet another sector of American popular culture: those interested in revisiting and reexamining traditional Christian faith. Presumably, those interested in The Da Vinci Code range from committed Christians to marginalized and disaffected

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Christians to those interested in discarding Christianity altogether, but a Christian worldview remains central to the book and its controversy. The Da Vinci Code’s power seems to lie in its ability to enrage and stimulate conversation among a wide variety of constituencies. As different as these texts are, they share some surprising similarities—similarities that point to common religious sensibilities even across a diverse and divided public.

THE CELESTINE PROPHECY: THE NEW ERA OF NEW AGE In 1989, James Redfield, a therapist who worked with severely disturbed adolescents, quit his job to begin writing. The Celestine Prophecy was written during this interval in Redfield’s life and was self-published in 1993. In 1995, after hand-to-hand selling and a contract from Warner Books, the novel became a worldwide best-seller. It remained on the New York Times best-seller list for three years and created its own line of New Age products, texts, and ‘‘workbooks’’ for the enthusiastic reader.9 The Celestine Prophecy tells the story of a man at a point of crisis and uncertainty in his life who coincidentally encounters an ancient manuscript that prophesies a coming age of spiritual enlightenment. The protagonist travels to Peru to find the manuscript and finds a world of adventure, intrigue, and spiritual awakening. As he travels, he encounters each of the ‘‘Nine Insights’’ taught by the manuscript, and he collides with the forces of the institutional church that are trying to keep the insights from being known. This structure propels the plot while offering sermon-like teachings of the book’s philosophy. The Nine Insights of The Celestine Prophecy are not unique. They are instead basic and fairly simplistically rendered foundations of New Age spirituality and the Human Potential movement, with roots in esoteric movements of the nineteenth century and the counterculture of the 1960s. This eclectic foundation is placed into an action-adventure narrative based on a series of coincidences, and coincidence itself forms one of the insights. Every encounter, the books teaches, is significant and is a vehicle for the universe to communicate its hidden meanings. The broad popularity of the book has little to do with its artistic or literary merit. In fact, among New Age writing, commentators have frequently noted how poorly put together, how shallow in plot and character, the book is. But Wouter Hanegraaff has pointed out, commenting on the popularity of the books among the Dutch public, that it is not quality of writing that readers are seeking. Instead they find in the book a reflection of their own experience, an articulation of something that they recognize as true, and in reading, they feel recognized themselves.10 In other words, the teachings of The Celestine Prophecy had already become so significant to the receiving culture, so much a part of the broad stream of that culture, that the novel changed nothing, but merely gave notice that a once-marginal voice had developed a broadly popular base. Unlike the other best-sellers discussed in this chapter, The Celestine Prophecy was broadly popular without stirring much controversy.

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Redfield’s book offers a kind of secular spirituality, rendering a loosely scientific and yet religious interpretation of everyday life. For example, the First Insight—that human culture is on the verge of a transformation that happens as people ‘‘experience their lives as a spiritual unfolding, a journey in which we are led forward by mysterious coincidences’’—infuses everyday life with extraordinary meaning.11 Nothing is an accident anymore; nothing is mundane and ordinary. Instead the texture of everyday life becomes the very material of the spiritual. No specific deity or religious tradition is ever endorsed, but if religion involves interpretation of life’s meaning, the book is clearly and firmly religious. As the unnamed protagonist continues his journey, he gains insights into the interconnectedness of humans and nature, into the meaning and interpretation of his past, and into the ‘‘emerging culture’’ of the future. At every turn, the insights become simple formulas that the protagonist can immediately apply to his own life. But why fiction? Why couldn’t Redfield’s message be offered as another self-help book, and what is it about fiction that propelled The Celestine Prophecy’s popularity? One possibility is that the narrative invites identification. Readers connect not only with the spiritual message of the book, but also with the protagonist at the center of the story. And perhaps because he is unnamed, readers are invited to see him as ‘‘anyman,’’ even as themselves. They do not simply absorb the message in abstraction, but engage the concrete details of someone’s life, however contrived those details might be. In fact, oddly enough, as is true with Left Behind, the very cardboard nature of the character may invite more, not less, identification, because it leaves readers, especially inexperienced readers, more room to use their own imaginations to construct the details that are not available in the narrative.12 Readers who read a good deal of fiction come to expect writers to do this work for them; but more inexperienced readers, the kind Redfield has reached with The Celestine Prophecy and LaHaye and Jenkins have reached with Left Behind, do not have the same set of expectations, and they are willing to let their imaginations fill in the gaps. They thus create bonds with characters that, on the surface, seem to have little to offer. The power of The Celestine Prophecy lies in its ability to connect with readers who have not been active in the New Age movement, perhaps have not even specifically engaged the movement before, but who have received its ideas latently, as they have diffused throughout the culture. The Celestine Prophecy is evidence that New Age is not a set of marginal and strange ideas, but an active and widespread set of hunches and beliefs that can be given articulation in popular fiction.13 Perhaps less than explaining an ‘‘emerging culture,’’ Redfield has articulated the beliefs and expectations of no small segment of his own culture. He seeks a synthesis of all religions, and a synthesis of religion and science, arguing that all religion is finally about the ‘‘same thing’’ and science contains this ‘‘same’’ meaning, as well. In the end, we live in a completely harmonious universe that will inevitably move toward its utopian destiny. This destiny is expressed in terms that allow readers to believe that they are living not in

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ordinary times but times of extraordinary awakening. The final destiny is not toward a perfected earth, however, but toward a bodiless state that will allow human beings to ‘‘cross over’’ into the world beyond life and death. We will no longer die, but instead become ‘‘pure light’’ and ‘‘pure spirit.’’14 This, one of Redfield’s characters claims, is the path laid out by both Jesus Christ and the Mayans, and the path that is open to the reader who begins to grasp the Nine Insights. The ‘‘emerging culture’’ is ultimately a denial of culture, the disappearance of human society as we know it. This gives The Celestine Prophecy a distinct similarity to another book published at the same time, but with a very different religious message.

LEFT BEHIND: BRINGING EVANGELICAL CULTURE INTO THE MAINSTREAM In the same year that The Celestine Prophecy began its momentous and historical climb to the top of best-seller charts, another fiction phenomenon was building. This one, however, needed several more years and significantly more cultural controversy to take its place among those books defining contemporary religious fiction. To many observers, Left Behind’s popularity and success appeared as a shocking eruption of evangelicalism into popular culture. The first book in the twelve book series was published in 1995, and it sold mostly in Christian bookstores.15 By 1999, the year that the fifth book in the series, Apollyon, attained a number one position on the New York Times best-seller list, 75 percent of Left Behind’s sales were in general retail outlets such as Wal-Mart and Costco. By 2004, when the series concluded, more than 62 million units (including auxiliary merchandise) had been sold, the authors appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine, and Left Behind’s popularity was an accepted, if controversial, part of popular culture.16 Left Behind was conceived by one of the most popular and powerful figures in evangelical publishing, Timothy LaHaye, and was then penned by the less well-known evangelical writer, Jerry Jenkins. LaHaye had long written on biblical prophecy, but had not yet tried his hand at fiction. Jerry Jenkins had helped Billy Graham with his autobiography and written a comic strip and both children’s and adult fiction, but he was little known by those outside publishing. The first novel in the series begins with a non-Christian and unbelieving airline pilot who is flying above the Atlantic Ocean when several passengers on his plane disappear. Because the pilot, Rayford Steele, has a Christian wife, he knows what has happened: the rapture. The rapture is an event in evangelical apocalypticism in which Jesus secretly comes to earth and takes with him all true believers. Everyone else is left behind to face seven years of suffering, plagues, and war called the ‘‘tribulation.’’ These are the last seven years of life on earth, and they culminate with a final battle between Christ and Satan and the triumphant return of Christ. The series follows Rayford Steele from the rapture, through his conversion to his wife’s faith, to his bonding together with

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other converts for constant battle against the antichrist. The final book in the series, The Glorious Reappearing, ends with the return of Christ, most of Rayford Steele’s band of warriors dead, and Christ’s victory over Satan.17 The story that the Left Behind series tells is one that, for most of the twentieth century, was well-known by only a small group of Christians who believed themselves to be almost entirely marginal to American culture. The idea of the rapture was introduced by a British itinerant preacher in the mid-nineteenth century and was gradually embraced by a group of passionate believers who came to call themselves ‘‘fundamentalists.’’ Over time and via a variety of methods, the idea of the rapture and this so-called ‘‘literal’’ reading of the Bible became a widespread, but diffuse, belief that was held by millions, and yet lacked an institutional center. It was embraced as a countercultural, anti-modern movement, even as its propagators and proponents were innovators and pioneers of mass media and communication technology.18 Over the years, the story of rapture and tribulation was told most often in the form of sermons and tracts, at revivals and Sunday evening church gatherings among conservative, fundamentalist Christians. The line between fiction and prophetical preaching was a line that was frequently crossed in the telling of the story, in part because the story offers a compelling narrative that lends itself readily to fictionalization, and in part because its propagators sensed the story’s power as a story, as much as its power as biblical truth.19 Occasionally, in the last one hundred years, the story was formed into novels by committed believers, but in an undeveloped and isolated publishing industry, none had the success of Left Behind. Readers find two kinds of truth presented to them in the Left Behind series, and these two different kinds of truth require distinct kinds of writing. The first kind of truth is one in which obscure doctrine takes on living form in the story. At least 84 percent of readers of the Left Behind series describe themselves as ‘‘born again.’’20 While this figure tells us little in itself about how each individual interprets prophecy, how each reads the Bible, or what specific beliefs each might hold about the end times, it does tell us that the vast majority of readers come to Left Behind with a predisposition to find what it says to be, in some sense, ‘‘true.’’ For the authors of Left Behind, the series is based on biblical teachings and on the ‘‘facts’’ of future events. They believe that they have merely translated the Bible into fictional form, giving fictional content to a God-given outline for the end of time. LaHaye has carefully plotted the series to correspond with what he believes the Bible offers as a timeline for end time events. The fiction then is merely an overlay onto this structure of truth. Readers struggling to understand what the Bible teaches about the end of time amidst the strange and bizarre images of the Book of Revelation find in Left Behind a way to gain access to clarity and vividness that stimulate their imaginations and bring the biblical teachings to life. This kind of truth uses the story as its vehicle. The second kind of truth that Left Behind offers is a truth about salvation and a religious message that often takes the form of both testimony

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and sermons in the novels. Readers who open the pages of the series find not only a story about people living in extraordinary circumstances, but also an explicit urging for the reader to respond to the religious message. At these points in the novels, the story drops away in order for the evangelistic message to take center stage. As in The Celestine Prophecy, these sermonizing moments serve as opportunities of recognition for readers. They are opportunities for readers to confirm their beliefs and secure themselves within the worldview of the authors. While many readers and the authors of the series are convinced of the power of these passages to persuade nonbelievers, their greater significance is their ability to communicate belonging and righteousness to existing believers. Given the power of Left Behind’s popularity and the strength of the evangelical book-buying public, one might have expected that the next explosively popular religious best-seller would be similar to Left Behind in religious orientation, that Left Behind might have opened the floodgates to more evangelical fiction on best-seller lists. Instead, the next book to make its mark on the scene challenged the very foundation of Left Behind’s worldview and appealed to a very different audience.

THE DA VINCI CODE: RETELLING THE CHRISTIAN STORY As I write this, a full two and a half years after the publication of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and Doubleday, the book remains on nearly every best-seller list in the nation. Sales have topped twenty million and set records for fictional sales. The Da Vinci Code is a classic mystery novel with a religious and conspiracy-theory twist. In the opening of the novel, the curator of the Louvre is murdered, and the investigation into his death by his granddaughter and a professor of ‘‘symbology’’ at Harvard University uncovers a string of messages that have been left throughout time to tell the story of Mary Magdalene’s marriage to Jesus and the birth of a child who carries Jesus’s royal lineage. Dan Brown is a thriller and suspense novelist, and The Da Vinci Code is his fourth novel. Before the book’s release, there were hints that this novel would be a breakthrough for him. In January of 2003, two months before the release date, Publishers Weekly suggested that previews were very good and predicting success.21 Publishers and booksellers know that almost anything about the Holy Grail—with its explorations of the Christian tradition, the references to the Middle Ages, and a significant amount of intrigue and mystery—sells books. The Da Vinci Code is an odd book, however, because it is not merely a thriller. The book contains long and rather actionless sections about the history of Christianity and Christianity’s ‘‘stolen heritage.’’ Brown puts words into his characters’ mouths that are spoken as though they are documentable historical facts. And he even begins the book with a statement that frames the controversy that eventually surrounded the book. He titles the first page of the book: FACT, and concludes with a statement, ‘‘All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in

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this novel are accurate.’’ Whatever Brown was trying to accomplish with this line—whether it was intended as an ironic statement, a statement specifically designed to inflame passion, or if Brown is as naı¨ve about the process of interpretation as that line suggests—the assertion that the book contains both fact and fiction has turned Brown from a novelist into a crusader. Brown himself insists that his only crusade is for greater dialogue and greater understanding. On his Web site, he cagily dodges the question of what he means by ‘‘FACT,’’ preferring to rely on semantics he likely knows are misleading. ‘‘If you read the ÔFACTÕ page, you will see it clearly states that the documents, rituals, organization, artwork, and architecture in the novel all exist. The ÔFACTÕ page makes no statement whatsoever about any of the ancient theories discussed by fictional characters. Interpreting those ideas is left to the reader.’’22 Notice that on the FACT page, he uses the word ‘‘accurate,’’ while on his Web site, he chooses the less controversial word ‘‘exist.’’ He somewhat disingenuously insists that he ‘‘makes no statement,’’ although the book’s loyalty to particular points of view is clear, and the reader makes a similar journey to the discovery of hidden ‘‘truths’’ as do the hero and heroine. Brown’s own language games aside, The Da Vinci Code is compelling in part because of the play between fiction and the possibility of truth. The central ‘‘truth’’ claim is that the Catholic church has proof that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child. According to Brown’s characters, the church is desperate to conceal this information because it would prevent the church from remaining the sole authority on the meaning of Jesus’s life and death. Brown does not say that he believes this theory. Instead, he says that he believes such theories ‘‘have merit’’ and notes his general disagreement with people he calls ‘‘clerical scholars.’’ Although the text of The Da Vinci Code cites numerous documents and hints at the existence of many others, Brown’s main sources are two books that were published in the 1980s and 1990s. The earlier of the two is called Holy Blood, Holy Grail and was written by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Harry Lincoln. The other is called The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ by Lynn Pickett and Clive Prince. Both of these nonfiction books make the argument about the existence of the Holy Grail, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and the repression of information by the Catholic church that Brown puts into the mouths of his characters. Neither of these two books has made successful inroads into historical scholarship. Still, as with all conspiracy theories, refutation of the claims made by conspiracy theorists are taken as simply more evidence of the claims’ truth. The claims that The Da Vinci Code makes have struck a chord deep enough to have spawned both popularity and passionate disagreement. Numerous books have been written refuting the claims made by characters in The Da Vinci Code. These books are Catholic, Protestant, secular, historical, and theological. They are written from a variety of perspectives and for a variety of reasons.23 Many, if not most, of them are angry with the way that The Da Vinci Code plays fast and loose with history about something

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that for them is sacred. But the question that most of the debunkers fail to address is why, given the preponderance of evidence that the story The Da Vinci Code hints is true is false, are people so drawn to this story? Brown’s book seems to have struck a chord for a longing to retell the Christian story. He has tapped into a growing popular sentiment that the Christian tradition has repressed alternative voices with ferocity. Brown’s debunkers are busy parsing out ‘‘fact’’ from ‘‘fiction,’’ an exercise that certainly has value. But in the process they lose sight of the fact that readers are compelled not by the facts, but by the story. People care little for facts when they can be convinced with story. Brown’s own explanation within the pages of the novel is the longing for a spiritual balance between the masculine and the feminine. The Da Vinci Code makes reference to something that Brown calls the ‘‘sacred feminine,’’ and he repeats this claim on his Web site. ‘‘Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power. The novel touches on questions of how and why this shift occurred . . . and on what lessons we might learn from it regarding our future.’’24 Clearly, for Brown, the need for the sacred feminine is one of the claims the novel makes that he feels most passionately about. Brown points to the tradition’s devaluing of the contribution of Mary Magdalene and a rejection of women’s bodies he believes inherent in Jesus’s supposed celibacy.25 This longing for the ‘‘sacred feminine’’ does indeed resonate with readers and gives them reason to be sympathetic to Brown’s other arguments. Of the three blockbuster religious fiction books of the last fifteen years, Brown’s is by far the most sophisticated in its treatment of the relationship between truth and fiction. The Celestine Prophecy contains the shell of a story that exists only as an excuse to offer a theory of metaphysical truth. Left Behind invests more in its story, but its authors are explicit in their belief that it is a form of fictionalized truth telling; their role is only to render a story the Bible tells into a modern-day fictional form. Brown, however, is neither as ideological nor as literal. He knows that his story will provoke controversy, raise questions, and give people reason to explore. The investment he has in his story, then, is different from the others because he is able to create a more dialogical relationship to his characters. His primary purpose is to tell a good story, one that will make you want to turn the pages. This primary purpose makes him much more willing to stretch ‘‘facts’’ and play with versions of ‘‘truth.’’ If the result is controversy, passionate conversations, and book sales, so much the better. Yet like the others, The Da Vinci Code contains a good deal of preaching, and this element is as crucial to the book’s popularity as the fast-paced narrative in creating the book’s enormous popularity.

THE TRUTH OF RELIGIOUS FICTION Before Left Behind, Timothy LaHaye wrote many books on prophecy that never gained the wide audience of this novelistic rendering. Dozens

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of New Age volumes convey the same spiritual truths as The Celestine Prophecy, but without the added story. And publishers have long known that books about the Holy Grail have the potential to be popular, but none broke sales records before The Da Vinci Code. The alchemy of the religious best-seller is somewhere in the relationship between a preachy truth and a compelling narrative. Readers want to be stimulated and edified, perhaps, but not too much. They do not find reasons to change their beliefs, so much as they find the pleasure of self-recognition, a story that confirms their self-understanding in a diverse and rapidly changing culture. The action and the sermon in these books are separated like oil and water. The story teaches, but without ambiguity as to its meanings. These are not stories like the parables of Jesus or Buddhist tales in which the story itself is the teaching and meanings are multilayered. Instead, the story and the sermon do separate work, the story serving as a host to the sermon, giving the sermon a place to exist and giving the reader a reason to read it. At the same time, people love and learn from the story. They are compelled by the story into flights of imagination and acts of identification. They see themselves reflected in the stories and respond with delight. Of course, not everyone has responded with delight to these renderings of religious themes in contemporary culture. Left Behind and The Da Vinci Code in particular seem to speak to the passions and suspicions of different constituencies in American culture. Left Behind is a perfect example of what progressives fear about religious conservatives: its blood and gore and obsession with ongoing war; its tenacious and aggressive believers who never experience anything like doubt about their own righteousness; its easy dismissal and mockery of concepts like pluralism and peace. Given this, along with Left Behind’s unorthodox use of the Bible, the books have fueled media madness. Left Behind has made visible a reading public that had been long behind the scenes and forced those outside to take notice.26 The Da Vinci Code has been equally controversial. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a leading Vatican cardinal, has called the book ‘‘a sack full of lies’’ and ‘‘rotten food’’ and urged people not to read it.27 More than a dozen books have been published attempting to ‘‘correct’’ Brown’s ‘‘mistakes.’’ While Brown repeatedly insists that the book ‘‘isn’t anti-anything,’’ theologians, historians, and various lay people have entered the conversation. Whether it is the book’s direct criticism of the church, its defense of the vague concept of the ‘‘sacred feminine,’’ or its conspiratorial hint at secret and sacred knowledge, it has stirred up passions. Meanwhile, for readers compelled by The Da Vinci Code’s claims, the vigorous response of the institutional church only suggests that it has something to hide and fuels their interest, if not their belief, in the possibility of an alternative story. While the relationship between truth and fiction is at stake in all three novels, views of the nature of truth are quite distinct. In The Celestine Prophecy, truth is on the far reaches of science in an emerging worldview that will eventually be confirmed through scientific experimentation. As the protagonist travels in Peru, he stops at a place where scientists are

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studying ‘‘an invisible type of energy.’’ One scientist lectures him on the importance of overcoming skepticism and, referencing Einstein, insists that ‘‘the basic stuff of the universe, at its core, is looking like a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation.’’28 Truth then, even spiritual truth, is an extension of science, a way of being in the world that will eventually have scientific confirmation. For The Da Vinci Code, truth appears at first to lie with historical fact, but the novel later takes a surprising and incongruent turn to the view that truth lies only in interpretation of facts, not in the facts themselves. Truth becomes a refracting mirror in which nothing final or conclusive can be found. Brown fuses fact, interpretation, metaphor, and something he calls ‘‘exaggeration’’ into a kind of theory of religion that refuses any kind of final ground for ‘‘truth.’’29 Oddly though, The Da Vinci Code cannot maintain this view of truth and be what it is—a murder mystery. This genre insists that murders have solutions, that mysteries be solved, that the truth be finally and conclusively known. So by the end, we return to FACT, and the architectural, historical, and artistic evidence of it. In the end, the Mona Lisa, among many other examples, is a code to be solved, a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and loses its power as metaphor. Left Behind departs from either of these tracks by laying its claim for truth on futuristic interpretations of existing ancient documents (instead of, as in The Celestine Prophecy, on a similar interpretation of imagined ones), claiming that these documents (the Bible) predict a particular and inevitable turn of world events. Left Behind is fundamentalist in that it advocates the transparency and literalism of the words of the Bible, and also apocalyptic in that the books teach that the Bible clearly and accurately tells the story of future and bloody destruction.30 Truth lies both in the Bible, which acts as a proof text for the novels, and in the conversion and transformation of the human heart, which will inwardly confirm what the authors know to be true.

THE COMMON CULTURE OF RELIGIOUS BEST-SELLERS Despite the obvious distinctiveness of each of the three books that have astounded the book publishing industry and entranced the public in the last fifteen years, these three books are cultural siblings, sharing common roots, origins, conventions, and structures. These commonalities are road markers in our attempt to understand American contemporary spirituality. The first trait that these three books share is a consistent literalism. Metaphor and symbolism (even in The Da Vinci Code) are merely extensions of a concrete reality found in and conveyed by language. We can evidence this by looking at the way the books treat the ancient documents each claims contains evidence of its truth. The Celestine Prophecy’s ancient document, the manuscript dated to 600 B.C.E., is the only one of the three that does not claim existence outside the fiction of the text. But when the unnamed protagonist finds each piece of it, he has no difficulty interpreting its meaning. The language of this document is anything but

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cryptic. Instead all the protagonist needs to do is read it and then accept that what it says is true, literally true. For example, as the protagonist explores the Fifth Insight, the most psychological of the Nine Insights, he struggles with naming and accepting his own ‘‘control drama,’’ but he has no trouble understanding the manuscript and its translation. ‘‘I read the entire text in less than thirty minutes and when I finished I finally understood the basic insight: before we could fully enter the special state of mind that so many people were glimpsing—the experience of ourselves moving onward in life guided by mysterious coincidences—we had to wake up to who we really were.’’31 This ancient manuscript written in a language not spoken by the people who wrote it and translated from Aramaic to Spanish to English, crossing 2,600 years and a multiplicity of cultures, remains transparent in its meaning along the way. No one in the book argues over what the text means, only if it should be shared with the public. Left Behind’s ancient document, the Bible, also requires little interpretation. Each word it speaks can be literally mapped onto a future scenario— an earthquake here, a plague there—each element is found, literally prophesied, in the Bible itself, if you know how to read it. In this sense, the Bible is more of a ‘‘code’’ than the manuscript of The Celestine Prophecy. The reader must learn to interpret the Bible according to the teachings of a particular kind of Christianity. But once this happens, understanding what the Bible means to say is easy, even transparent. This rendering of the Bible is often called ‘‘literal’’ both by its adherents and by its critics. The primary function of this ‘‘literal’’ interpretation is to discount metaphoric language in favor of a one-to-one correspondence between what the Bible says and what is happening in the story (and will someday happen in our world as well). Symbolism and metaphor are sifted out in order to recover the most literal meaning possible. After the rapture, for example, Rayford gets hold of a videotape made by the pastor of his wife’s church to explain what has happened to those who are left behind. The pastor uses a passage of the Bible (I Corinthians 15:51–52) to explain the rapture. ‘‘Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.’’ The pastor takes each part of this passage and explains that ‘‘sleep’’ means ‘‘die,’’ ‘‘changed’’ means ‘‘raptured,’’ ‘‘at the last trumpet’’ means the beginning of the end times. Through this so-called literal rendering of the passage, the reader can discover the most logical meaning of the passage, but only if someone explains it to him.32 If in The Celestine Prophecy the manuscript requires no interpretation, here the claim is slightly different but still literal, namely that the ancient manuscript has only one correct interpretation and that this interpretation refers to a future event. Despite The Da Vinci Code’s apparent rejection of this kind of literalism, the book deals in the same game. Metaphors and symbols do not exist for their own sake in the novel, but instead to encourage a decoding that is not unlike what characters in Left Behind do with the Bible. A symbol conveys a very specific and precise meaning, if you learn how to read it properly. Instead of multiple layers of meaning, the symbol points back

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to a solid core of reality that makes the mystery of the narrative possible to solve. The Holy Grail, for example, is not a symbol of grace or mercy in Brown’s version, but a physical body, a person, something that can have tangible and concrete presence in the world. A painting does not convey a variety of meanings or explore the human condition; instead it is a code, a series of messages that can, once they are properly understood, be ‘‘read’’ literally. These three books, then, share a theory of language that despite Brown’s postmodern imaginings seems little changed from positivist theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Language conveys concrete and specific meaning. Symbols and metaphors exist only to spice up this one-to-one correspondence between language and truth. Along with this linguistic and conceptual similarity, the three books also share a common social vision. Each book depicts a clearly delineated group of ‘‘good guys’’ that includes the protagonist and a clearly delineated group of ‘‘bad guys.’’ To be sure, there are also bad guys masquerading as good guys, and bad guys who undergo some kind of conversion experience and become good. But the lines are clearly drawn. This social vision exists not only on the level of the individual, but also can be mapped onto a broader worldview: The good people exist as a microcosm facing a larger and more powerful macrocosm of evil.33 In all three novels, the institutional church plays at least some role in creating the macrocosm of evil. All three novels seem convinced that the institutions of church and to some extent government are corrupt and untrustworthy.34 Evil is institutional and more powerful in a worldly sense, than those who are fighting against it. The microcosm of good is perpetually the underdog, fighting to bring about a transformative change in understanding. In The Celestine Prophecy those on the side of good are those who are trying to learn about and understand what the ancient manuscript says and are becoming schooled in the Nine Insights. They are in constant battle and under constant threat by the state-associated Catholic church, particularly one Cardinal Sebastian, who sees the manuscript as a threat to its power. In The Da Vinci Code, a very similar, but more complicated, enemy is constructed for similar reasons. A group within the Catholic church called Opus Dei wants to prevent information about the ‘‘true nature’’ of the Holy Grail from becoming known and so ingratiate themselves into the powers that be in Rome. But this group is actually controlled by a figure they call ‘‘The Teacher,’’ who is a cynical and power-hungry Grail seeker, not a person of religious convictions. Ultimate evil does not lie with the church, but instead with those who use their wealth and power for selfish means. In Left Behind the evil macrocosm’s orientation to religion is again a little more complex. When the antichrist comes to power, using the United Nations as his vehicle, he eventually establishes a new religion and a new church. At the beginning of the novel, the pope himself is raptured, and in his absence, the Catholic church founders. The head of the antichrist’s church ‘‘had become pope briefly after the disappearance of the previous pontiff but was now the amalgamator of nearly every religion on the globe

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save Judaism and Christianity.’’35 Although the authors single out Judaism and Christianity here, they do not mean all of Christianity and Judaism. All religious groups that do not embrace a particular form of Protestant Christianity (or remain Orthodox Jews) eventually fold into this massive church structure where religions are not distinct from one another. But this church does not serve as the primary vehicle for evil. Instead, the church is merely manipulated by the antichrist’s regime. Like ‘‘The Teacher,’’ the antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, is hungry for power for power’s sake and does not welcome any competition. The stakes that Left Behind gives to the battle between the antichrist and the Christians are much higher than in either of the other two books. Left Behind is explicitly apocalyptic and explicitly about the end of the world. Yet all three books share an apocalyptic view of time; they depict the current world on the brink of monumental change and seek to uncover clues to the future in the present. The Da Vinci Code and The Celestine Prophecy are both apocalyptic in the sense that they speak of a coming ‘‘revelation’’ that will transform the world. The Da Vinci Code and The Celestine Prophecy both speak of a coming age when an ideological shift will take place that will transform human societies as we know them. The Celestine Prophecy establishes its apocalypticism early, arguing that a time is coming when consciousness will grow and a massive cultural shift will take place. When this shift takes place, our culture may cease to exist, just like Mayan civilization. We will ‘‘cross over’’ together to the other world, a spiritual place where we become one with ‘‘pure energy.’’36 The Da Vinci Code’s explanation of time is oddly centered on Christendom but mixes New Age and Christian beliefs. Brown’s protagonist, Robert Langdon, and Lee Teabing, who we later find out is the evil Teacher, explain matterof-factly that the Age of Pisces, which is also the Age of Christ, is passing, and the Age of Aquarius is coming. The difference between the two Ages is extraordinary since the Age of Pisces (Teabing then quickly associates Pisces with Jesus and with Christianity) is a time when people are told what to think. The Age of Aquarius will be a time when people will think for themselves. Langdon himself does not believe in astrology, but he notes that ‘‘there were those in the Church who followed it very closely.’’37 While The Da Vinci Code’s protagonist disavows this view of time, the conversation sets the book on a precipice and raises the possibility of an apocalyptic interpretation of the events. Hand in hand with at least gestures to apocalypticism, all three of these best-selling novels can be described in some sense as gnostic. Gnosticism, which comes from the Greek word gnosis or knowledge, is a form of belief that a secret form of knowledge exists, primarily a spiritual knowledge, that is known only by a few. This knowledge must be guarded, defended, and kept until it is ready to be known more fully. This is, in many respects, the function of the microcosm in each book. Each microcosm has spiritual knowledge that must be kept and defended against the macrocosm. Gnosticism is, in its most basic sense, a denial of the reality of the material world, and an insistence that the essence of reality is spiritual. Both The Celestine Prophecy and Left Behind use this ideal most intensely. The Celestine

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Prophecy, like many Gnostic texts, claims that the physical body will eventually become unnecessary and a spiritual body will take its place. Left Behind demonstrates a process by which the physical world will cease to exist, to be replaced by the spiritual kingdom of God. The Da Vinci Code draws specifically on early Gnostic texts for the foundation of the ‘‘evidence’’ of the story it tells. At the same time, Brown seems uninterested in or unaware of the facts that Gnostic texts did not celebrate the feminine or the female body as he suggests, that these texts did not endorse marriage, and that they encouraged followers to avoid earthly and physical forms of intimacy in favor of spiritual forms. Brown uses ancient Gnostic texts, but not for what have been understood as Gnostic purposes. Thus The Da Vinci Code leaves us with the strangest amalgamation of all—a seeming celebration of the physical over the spiritual, a desire to celebrate the physical nature of Jesus, while at the same time leaving his protagonists with a secret knowledge that is primarily of a spiritual nature. These three ‘‘blockbusters’’ will not be the last for contemporary publishing. The industry is now keenly aware of the public’s fascination with religious and metaphysical teachings told in the form of story. The industry pants breathlessly for the ‘‘next Left Behind’’ or the ‘‘next Da Vinci Code,’’ but they do not yet seem able to manufacture it. Each of these three books came as a surprise, indeed surprise is one element in the making of a phenomenon, and surprise itself fuels popularity. What each of these books has done, through the creation of spin-offs, imitators, and auxiliary material, is widened the space in contemporary culture for fictional books with religious messages. While the fiction itself is formulaic, there is as yet no formula for the making of a religious best-seller. The distinctiveness of each of these three books, as well as their shared realities, should remind us, as critic Janice Radway has put it, that ‘‘reading is not eating,’’ and readers are not mindless consumers of whatever is put on their plates.38 The most important part of the phenomenon of religious fiction, what happens after a book is purchased and is in the hands of a reader, remains largely mysterious.

NOTES 1. See, for example, Marcia Z. Nelson, ‘‘Religious Publishing: Just How Big Is It Really?’’ Publishers Weekly (March 13, 2000): 38–40. 2. John C. Adams, ‘‘Alexander Richardson and the Ramist Poetics of Michael Wigglesworth,’’ Early American Literature 25, 3 (December 1990): 275–77. 3. For more on captivity narratives and their religious underpinnings, see Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-Modern Images of Indian Captivity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); Alden T. Vaughn and Edward W. Clark, eds., Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Kathryn Zabelle Serounian-Stodola and James Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900 (New York: Twayne, 1993). 4. David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7.

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5. Ibid., 117. 6. John Tebbel, History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1975), 3. 7. Joan Shelley Rubin, ‘‘The Boundaries of American Religious Publishing in the Early Twentieth Century,’’ Book History 2, 1 (1999): 210. Rubin draws on the work of Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), on the relationship between the sacred and the secular in consumer society. 8. Marcia Z. Nelson, ‘‘Religion Sells,’’ Christian Century 121, 21 (October 19, 2004): 10. 9. Difficulties over the definition of New Age are outside the scope of this chapter; the term ‘‘New Age’’ is a loose, awkward, and usually inappropriate phrase. But there is no other phrase that brings together the eclectic mix of popular religious, spiritual, and philosophical ideas from which The Celestine Prophecy draws. So for the moment, I shall use the phrase to describe the broadly popular spirituality movement that is an inheritor of the Western esoteric tradition. 10. Wouter Hanegraaff, ‘‘New Age Religion and Secularization,’’ Numen: International Review for the History of Religion 47, 3 (2000): 290. 11. James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure (New York: Warner Books, 1993). This summary of the First Insight comes from The Celestine Prophecy Web site, www.celestinevision.com. 12. I have developed this theory from an extensive study of readers of the Left Behind series, and I have not tested it on readers of The Celestine Prophecy. I have also been helped by Megan Sweeney’s work on readers of true crime fiction and in conversation with her. See, for example, Megan Sweeney, ‘‘Legally Blind: Seeking Prisoner’s Alternative Literacies,’’ Genre 35 (Fall/Winter 2002): 599–624. 13. Hanegraaff’s article gives a good argument for this. 14. Redfield, 243. 15. Tyndale House initially planned three volumes, then seven volumes, and finally settled on twelve as popularity increased. 16. Although the Left Behind series has technically ended, Tyndale House is continuing with prequel and sequel titles, as well as with spin-off series they call their ‘‘political’’ and ‘‘military’’ series, written by different authors. 17. For background on the origins of this story, see Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Timothy Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy and Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). 18. On this theme, see Margaret Bendroth, ‘‘Fundamentalism and the Media, 1930–1990,’’ in Religion and Mass Media: Audiences and Adaptations, ed. Daniel Stout and Judith Buddenbaum (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); Virginia Lieson Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); James Davidson Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); and Nord. 19. See my Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 6.

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20. See ‘‘Research—Barna—Readership of the Left Behind Series—Survey Conducted Spring 2001’’ at www.leftbehind.com/publicity research.asp, accessed July 4, 2005. 21. Charlotte Abbott, ‘‘Code Word: Breakout: Can Bookseller Buzz Make a Bestseller?’’ Publishers Weekly (January 27, 2003): 117. 22. ‘‘Common Questions,’’ www.danbrown.com, accessed June 26, 2005. 23. See, for example, Darrell Brock, Reading the Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone’s Asking (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2004); Bart D. Ehrman, The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); James Garlow and Peter Jones, Cracking Da Vinci’s Code: You’ve Read the Fiction, Now Read the Facts (Colorado Springs, CO: 2004); Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel, The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code (Fort Collins, CO: Ignatius Press, 2004); Amy Welborn, Decoding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of The Da Vinci Code (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2004); and Ben Witherington III, The Gospel Code (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004). 24. ‘‘Common Questions,’’ www.danbrown.com, accessed June 27, 2005. 25. Brown’s claim that if Jesus had ‘‘married’’ Mary Magdalene and had children, this would somehow deliver to us a more balanced and less patriarchal religion is difficult to fathom. Or that the existence of descendants of Jesus who are part of a ‘‘royal’’ line could somehow give insight into a ‘‘sacred feminine’’ seems dubious to this feminist reader. To me, this hints at a still more hierarchical and less radical story than the one on which the Christian tradition is based, yet Brown believes that his story is ‘‘empowering to women’’ (‘‘Common Questions,’’ accessed June 27, 2005). 26. See, for example, John Dart, ‘‘ÔBeam Me UpÕ Theology: The Debate over Left Behind,’’ Christian Century (September 25–October 8, 2002): 8; Gary DeMar, End Times Fiction: A Biblical Consideration of the Left Behind Theology (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001); Craig Hill, In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); Paul Krugman, ‘‘Gotta Have Faith,’’ New York Times, December 17, 2002; Nicholas Kristof, ‘‘God, Satan and the Media,’’ New York Times, March 4, 2003; Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004). 27. MSNBC News Service, ‘‘Cardinal’s Plea: Don’t Read ÔDa Vinci CodeÕ: Theologian calls novel insulting Ôsack full of lies,Õ’’ March 15, 2005. 28. Redfield, 41–42. 29. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 341–42. 30. See George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), for a discussion of the transparency of biblical language. 31. Redfield, 148. 32. Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of Earth’s Last Days (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1995), 210–16. 33. I borrow this language from Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). 34. In both The Celestine Prophecy and The Da Vinci Code, the particular form of the church singled out for accusation is the Catholic church. This may be a demonstration of Philip Jenkins’s thesis that anti-Catholicism is one of the last acceptable prejudices (Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003]). Left Behind, coming out of a worldview that has been decidedly anti-Catholic for more than a century, is

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cagier. Churches themselves are not necessarily on the side of good. Most give themselves over to the antichrist’s regime. But LaHaye and Jenkins do not single out the Catholic church for criticism the way that many of their predecessors had done. 35. Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Apollyon (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1999), 53. 36. Redfield, 241–42. 37. Brown, 267–68. 38. Janice Radway, ‘‘Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of Metaphor,’’ BookResearch-Quarterly 2, 3 (1986): 7–29.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Blodgett, Jan. Protestant Evangelical Literary Culture and Contemporary Society. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Ehrman, Bart D. The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Forbes, Bruce, and Jeanne Kilde, eds. Rapture, Revelation, and End Times: Exploring the Left Behind Series. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Frykholm, Amy Johnson. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Nord, David Paul. Faith in Reading. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

CHAPTER 6

The Footprints of Film: After Images of Religion in American Space and Time S. Brent Plate

I

n front of Philadelphia’s stately Museum of Art, with its extensive, wellrespected collections of Asian and American art, one can find the footprints of Rocky at the top of the great steps. Tourists from all over the world have made mini-pilgrimages here as they climb the enormous stairway leading to the museum and the footprints, and many stop to take their picture alongside this little hunk of cement with its indented footprints of Rocky’s Converse high-tops. Jumping up and down with arms raised, these tourist-pilgrims have their picture taken, then they go home and put that image in their scrapbooks and on Web pages to say, ‘‘Look, I stood where Rocky stood!’’ ‘‘Rocky,’’ as many will remember, refers here to ‘‘Rocky Balboa,’’ the character played by Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films. Although Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood is well known for its footprints and handprints of famous movie stars in the walkway outside, the impressions there are accompanied by the actors’ real names, people who have actual hands that can make an imprint in setting cement. But in the case of Rocky’s footprints, we realize there is no ‘‘Rocky.’’ He was only a fictional character in a movie.1 The religious landscape of the United States is littered with just such footprints of film. Far from being immaterial—nothing but light projected on a two-dimensional surface—filmic images have leapt off the screen and entered physical, three-dimensional spaces, leaving their marks in American cement, religious consciousness, and ritual practices. Like the character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) in Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, film has stepped down from the screen to infiltrate political, social, and religious lives. My argument here is that religion and film leave the temples and theaters, synagogues and living rooms, and meet in the streets, stairways, parking lots, weddings, funerals, cities, and deserts of the United States.

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At the start of this chapter, I shall survey some of the scholarly approaches to the religion-film relation in the United States. Many scholars have been working at this intersection, and there is much good work here. Most of these approaches, however, treat religion as a well-delineated institution with set theological (usually Christian) doctrine, and film as something that exists merely as a formal ‘‘text’’ that must be ‘‘read’’ by knowledgeable interpreters. The methodology has been a kind of matchmaking enterprise: Spot the traditional religious symbol in the film, then write about it. Religion and film are rarely seen together among the ‘‘webs of significance’’ (to use Clifford Geertz’s well-rehearsed phrase) that constitute the broader culture. Thus, in the second part of the chapter, I triangulate the religion-film relation to make a larger argument for the ways in which filmed characters and scenarios have come down off the screen and entered the religious landscapes of present-day society and contemporary ritualizing practices. My triangulation works to delineate a space, literally and metaphorically, in which religion and film meet in U.S. religious geography. In this second section I note the ways films have influenced contemporary rituals such as weddings and funerals, bar mitzvahs and baptisms, and the ways films have constructed brand-new rituals such as is the case with cult followings of films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At times rituals must be reinvented, at other times they are built from the ground up, and media such as film are integral to the ever-evolving cultural systems of religious traditions.

STUDYING RELIGION AND FILM IN THE UNITED STATES Since the late 1960s, a growing number of religious studies scholars have been analyzing films, noting their oftentimes deliberate, oftentimes oblique, religious references. The ‘‘first wave’’ of religion and film criticism stands as a loose canon of publications roughly extending from the 1960s to the late 1980s.2 Book-length studies during this period began with many of the assumptions of existential Christian theology, particularly grounded in Paul Tillich’s theology of culture. Film could be religiously instructive because it taught about the human condition, providing stories and images that struggled for ultimate meaning. So, the thinking goes, by analyzing some of these films, we understand more about this thing called humanity, its destiny and purpose. Most publications in this first wave made clear that such investigation was primarily to be found in European cinema, in the work of directors such as Pier Paolo Passolini, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, and Ingmar Bergman (Japanese directors Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa were the two key non-Westerners). Relevant U.S. productions included work by D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille in the early years of cinema, with Alfred Hitchcock adding a few flourishes mid-century, and George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese providing a religious flavor to film in the 1960s through the 1980s. In many ways reacting to this earlier paradigm that found film and religion in ‘‘serious,’’ art house films—especially as seen in European

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cinema—the 1990s witnessed the next wave of film and religion criticism that self-consciously took popular, industrial Hollywood film as its primary focus. Attention shifted from European film to American film. Biblical scholars, theologians, and a few religious studies scholars began to take a second look at popular culture and found a wealth of resources in American film. Many of the writers in this period paid attention to popular cinema because, it was argued, this is what the masses watch and thus when we investigate popular films we find out something about U.S. culture in general. Darrol Bryant suggests, ‘‘as a popular form of the religious life, movies do what we have always asked of popular religion, namely, that they provide us with archetypal forms of humanity—heroic figures—and instruct us in the basic values and myths of our society.’’3 Conrad E. Ostwalt parallels this statement when he claims, ‘‘Popular culture provides the context for understanding the values, belief systems, religious imaginations, and myths of a particular people at a particular time.’’4 While there is much to applaud in this turn to include popular film, a number of unchecked assumptions remain in such an approach. The chief problem is that the emphasis on popular film/culture tends to confuse the part for the whole. If something like a film is ‘‘popular,’’ it does not necessarily follow that we can understand the values, beliefs, and myths of ‘‘our society’’ through it, especially since ‘‘popular’’ at the box office still usually accounts for only a fraction of a population. And when so many Hollywood industrial films are aimed at a young, middle-class, white audience—as film producers readily acknowledge—scholars overwhelmingly reify a WASPish U.S. culture in religious studies of cinema. A deeper understanding of the diversity in U.S. society is ignored as the ‘‘basic values and myths of our society’’ become equated with those of the dominant class. The myths and values are exclusive, not inclusive, and hardly contribute to a pluralist view of culture. The popular film/culture methods have also radically missed the ways in which the film industry functions to produce the viewer. I am not arguing against the study of popular culture, but rather to take these studies further and make them more critical regarding larger cultural forces, including the often bullying weight of corporate and global capitalism. Assuming that ‘‘the populace’’ makes decisions as to what becomes popular is to leave aside important critical concerns about socioeconomic structures of power in U.S. culture. Edward Jay Epstein’s recent book, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, details some of the ways in which the Hollywood marketing industry, with billions of dollars at their disposal, actually functions to create the viewer and to affect the general public’s aesthetic sensibilities: [B]ox-office results reflect neither the appeal of the actual movies—nor their quality—but the number of screens on which they are playing and the efficacy of the marketing that drove an audience into the theaters. . . . Studios spend $20 million to $40 million on TV ads because their market research shows that those ads are what can draw a movie’s crucial openingweekend teenage audience. To do that, they typically blitz this audience,

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aiming to hit each viewer with between five to eight ads in the two weeks before a movie’s opening. The studios also spend a great deal of money testing the ads on focus groups, some of whom are wired up to measure their nonverbal responses. If the ads fail to trigger the right response, the film usually ‘‘bombs’’ in the media’s hyperbolic judgment. If the ads succeed, the film is rewarded with ‘‘boffo’’ box-office numbers.5

Playwright and screenwriter David Mamet, no stranger to the forces of Hollywood, has likewise argued that Hollywood is best understood not as a location for artistic creation but as an economic market, with studio executives playing the role of stock market traders: ‘‘The audience, to them, is composed of ignorant natives, who must be transformed, segment by segment, into docile proprietary consumers—e.g., the efforts of the Coca-Cola company. The ne plus ultra of this conquest is the control of a group not only proprietary but addicted.’’6 Hyperbole aside, these comments—and many more like them from people working within the Hollywood system—make clear that the focus on ‘‘box-office success’’ that so many religion and film scholars have lately been championing is radically out of touch with the film production industry, to say nothing of the way culture operates. Many of the religion and film studies approach culture as if economic forces have no role in actively shaping culture and creating popular film. If successful films tell us something about U.S. culture more generally (the nuances of which are rarely articulated), then it remains crucial to note the ways that culture is itself produced in part by economic forces. Culture does not exist as an independent entity that humans somehow stand apart from and at times touch on its fringes. Individual films—and ‘‘cinema’’ as a larger industry and culturally productive entity—are not separable from the greater web of culture and society. Religious studies scholars have too often limited the meaning of cinema to the formal categories of individual films, particularly their narrative content and character development. Because of these limitations, a number of scholars have started to articulate what may emerge as the third wave of the interdisciplinary study of religion and film. While there seems to be some waffling around for a methodology, with a number of hints and guesses at what the future of the interdiscipline might hold, a few scholars have pointed down at least two avenues. First, there is a suggested move away from a literary-oriented analysis of film—that is, figuring out the narrative structure of a film, paying attention primarily to character development—toward increased attention to the specificities of the filmic medium—what makes a film a film and not a novel or theatre; for example, including attention to lighting, mise-en-scene, and cinematography.7 As Steve Nolan observed in 1998, there is a myopia among religious film-analysts around the location of meaning, with many assuming that it is located in the text and can be read out by interested readers. This has resulted in, at best, a certain predictability of film readings, and, at worst, a sanitising/sanctifying of what at times can be dangerously and religiously subversive cinema.

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These problems have largely been due to the over reliance of religious film-analysts on (out-dated) literary categories of interpretation, combined with their failure to engage seriously with the categories of contemporary film theory. Future religious film-analysis must learn to treat film qua film. . . .8

Five years later, however, Conrad Ostwalt still found it important to reiterate the injunction: ‘‘it is necessary to explore methods unique to the film genre, and religious studies scholars need to learn more from the methods and insights of film studies. While we know how to ÔreadÕ a film like literature, we might not know how to ÔseeÕ a film critically.’’9 There remains a dire need for religious studies scholars to take up this suggestion and start to do some reading in film and visual theories, especially paying attention to the ways that films help create ethnic, gendered, sexual, and religious identities. Considering the large role that visuality plays in the construction of these identity categories, there is a need for religious studies scholars to pay attention to the ways such aspects of identity intersect with religion and film.10 The second shift currently taking place in religious approaches to film is a concern to move beyond formal analyses of films toward audience reaction to films. Recently, in separate studies, John Lyden and Conrad Ostwalt have each argued for the religious function of film. That is, their attention is not focused on whether a film has explicitly religious characters or symbols in it, but how a film affects the behaviors and beliefs of its viewers.11 This functional view of film, paralleling the functional theory of religion, sets the interrelation within a larger cultural context. Along with this, there is an interest in ethnographic analyses of audience responses to film. However, almost no ethnographic work has been done so far.12 That the flickering and fleeting images of film have affected certain sectors of the U.S. public is apparent enough. How much is another question, and to what purpose is still another. Does film affect people’s lives? Do people see the world differently because of film? These questions have to do with the relation between the world ‘‘out there’’ and the world ‘‘on-screen.’’ The data, for example, linking violence on screen to violence in real life remain speculative, and there are many who still go to the movies and will say, ‘‘That was nice but it’s just a movie,’’ while others claim that a screened scenario has affected their lives in dramatic ways.13 I remain agnostic on issues of whether violence on screen creates a more violent society (there are too many factors to account for here), but there can be no simple division between the world of the movies (including the actors, filmmakers, and the marketing industry) and the world of everyday life. Film has entered U.S. cultural and religious life, creating and de-creating identities in its wake, setting up certain rituals and rearranging others.14 To posit a division between the world on screen and the world out there is to ignore the multiple intersections between culture and religion more broadly, and film and religion more specifically.

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RITUALIZING FILM In the following, I extrapolate on a comment by Margaret Miles, who says, ‘‘The primary context for a film, I believe, is not other films but the public world of events, institutions, and multiple vexed negotiations of values and behavior.’’15 Having surveyed some of the religion and film material up to the present day, in the remainder of this chapter I chart some of the ways the world on-screen meets up with the world out there. In so doing I try to offer a new tack on the religion-and-film relation. I am in agreement with previous authors who note the need for reception studies in order to understand further the religion-film relation, but rather than working through surveys, asking audience members what they thought, my investigation notes the ways film becomes incorporated into the spatial and sacred practices of people who watch and are affected by film. This is an attempt to view the lived religion of film. But this is also to contradict another, anti-filmic suggestion by Miles: ‘‘The satisfaction produced by films is encompassed by, and stops with, vision. There is nothing to touch. There are no bodies. Touch and the other senses can be engaged only in imagination.’’16 What I hope to show is that there is actually an intimate interrelation between the imagination, socio-politico-religious life, and the full human sensorium. Recently, as part of a weekly response to class readings, one of my students discussed how her brother had chosen Matrix-style clothing— leather trenchcoats, sunglasses, and so on—for his wedding. I have seen the Matrix trilogy on many occasions, have shown The Matrix to my classes every year for the past five years, and read a lot about the films.17 I know there are a lot of aficionados (or cult followers depending on how you phrase it) of these films, but until I read my student’s paper I had not thought about the ways a film leaves its own formal confines and infiltrates the lives and ritual structures of average U.S. citizens. This provoked me to think further about how films have impacted rituals and I did some research on film and ritual in the United States.18 According to a September 2001 article in Bride’s magazine, ‘‘theme weddings,’’ including those based on films, are a hot trend in the wedding industry. Many wedding planning guides offer a variety of focal themes, from Renaissance themes to underwater weddings, from Hawaiian to Scottish to fairy-tale lands, and those with the ever-popular Elvis impersonator presiding. Online sites offer a plethora of theme wedding packages, including Roaring 20s themes, Disney themes, Star Trek themes, and the ‘‘Hollywood theme,’’ which one online wedding planner describes this way: As your white limo whispers to a halt before the expectant crowd, the handsome man at your side smiles lovingly into your eyes. You step gracefully from the car, your diamonds sparkling with every movement. (‘‘Diamonds’’ are a state of mind!) You pause as a mass of avid fans and photographers surround you, begging a moment of your precious time. Magnanimously, you scrawl your autograph and casually tilt your head for the snapshot of the century. (First making sure your good side is towards the camera, of course!)

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Finally, clinging possessively to your leading man, you reluctantly tear yourself away from your adoring fans and head for the elaborate reception that is being held in your honor. Is this all just a dream? No, this could be your wedding!19

The site ‘‘Wedding Shops Online’’ offers suggestions of wedding themes such as ‘‘country/western,’’ ‘‘ethnic,’’ ‘‘nautical,’’ and ‘‘Movie or Television.’’ For the last they give the idea: ‘‘Have all in attendance dress up as characters from your favorite movie or television program (i.e. Star Trek). Carry the theme throughout the reception—serve food that was served during the movie, play theme music, etc. Send invitation and program designed as a ÔPlay Bill.Õ’’20 Other Internet searches reveal couples having theme weddings based on films such as Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and Braveheart. And lovetripper.com, a resource for honeymoon planning, offers a list of ‘‘romantic movie quotes’’ to ‘‘spice up your love letters,’’ including one-liners from Bridges of Madison County (‘‘This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime’’), West Side Story (‘‘Goodnight, goodnight, sleep well and when you dream, dream of me . . .’’), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (‘‘A faithful heart makes wishes come true’’).21 Similar film themes can be created for b’nai mitzvahs (mitzvoth). Indeed, Woody Allen’s 1997 film, Deconstructing Harry, depicts a Star Wars–themed bar mitzvah, complete with child cutting the cake with a light saber. Yet, the scene did not stem from the imaginative mind of Allen, but from life itself. The online partypop.com offers suggestions and planning for bar mitzvahs with themes like ‘‘Back to the Future,’’ ‘‘The Terminator,’’ and ‘‘Lost in Space.’’ The online sales pitch tells us the story of ‘‘Marcus’’ who recently had a Terminator-theme for his coming of age party/ritual: Everything in the hall looked like metal. . . . There were even jungle gyms and slides painted in camouflage colors for them to play on. Once everyone had arrived, the Aliea La Tora [sic] was performed on the hall stage. Then, since everyone was already in the hall, Marcus’ grand entrance was a ride around the hall in an electric scooter decorated to look like the Terminator’s motorcycle in T2. It was his bar mitzvah gift from his parents. Marcus got on and made a victory lap while the DJ played the ‘‘Terminator’’ theme music.22

Or note Lisa Niren’s Titanic-theme bat mitzvah, reported by the Associated Press: Thirteen-year-old Lisa Niren, described by her sister as obsessed with ‘‘Titanic,’’ got the bat mitzvah of her dreams over the weekend. A hotel ballroom was transformed into the luxury liner, with 12-foot steaming smokestacks at the buffet table, phosphorescent artificial icebergs and a ‘‘steerage’’ section for the children. . . . The piece de resistance was a gigantic photo, 10 feet above the floor, featuring Lisa’s face superimposed over actress Kate Winslet’s body in a famous

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‘‘Titanic’’ scene on the prow of the ocean liner. Lisa appeared to have teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio smiling over her shoulder. . . . Reflective aqua-tinted lighting along the walls and the phosphorescent blue and green icebergs made it appear as if the ballroom was under water. Tables featured roses, crystal candelabras and replicas of the heart-shaped blue diamond necklace from the movie. ‘‘This is incredible,’’ said Heather Levy, a friend of Lisa’s mother. ‘‘A lot of people do things for their children because they love them, but this goes beyond all that. I’m just standing here smiling.’’23

Granted, such b’nai mitzvahs and weddings make up a small but growing percentage of all ceremonies conducted in the United States, yet their existence indicates some of the ways young people and couples are searching for ways to ‘‘personalize’’ their rituals. Plenty of other religious services realize this need for the updating of media and are happily incorporating film into their liturgies. This seems to be particularly true among evangelical Christian churches. In fact, it seems that the more conservative a church is theologically, the less problem it has pulling down a screen in the middle of a Sunday morning sermon and playing a clip from a film. Meanwhile the mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches tend to relegate film to the adult education courses on Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights.24 Moving in the opposite direction, the influence of the audiovisual, technological recordability of rituals has undoubtedly been observed by anyone who has attended a wedding, b’nai mitzvah, baptism, ordination, or funeral in the past ten years. These rituals are oftentimes overwhelmed by the presence of uncles, fathers, friends, or even professionals hired for the event who ‘‘memorialize’’ the ritual through their latest techno-gizmos (there is an interesting element of masculinity to much of this visual techno-gazing/recording).25 Memory, perhaps the central facet of ritual, is produced in and through media, and the so-called reality of the memory is deeply dependent on the medium through which it exists, whether that is a verbal medium (e.g., as spoken or printed word), or visual medium (e.g., a photograph), or is multimedia (film, performance). This is not the place for a thorough ethnographic study of film-themed rituals, but film has clearly left an imprint on contemporary ritualizing processes. There will be critics who see these rites of passage as succumbing to entertainment and consumerism, one more step in the commodification and secularization of religious traditions. And there may be a lot to the charge. But there is more to it than that. My student whose Matrix-inspired brother re-outfitted his matrimonial wardrobe had been reading Ronald Grimes’s work, Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage. Grimes plays with the possibilities of having renewed rituals to keep contemporary humans inspired, to give us meaning in the patterns of our lives, and to connect within a society that too often produces alienation. Throughout his book, Grimes is concerned with what seems to be a growing absence of rites of passage in the modern age and offers an interesting, if not overstated, quote from the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential: ‘‘The absence of rites of passage

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leads to a serious breakdown in the process of maturing as a person. Young people are unable to participate in society in a creative manner because societal structures no longer consider it their responsibility to intentionally establish the necessary marks of passing from one age-related social role to another[.]’’26 Humans have an ongoing need for ritual, as many have suggested, but Grimes also raises the concern that ‘‘traditional rites themselves can become so ethereal that they fail to connect with the bodily realities and spiritual needs of those who undergo them.’’27 And this is where the need for reinvented rites becomes so important. The Matrix marriage had an air of novelty to it, but perhaps it was a way to lighten what some felt was an overly solemn occasion (marriage should be fun, right? so why not relax a little). Perhaps it is the assumed solemnity of the occasions that produces alienation and disconnection, and new media create a sense of lightness and approachability. Since a Jewish boy is automatically a bar mitzvah at age thirteen and a girl at age twelve is automatically a bat mitzvah, with or without the ritual, perhaps the theme of the festivities is not important. But others do see it all as intertwined. Concerned with the stodgy old ways of creating bar/ bat mitzvah rituals and parties, Gail Greenberg recently wrote a popular book and created a company called ‘‘mitzvahchic.’’ She says: ‘‘Since the 1950s b’nai mitzvah have followed the same formula and nothing has changed except which trendy themes are in vogue. But now, we recognize that there’s got to be more, that we’ve exhausted the thrills and satisfaction we can get through decorating and the old routines alone.’’ Greenberg and, it seems, many others who have heeded her advice realize there is still power in ritual, and without much scholarly knowledge of ritual studies, she seems to know implicitly that a re-invention of rituals is vital to religious tradition. Not wholly advocating the throwing out of tradition, nor simply suggesting anything goes, the ‘‘mitzvahchic’’ approach attempts to bring the deep significance of the older traditions together with personal meaning in a contemporary age: ‘‘Today’s bar mitzvah/bat mitzvah has a new level of spirituality; new ways of adding tzedakah, having fun and making it beautiful.’’28 The Terminator theme, noted earlier, may have questionable meaning-making abilities (a victory lap in an electric scooter?!), but the need for personal connection in ritual is very real. As quantified evidence for the role of film and other popular media in the shaping of contemporary religiosity, Lynn Schofield Clark has offered a number of intriguing studies on media and adolescent religious identity in the United States. Her book From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, The Media and the Supernatural, based on hundreds of interviews with teenagers and their families, demonstrates how many youth today express their own understanding of ‘‘religion,’’ ‘‘spirituality,’’ and the ‘‘supernatural’’ through media symbols. Television shows and films such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, The Sixth Sense, and Harry Potter provide articulations for the ways U.S. teens understand themselves to be ‘‘religious.’’ Clark claims that a ‘‘great deal of evidence suggests that the media play an important role in how young people form and articulate their identities. Young people learn from and identify with celebrities they admire. Their

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choices for media consumption have a lot to do with the identifications they hold according to their participation in different racial, class, gender, and friendship groups. . . . Given the significance of the entertainment media in the lives of teens, it’s worth exploring what teens mean when they identify themselves as religious, and what such identifications might have to do with what they see, hear, and consume in the media.’’29 Among other interesting findings, Clark’s work, along with that of her colleagues at the University of Colorado, demonstrates how the secularization thesis has not taken account of the role of media in actively shaping what can only be called religious views of U.S. culture. While nontraditional religious movements are replacing ‘‘traditional’’ religious institutions, media such as film, television, comic books, and video games are replacing traditional institutional worldviews with new articulations, new descriptions and depictions, of very old religious categories like good and evil, sin, angels, demons, and god. Ritualizing and world building are necessary to religion, but the same old ritual in the same old way, the same old message in the same old medium, leaves people feeling disconnected. Central to re-ritualizing processes is the necessity of attention to the media of transmission. From orality to literacy, printing presses to the Internet, ‘‘tradition’’ becomes abstract and stale if everyone repeats the same things in rote manner through the same medium. To invent new and meaningful rites, many people now turn to film (and other forms of media such as television, comic books, and games) to help them through stages of life. These media have become familiar, comfortable. In many instances the process may be just good clean fun, but in other ways films offer linguistic and symbolic registers and ways of understanding the world from vital, new perspectives, touching on sensual aspects that words alone are too limited to deal with.

CREATING NEW RITUALS: FROM ROCKY TO ROCKY HORROR New media alter old rituals, but they also produce brand-new rituals, in places and times the traditionally minded religious person would not think to look. As I write this, thousands of people are camping on the streets—a few, notably, have been camping for months—waiting for the tickets to go on sale for the final installment of the Star Wars series. These fans are dressed in Star Wars–specific costumes, spending time with friends along the way, just to be able to participate in that special, set-apart time and place where they can watch Star Wars: Episode III. The religion of Star Wars has often been noted in popular and scholarly literature alike, and a Romanian-based fan club has just opened the first known ‘‘Jedi Academy.’’30 Indeed, in the 2001 Australian national census, more than 70,000 people marked ‘‘Jedi’’ as their religion, hoping to get it listed as an official religion recognized by the nation. Responding to this religious/ political movement, Chris Brennan, director of the Star Wars Appreciation Society of Australia, stated, ‘‘This was a way for people to say, ÔI want to be part of a movie universe I love so much.Õ’’31 Brennan’s words are

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telling, especially when compared to Jonathan Z. Smith’s definition of ritual: ‘‘Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.’’32 Star Wars fans reenact and recollect an alternate reality—standing in line for days and weeks, dressing the part, being with like-costumed and likeminded people, participating in a world (both on the streets outside the theater and as part of the filmed world on screen) that expresses ‘‘the way things ought to be’’—a reality in contradistinction to the hum-drum existence of office spaces, mortgage installments, and traffic commutes. Perhaps no other film, blockbuster or otherwise, has created a greater ritualized following than the 1975 Rocky Horror Picture Show, directed by Jim Sharman. While many religious studies scholars might write-off Rocky Horror as a campy production with little ethical or religious value, it has nonetheless elicited a mass, cult following since its debut. The plot line is a retelling of the bourgeoisie (represented by Brad and Janet—played by Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) encountering another, alternate social reality (here at the underworldly castle-home of Dr. Frank N. Furter—Tim Curry) and being transformed by the experience. ‘‘Normal’’ social behavior is mocked throughout the film; polymorphous perversions and various acts of violence (the reason it is a ‘‘horror show’’), including cannibalism, are demonstrated on screen, turning Brad and Janet’s ‘‘traditional’’ values upside down. They are transformed through their experiences. The plot itself relates to Victor Turner’s (following Van Gennep’s) tripartite schema of religious ritual entailing: separation, liminality, reincorporation. But it is in the watching of the film where the true religious dimensions surface, as it functions religiously by way of audience interaction, for the audience also goes through the three-part ritual process.33 Now, thirty years after its creation, in almost any major city across the United States and elsewhere, at the liminal hour of Saturday midnight, one can find a screening of the film and a devoted crowd of people still gathering, donning costumes related to the film, along with their special ‘‘props.’’ A fair number of people have now seen the film over one thousand times. Those who have never attended a screening are termed ‘‘virgins’’ (and often are made to wear a lipsticked ‘‘V’’ on their foreheads). Indeed, an entire vocabulary has been developed in relation to the screenplay. In their article, ‘‘Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading Rocky Horror,’’ Patrick Kinkade and Michael Katovich explore the phenomenon of secular filmic cult audiences. Drawing on previous work in the field, they define ‘‘cult film audiences’’ as ‘‘a type of secular cult organization, and cultish attachments to these films replace a charismatic actor with a document granted charismatic appeal.’’34 Such a definition is intriguing for the ways in which it redefines traditional central sacred texts and figures, implicitly noting the ways in which media affect what can only be called ‘‘piety.’’ As Kinkade and Katovich observe, cult film audiences, ‘‘construct ritual and belief systems through their viewing experience. Cult film attachments, therefore, become obsessions and enduring shared foci for habitues.’’35

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Such behavioral systems are readily apparent at screenings of Rocky Horror, as audience members enact ritual activities in tandem with other audience members and in conjunction with the film scenes. In the film theater, audience members perform events that mimic the events on screen. At several points viewers will get up and reenact key scenes as they are taking place on screen: The audience throws rice at the point when Brad and Janet get married at the beginning of the film; and people bring actual toast with them so at the point when Frank N. Furter proposes a ‘‘toast,’’ the audience throws their toast at the screen. These responses have been repeated and codified over the years, so that now one can attend a Rocky Horror screening across the world and encounter the same performative actions. Cult audiences, including those often seen at Rocky Horror screenings, are often comprised of disenfranchised members of a society who find connection, meaning, and solace within such liminal activities as a form of ‘‘spontaneous communitas’’ is formed. Earlier in this chapter I criticized the approach of religious studies scholars to popular film, suggesting that this so-called popular culture is itself a creation of the multibillion-dollar entertainment industry. The same criticism can be raised toward these new cinematic rituals. How many seemingly grassroots responses are in fact created as publicity stunts? Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a clear demonstration of how this can happen, and while it has become one of the top-grossing films of all time, it seems to have done so by mimicking the disenfranchised aspects of the cult film phenomenon: Mel Gibson as outsider who must fund his film by himself (the fact that he could come up with the $30 million by himself should probably clue us in to the fact that he was anything but an outsider), the Hollywood industry that shuns him, reviewers who pan the film, just as the film ostensibly tells the story of a social outsider pushed down by the socio-religious authorities. Just as Gibson and his marketing people clearly promoted the film as Hollywood insiders who know the code, in like manner, advertisers and theater managers probably sparked the Rocky Horror cult itself.36 Thus, at a certain point one might be tempted to suggest that there is some ‘‘pure’’ grassroots ritual process standing in contrast to these ‘‘artificial’’ commercial constructions. But rituals, like culture in general, is always a production (however ongoing and morphing) made up by the webs of significance of economics, social life, legal issues, cultural symbols, human bodies, religious institutions, communal interactions, and personal beliefs. I am not suggesting that some films offer ‘‘pure’’ rituals, stemming from the untainted underground life of the disenfranchised, while others are merely industry standards. Rather, I am suggesting again that religion and film meet in a much larger and more diverse U.S. social and cultural matrix than has heretofore been suggested by scholars working in the field. Future scholarship needs to take more careful accountings of the popular and the underground, the formalities of a film production as well as the reception of a cinematic experience, and more of the webs of the visual culture of film in the United States. In Clifford Geertz’s well-known definition, religion offers: symbols, powerful and pervasive moods and motivations, as it formulates

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‘‘conceptions of a general order of existence,’’ arranging all of this to seem ‘‘uniquely realistic.’’37 Through special effects, editing, cinematography, and finely honed acting, films and their reception offer much of the same. The trailers at the cinema even tell us as much. As we sit down with our popcorn—perhaps dressed as a stormtrooper or a Wookie—waiting for the feature presentation, we hear the voiceover for the coming attractions: ‘‘In a world where you have to fight to be free . . .’’; ‘‘In a world where love is within reach . . .’’; ‘‘In a world. . . .’’ We the viewers are invited into other worlds, alternate renditions of reality that through seamless editing, precise special effects, carefully placed cameras, and elaborate props offer views of the world that seem ‘‘uniquely realistic.’’ Film, like religion, tells of another reality, of a world that could be, of a world that viewers want to live in—or in the case of apocalyptic films a world viewers want to avoid. Regardless, films present other realities that stimulate moods and motivations.38 One way or another, film viewers have their eyes and ears opened to differing ways of imagining the world outside the film theater, but also outside our own social status in the world ‘‘out there.’’ In the audiovisual experience of viewing film, human bodies and minds have an experience that becomes internalized, ultimately affecting behaviors, attitudes, practices, and beliefs. And we often find the experience of film somehow transformed, translated, and transposed into the granite structures, the cement surfaces, and Saturday night haunts that constitute contemporary religious life. To conclude, I leave one final footprint. In Austin, Texas, between the state’s capitol and judicial buildings, there is a six foot by three foot granite sculpture of the Ten Commandments, chiseled in a quasi-Gothic script (in King James English, of course), with decorative flourishes—the Christic Greek chi-rho characters, stars of David, and an American flag—surrounding the words. This ‘‘monument’’ was erected in 1961, and my research reveals little interest in it from then until the early 2000s. Now the Austin sculpture has become one of many contested sites in the United States in which church-state relations have been put to the test. The case has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that such a presentation entails the government endorsing religion, while conservative lawmakers argue for the ways in which these commandments pay tribute to the religious and legal history of the United States.39 What neither side rarely admits—or simply remains ignorant of—is that the plethora of Ten Commandment sculptures outside courthouses, capitols, and urban squares in the United States today actually came into being through the publicity stunts of the great filmmaker, Cecil B. DeMille. In the mid-1950s, DeMille was finishing his second version of The Ten Commandments, famously starring Charlton Heston as Moses. As promotion for the film, DeMille got in touch with the Fraternal Order of Eagles (FOE), a nationwide association of civic-minded clubs (founded in 1898, interestingly enough, by a group of theater owners), who had been distributing copies of the Ten Commandments to courtrooms across the country as ‘‘guidance’’ for juvenile delinquents. DeMille and the FOE upped the symbolic stability of the Decalogue by commissioning hundreds of granite

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sculptures of Moses’s tablets to be placed outside courthouses across the United States, including that in Austin, Texas. DeMille died in 1959, but the FOE continued the task of planting the sculptures through the 1960s, and they are now the focal point of Supreme Court decisions that impinge directly on church-state issues in the United States.40 Film has left its footprints in U.S. culture, society, political discourse, and religious consciousness. These footprints are not those of abstract thought, but of material structures in physical time and space. Film progresses from its two-dimensional, light-projected status, to incarnated, three-dimensional aspects. And the point at which it becomes so interesting is when it is realized that film has so permeated cultural consciousness that people forget how material ‘‘reality’’ can have its origins in ethereal light projected onto a screen. There is no ‘‘Rocky,’’ and granite Ten Commandments are as much vestigial publicity stunts as they are making a statement about God-given law as the origin of the modern legal system. The image is confused for the real, and we realize therein that the real is always already imagined, and oftentimes primarily imaged. In the contemporary United States, film is no longer existent only in celluloid, or even in digital code. Film has left the theater house, infiltrated old rituals and fashioned new rituals. It has made its marks in cement, and these concrete places become, in turn, an alluring topography that attracts people to them. Film merges into the public spaces of civic life as it engenders court cases promoting deep political dialogue that harkens back to the founding of the nation, long before the moving, refracted-light image was a twinkle in the eye of the Lumı`ere brothers or Thomas Edison.

NOTES 1. The Rocky films have been so ingrained into the consciousness of millions of people around the world that the massive art museum, opened in 1877, is almost overshadowed in popularity by these footprints, based on the 1976 film. Virtualtourist.com has a page devoted to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with several dozen reviews of the museum and accompanying images. About one-fourth of all the reviews of the ‘‘museum’’ are actually about the Rocky footprints. One entry even blatantly suggests, ‘‘A group of us visited this museum, from ÔRockyÕ fame, on a whim . . .’’ as if no one ever went to museums except for their famed background appearance in movies. See www.virtualtourist.com/travel/North_ America/United_States_of_America/Pennsylvania/Philadelphia-860659/Things_ To_Do-Philadelphia-Philadelphia_Museum_of_Art-R-1.html, accessed June 5, 2005. Also, Tourquest.com offers student travel to popular U.S. destinations, including Philadelphia. From their home page one reads that you can go to Philadelphia to ‘‘see the historic part of Colonial USA, in its earliest stages!’’ The first bullet point listed under that ‘‘colonial’’ city is the fact that you can ‘‘Stand in ÔRocky’sÕ footprints atop the steps of the Art Museum,’’ although four points down is the vague, ‘‘Learn why Philadelphia is considered one of the major building blocks of the U.S.’’ See www.tourquest.com/, accessed June 5, 2005. 2. I have offered a brief overview in the entry ‘‘Film and Religion’’ in the Encyclopedia of Religion, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004). Significant early works in the field include Ivan Butler, Religion in the Cinema (New York:

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A.S. Barnes, 1969); Neil Hurley, Theology through Film (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Ernest Ferlita and John May, Film Odyssey (New York: Paulist, 1976); Ronald Holloway, Beyond the Image (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1977); and Thomas Martin, Images and the Imageless: A Study in Religious Consciousness and Film (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981). John R. May, through a series of edited and authored works, helped establish the interdiscipline within religious studies. See John R. May and Michael Bird, eds., Religion in Film (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); John R. May, ed., Image and Likeness: Religious Visions in American Film Classics (New York: Paulist, 1992); and John R. May, ed., New Image of Religious Film (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1997). 3. M. Darrol Bryant, ‘‘Cinema, Religion, and Popular Culture,’’ in May and Bird, eds., 106. Although this quote is from 1982, it is approvingly cited again in John Lyden, Film as Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 12. Lyden has other problems with Bryant’s earlier approach, but approves of the emphasis on popular culture. 4. Conrad E. Oswalt, Jr., ‘‘Conclusion: Religion, Film, and Cultural Analysis,’’ in Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, ed. Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), 19–58. Similar approaches are seen throughout the book Martin and Ostwalt edited. See also Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz, eds., Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies and Meaning (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998); Margaret Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston: Beacon, 1996); and the special issue of Semeia 74. 5. The quote comes from Edward Jay Epstein, ‘‘Gross Misunderstanding: Forget about the box office,’’ www.slate.com/id/2118819/. In addition, see Epstein, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2005). See also Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing, Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession (New York: Miramax Books, 2004). 6. David Mamet, ‘‘Bambi v. Godzilla: Why Art Loses in Hollywood,’’ Harpers (June 2005): 37. 7. Among others, see S. Brent Plate, ‘‘Religion/Literature/Film: Toward a Religious Visuality of Film,’’ Literature and Theology 12, 2 (1998): 16–38; Greg Watkins, ‘‘Seeing and Being Seen: Distinctively Filmic and Religious Elements in Film,’’ Journal of Religion and Film 3, 2 (1999): www.unomaha.edu/jrf/ watkins.htm. 8. Steve Nolan, ‘‘The Books of the Films: Trends in Religious Film-Analysis,’’ Literature and Theology 12, 1 (March 1998): 11. Nolan reiterates the point in ‘‘Towards a New Religious Film Criticism,’’ in Mediating Religion, ed. Jolyon Mitchell and Sophia Marriage (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), 169–78. 9. Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 149. 10. Although scholars are increasingly paying attention to issues of representation, identity, and religion, very few have looked at the role of film in this regard. On African American images in film, Judith Weisenfeld’s work has been groundbreaking; see her ‘‘Projecting Blackness: African-American Religion in the Hollywood Imagination,’’ in Race, Nation, and Religion in America, ed. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and ‘‘ÔMy Story Begins Before I Was BornÕ: Myth, History, and Power in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,’’ in Representing Religion in World Cinema:

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Mythmaking, Filmmaking, Culture Making, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave, 2003). On issues of sexuality in film see Erin Reunions, How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Although not specifically about anything that might be called ‘‘Latino/ Hispanic religion,’’ a good overview of Hispanics in film is Frank Javier Garcia Berumen, The Chicano/Hispanic Image in American Film (New York: Vantage, 1995). 11. See Ostwalt, Secular Steeples, esp. chap. 6, and Lyden, chap. 1. Neither Ostwalt nor Lyden does anything with their own suggestions and wind up back in what amounts to narrative analyses of some popular films. 12. Studies of audience response typically come from those trained in media/ communication studies rather than in religious studies. Useful studies include Paul Nathanson, Over the Rainbow (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), and two articles in S. Brent Plate, ed., Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): Neal King, ‘‘Truth at Last,’’ and Robert Woods, Michael C. Jindra, and Jason D. Baker, ‘‘The Audience Responds to The Passion of the Christ.’’ Relatedly, film and religion are brought together usefully by a third term such as cultural studies, media studies, or visual culture. From a media studies perspective, see Eric Rothenbuhler, Ritual Communication (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998). Working successfully between religious studies and media studies are the essays collected in two volumes: Stewart Hoover and Lynn Shofield Clark, eds. Practicing Religion in the Age of Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and Mitchell and Marriage, eds. David Morgan, although not dealing with moving images, nonetheless develops useful methods for seeing the relations between religion and visual culture, particularly in his Visual Piety (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 13. Perhaps the most recent infamous example here is that of the twenty-oneyear-old Texan, Dan Leach, who, after seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, confessed to police that he had killed his nineteen-year-old pregnant girlfriend, Ashley Nicole Wilson. Apparently the movie made him feel remorseful enough to confess to the crime. Police investigators had initially believed that Wilson had hanged herself and an autopsy confirmed the scenario. The story was picked up in the news in many places, including the Houston Chronicle on March 26, 2004: www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/2468569, accessed March 21, 2005. 14. For more, see Margaret R. Miles and S. Brent Plate, ‘‘Hospitable Vision: Some Notes on the Ethics of Seeing Film,’’ Cross Currents 54, 1 (Spring 2004): 22–31. 15. Margaret R. Miles, Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 18. 16. See ibid., 189. I am in overall agreement with Miles’s assessments, but do not feel she has given enough credence to the power of film for its very real bodily interaction. 17. The best collection on the films from a religious studies standpoint is Matthew Kapell and William G. Doty, eds., Jacking in to the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2004). 18. Thanks to my student Katherine Rodriguez, who discussed her brother’s wedding. Also, some of the research in this section was aided by my student assistant, Megan Ammann, and I wish to thank her for her help. 19. www.take2weddings.com. 20. www.advol.com/wedshops/ceremony.htm, accessed February 3, 2005. 21. www.lovetripper.com/channels/romantic-movie-quotes.html, accessed February 3, 2005.

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22. www.partypop.com/themes/NARM0004.html, accessed May 25, 2005. This account is most definitely a fabricated story, made up to appeal to young people shopping for b’nai mitzvah themes. Nonetheless, the countless Web sites displaying ways to do various film themes is very real. 23. ‘‘Girl Gets Titanic Bat Mitzvah,’’ Associated Press, Thursday, October 28, 1998; 1:43 A.M. EST, online at www.vho.org/NewsGB/SRN29-30_98.html#3, accessed June 7, 2005. 24. What is interesting in the liberal-conservative divide, as an independent study with my student Tiffany Austin revealed in 2005, is that there is a correspondence between the length of film clips shown (and related biblical passages referred to) and the theo-political divide. In a survey of curriculum resources for various Christian groups, it is clear that the more conservative the church and their corresponding curricula, the shorter the film clips and biblical passages. Conservative churches place more emphasis on shorter biblical passages (usually one or two verses) and shorter film clips (usually one to two minutes), while the mainline churches offer advice for lengthier quotes and clips (often up to ten minutes). However, the theologically conservative churches unabashedly offer the film clips in the main Sunday services, while the more liberal churches relegate such cultural interactivity to the ‘‘adult education’’ courses. Compare conservative publications such as Bryan Belknap, Group’s Blockbuster Movie Illustrations (Loveland, CO: Group, 2001), and the slightly less right-leaning Videos That Teach by Doug Fields and Eddie James (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999) with Abingdon Press’s periodical Reel to Real: Making the Most of the Movies with Youth that began publication in 1997. 25. In the tradition of the wedding photographer, many companies have emerged to ‘‘memorialize’’ (i.e., ‘‘take images of’’) events such as baptisms, bar mitzvahs, and even funerals. A company specializing in ‘‘memorial videos’’ offers the ability to ‘‘Honor a loved one with a beautiful tribute video. This video can also help promote healing for those that are suffering from loss. Instead of focusing on the death, you and your family will be able to focus on the life of those touched by your loved one.’’ See www.essenceoflifevideo.com/memorial/index/ html, accessed June 6, 2005. Many other companies offer similar services. 26. From the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, produced by the Union of International Associations in Brussels, available online at www.uia.org/uiapubs/pubency.htm. Quoted in Ronald Grimes, Deeply into the Bone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 91. 27. Grimes, 100. 28. www.mitzvahchic.com/index/php, accessed May 25, 2005. See also Mark Oppenheimer, Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). 29. Lynn Schofield Clark, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 30. For a brief news story, see www.ananova.com/news/story/ sm_1086432.html, accessed June 2, 2005. The Web site of the Romanian fan club is: www.jedi.ro/index.htm (in Romanian). 31. See Stewart Taggart, ‘‘Bad Movie Hurts Jedi Down Under,’’ Wired News (August 31, 2001), www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54851,00.html, accessed June 6, 2005. 32. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 63; emphasis added. 33. Liz Locke relates Victor Turner’s ideas of communitas to the cult following of Rocky Horror in ‘‘ÔDon’t Dream It, Be ItÕ: The Rocky Horror Picture Show as

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Cultural Performance,’’ New Directions in Folklore 3 (March 1999), online at www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/rhps1.html. Locke concludes: ‘‘What Turner calls Ônormative communitasÕ doesn’t only occur at the end of RHPS. . . . It also happens in RHPS communities. The cast members see themselves as more devoted than regular audience members. Their community is held together by fellow thespian aspiration as well as by love of the film’’ (www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/ rhps3.html, accessed June 6, 2005). See also the online site: www.rockyhorror.com for further information and statistics. 34. Patrick T. Kinkade and Michael A. Katovich, ‘‘Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading Rocky Horror,’’ Sociological Quarterly 33, 2 (1992): 192. 35. Ibid., 194. Other cult films include such diverse offerings as Wizard of Oz, Eraserhead, Harold and Maude, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 36. An account of the earliest audience participation rituals at Rocky Horror is given online at www.rockyhorror.com/partbegn.html, accessed June 5, 2005. 37. Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Religion as a Cultural System,’’ in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125. 38. I have attempted to articulate this ‘‘other-worldliness’’ further in ‘‘The Recreation of the World: Filming Faith,’’ Dialog: A Journal of Theology 42, 2 (2003): 155–60. 39. Thanks to my colleague Ronald Flowers for insight into the case. See Ronald Flowers, ‘‘Breaktime,’’ Liberty 95, 4 (July/August 2000): 3–7; and Rob Boston, ‘‘Nine Justices, Ten Commandments, Two Important Cases,’’ Church and State 58, 4 (April 2005): 4–7. 40. See the FOE Web site, which includes a short article by DeMille on ‘‘Why We Need the Ten Commandments’’: www.foe.com.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Clark, Lynn Schofield. From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hoover, Stewart M., and Lynn Schofield Clark, eds. Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Martin, Joel W., and Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr., eds. Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995. May, John R., ed. Image and Likeness: Religious Visions in American Film Classics. New York: Paulist, 1992. Miles, Margaret. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Mitchell, Jolyon P., and Sophia Marriage, eds. Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion, and Culture. London: T & T Clark, 2003. Nathanson, Paul. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Plate, S. Brent, and David Jasper, eds. Imag(in)Ing Otherness: Filmic Visions of Living Together. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Scott, Bernard Brandon. Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994.

CHAPTER 7

The Internet and American Religious Life Douglas E. Cowan

I

f the Internet as we know it now has a birthday, an ur-moment in its history, it is arguably October 13, 1994, when Netscape offered its Mosaic browser free to anyone who wanted it. Within hours that day, thousands of people around the world logged on to the Netscape site, downloaded Mosaic, and began to experience the nascent World Wide Web in a whole new way. Gone was the need to remember numberless and often obscure command codes; no more would the interaction between human and computer be dominated by text alone. Instead, Mosaic offered Internet visitors a relatively simple, user-friendly, graphical interface, and what had to that point been the domain of those willing to master the arcana of command-line processing was suddenly open to anyone with a PC, a modem, and a telephone line. Now, little more than a decade later, hundreds of millions of people around the world can scarcely imagine what a day without the Internet would look like. In countries of the world where the Internet has achieved the highest level of social penetration, having an email address is almost as common as having a telephone number. More and more mundane tasks are carried out electronically, and the increasing availability of broadband connections means that Internet consumers no longer have to ‘‘log on’’ to the Net—they are ‘‘always on,’’ they are always connected. They are, in a word, ‘‘wired.’’ In a very short time, indeed faster than any recent major technological advance, the Internet has gone from a novelty reserved for the electronically inclined to a part of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people, as common as the telephone or television. Not surprisingly, religion is an integral and unavoidable aspect of the online world, especially in its most recognizable form, the World Wide Web.1 From simple congregational home pages to elaborate online

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information services, few religious traditions have no Web presence at all. Although, as we will see, most users rely on the Internet for little more than electronic communication, while a lesser number actively search the Web for religious information, for some the ability to go online does appear to have profoundly affected their faith practice. This raises a number of questions not only about what kind of religion one finds on the Web, but, more importantly, also about how that religion is affecting the faith lives of believers, and, indeed, what kind of believers the Internet is creating. In order to understand how the Internet is affecting religious belief and practice, it is necessary first to understand something about the patterns of more general Internet use. Industry advertising and enthusiast rhetoric would have us believe that the world is now one massive electronic village, globally connected, wired up, and instantly available to one another. Just as it was for the train, the telegraph, the telephone, and television, the utopian dream for the Internet is that it will break down the walls of misunderstanding that keep humanity separate and mistrustful. Through the Internet, our enhanced ability to communicate with one another will result in greater global concern and compassion. Internet critics, on the other hand, maintain that it is like any other commercial medium, filled with brightly colored junk food for the mind and the soul. Still others regard it as the technological platform for any number of dire scenarios, from the implementation of a panoptic surveillance culture that limits even such freedoms as we do claim to enjoy, to the unavoidable, electronic chariot of the Antichrist.2 Utopic and dystopic visions aside, who actually uses the World Wide Web, and what do they use it for? There are, of course, those for whom the publicly available Internet is now an integral part of their daily business practice and who would be unable to conduct their business apart from it. But what about those for whom it is not a business tool, for whom the Internet is, perhaps, important but not essential to daily life? What do they do online? Do religious adherents differ in their Internet usage from those who access it for nonreligious purposes? How do believers use the Internet to practice their religious faith? And, since some observers have suggested that the Internet is one of the most important developments for religious belief and practice to emerge out of the twentieth century, what implications does computer-mediated communication have for religion in the offline world? Consider as an introduction, then, these three brief examples of one way in which the World Wide Web has facilitated religious activity online—three blessings from cyberspace, as it were.

THREE BLESSINGS FROM CYBERSPACE ‘‘I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have gotten that job without Digibless,’’ writes one user, ‘‘but I definitely feel that blessing my CV gave me a little extra helping hand. Thank you so much, Digibless!’’ Another site visitor testifies to ‘‘the great peace of mind knowing that the power of Jesus

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is working for your electronic files,’’ while a third wonders why ‘‘nobody else has started to provide this service.’’3 What service, you ask? Cyberblessing, a little ‘‘holy water for your files,’’ as the DigiBless Web site (www.digibless.com) puts it. Claiming to specialize in cyber-benediction for electronic documents and other items, DigiBless sprinkles virtual holy water on everything from individual .jpeg photos to complete Web sites, from PowerPoint presentations to, as we see here, curricula vitae. ‘‘Our server and algorithms have been specially consecrated,’’ states DigiBless, ‘‘enabling them to bless any data that passes through their blessing algorithms. Increasingly the electronic world is becoming more and more polluted with sin, and evil, and this is a simple easy to use service which brings a little divinity to your online documents.’’4 According to its very brief online history, DigiBless ‘‘was founded by a group of committed Christians in August 2003, who are dedicated to bringing the Word of God to the internet community.’’5 Customers simply visit the site and choose from a range of electronic blessings. They then upload whatever electronic file, Internet URL, or email message they want blessed, the benediction allegedly occurs in real time as it passes through the ‘‘DigiBless Holy Server,’’ and the file is returned to the sender (or sent to the designated recipient in the case of email).6 Once blessed, the DigiBless team recommends that users overwrite the original file with the blessed document to avoid confusion (and, presumably, dilution of the blessing effect). Under the terms of service, users are expected to ‘‘accept that the system has been made sacred,’’ and ‘‘in good faith acknowledge the divine power vested in the DigiBless spiritual team,’’7— none of whom is identified anywhere on the site.8 They caution users, however, that even in cyberspace nothing is certain. Blessing one’s CV, .jpeg, or Web site is no guarantee of successful employment, personal healing, or computer security: ‘‘DigiBless accepts no responsibility for the corruption in part or whole of any documents that are blessed using the Holy DigiBless server.’’9 All this for a suggested donation of $10.00 that can be conveniently made through PayPal.10 Does DigiBless offer an authentic religious service or is it little more than an online fraud, the latest attempt to play on the gullibility of the religiously devout? As I shall suggest below, it depends on your perspective. On the modern Pagan Internet, that portion of the Web inhabited by Wiccans, Witches, Druids, and Asatruar, online ritual is relatively rare. It takes place, but not nearly as frequently as one might suppose, especially given the importance of ritual to contemporary Wiccans and Witches. For some who do take part, however, it does appear to offer a significant blessing. Though I have written quite extensively elsewhere about this phenomenon,11 as a second example of computer-mediated blessing and religious participation, I should like to revisit an online celebration of Ostara, the vernal equinox, that occurred in 1998 by way of a chat room on The Cauldron, a Pagan Web portal that supports among other things a variety of discussion forums, an online newsletter, and an eCauldron electronic mail service (www.ecauldron.com). Eight people participated, and once the more formal part of the ritual was concluded, the High Priestess,

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Elspeth, asked them, ‘‘Did anyone bring food they want blessed?’’12 Though no one had, a few asked for a blessing of other things—dolls, candles, and a new set of crystals. Soon, the following text scrolled up several computer screens, each separated perhaps by thousands of miles and not a few time zones. .Elspeth> .Elspeth> .Elspeth> .Elspeth> .Elspeth> .Elspeth>

By those who watch . . . those who guide . . . those who guard By all the deity known and unknown . . . Send your blessings to these items Make them tools of wisdom for us That they may aid us on the Path You have sent us on ::sketching a symbol of blessing and sending forth::13

Though all those involved in the ritual saw the words appear, in many ways Elspeth herself remained (and remains) a mystery. That is, reading through the ritual log, the online record of the event, one has no idea who she is or where she was physically during the ritual, where her computer was located in her home, what she was wearing, what she looked like, or even how old she is. And perhaps none of her co-ritualists knew either. Likewise, one has no idea if she actually spoke the blessing words aloud as she typed, or whether she physically traced the ‘‘symbol of blessing’’ or simply typed in the action as though she had. These things remain obscure. What is significant, however, is the reaction of those who were in the ritual chat room with her. For those whose feedback is recorded in the ritual log, the experience appears to have been real and, some might even suggest, profound. ‘‘I felt that,’’ responded one participant almost immediately, while another wrote that ‘‘it hit . . . [I] felt it in the back of my skull.’’ ‘‘I felt a warmth in my arms,’’ added a third, the woman who wanted her new crystals blessed.14 Once again, is this a real experience or simply the product of religious imaginations who want it to be real so much that they co-create the illusion of reality? Finally, in Irving, Texas, a western suburb of Dallas, the Ekta Mandir serves the spiritual needs of the large Hindu community in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area. In addition to all the regular activities of a functioning temple, community meeting place, and cultural center, Ekta Mandir’s Web site (www.dfwhindutemple.org) offers two computermediated forms of puja, the principal ritual practice of Hindu devotion. Visiting the site, a devotee can use an online form to order (and pay for) a puja to be performed by a priest either at the temple or in her home, or, while online, she can perform a Flashmedia puja herself, offering it to any one of a dozen deities, including Ganesh, Krishna, Lakshmi, and Durga.15 There is no fee for this service, and for each online puja the devotee is presented with a similar, relatively simple altar scene: Classic deity figures are pictured under a golden arch with a bell suspended over them and various ritual articles laid out in front. The transliterated words to a puja chant are accompanied by a brief description of the deity or deities. For visitors who are uncertain how to proceed, a button marked ‘‘Guide Me’’ sits on the right of the onscreen altar shelf.

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Clicking on each of the items in turn as she chants, the devotee performs her online puja. First, she clicks the bell and a sound file plays a single tone, one not unlike many of the sounds computer users can attach to different operations of their personal computers. Then, she lights the online agarbatti; as she clicks on the icon, wisps of smoke begin to rise from .gif incense sticks. Next, she clicks a small gold bowl meant to indicate the red turmeric powder with which devotees mark tilak, the opening of the third eye on their foreheads; though nothing happens onscreen at this point, this remains an important part in the performance of any puja. By clicking and dragging the online aarti lamp, the devotee offers light to the deity. Finally, clicking on the bowl of flowers that sits at the left of the onscreen altar causes a cascade of virtual blossoms to fall about the deity figure.16 These few brief examples raise several important questions about the online practice of religion. First, obviously, how serious are these people, and how seriously are we meant to take these activities as meaningful expressions of religious belief and practice? That is, can clicking-anddragging a .gif icon of an aarti lamp in any way approximate the devotional quality of an offline puja? Can an earth-centered religion such as Wicca, one in which embodied, physical interaction between participants within their ritual space is of paramount importance, ever truly replicate online the sensations and emotions of a ritual conducted in a consecrated circle offline? Does anyone really believe that their computer files are protected by Jesus simply because they have been routed through the DigiBless Holy Server? Certainly, it is easy to dismiss activities like these, to reject them as harmless illusions at best, or dangerous delusions at worst. But we do so at the risk of misunderstanding what those who participate actually experience. Put differently, whether the creators of DigiBless mean their site to be taken seriously or not, it is as important to understand how its users conceptualize their participation in Webbased religious activities as it is to map the ways in which they use or participate in it.17 Whether other members of the Ekta Mandir consider the option for an online puja devotionally realistic or not, what does it mean for those who do take advantage of it? And even if the majority of modern Pagans would deny the efficacy of a blessing offered online, does that automatically mean that for those who believe it did not occur? Second, assuming that online religious activities such as these are profoundly meaningful for at least some Internet users, how widespread are they? Where do they fit in the broader landscape of Internet activity in general and religion on the Internet more specifically? Do they signal a significant change in the way people perform their religion when online, or are they simply anomalies, interactive kitsch for the theologically unsophisticated? Or do they fall somewhere in between? Third, as an ‘‘always-on’’ interactive medium, even more so with the recent growth of broadband and wireless services, how do we usefully differentiate between the consumption of Internet content and participation in it? That is, what do we really mean when we say that people are ‘‘using the Internet’’ for religious purposes? While a number of observers, for example, maintain that the notion of an ‘‘online community,’’ especially

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one that is organized around something as profoundly personal as religious belief and practice, is an oxymoron, others have argued that something communal is emerging in cyberspace, and if we don’t call it a ‘‘community,’’ then what is it? Can sending an electronic greeting card on a religious holiday like Christmas really be considered a ‘‘religious’’ use of the Internet? Would we be willing to make the same claims for the hundreds of billions of people worldwide who send Christmas cards through the post? Finally, many commentators have suggested that in the coming decades Web-based religious practice will become increasingly common and that as global Internet penetration increases and more and more believers opt for computer-mediated religion of some kind, online religious devotion will significantly challenge the dominance of offline participation. Are these reasonable predictions? Is there any evidence to support the notion that online benediction, puja, or sabbat rituals will come to supplant their reallife counterparts? Though not exactly in the order I have asked them here, these are some of the questions to which we now turn.

LIFE ON THE INTERNET: WHO’S CONNECTED AND WHAT ARE THEY DOING? Contrary to industry and enthusiast hyperbole, the world is not nearly so ‘‘wired,’’ so ‘‘globally connected,’’ as we are often led to believe. Indeed, the notion of the ‘‘World Wide Web’’ is itself something of an overstatement. According to the Internet World Stats, a research site that factors current Internet usage, usage growth over time, and social penetration of the Internet against world population, less than 15 percent of the world’s population are defined as ‘‘Internet users,’’ a proportion that has admittedly grown by more than one-and-a-half times since 2000,18 but which still hardly merits the sobriquet ‘‘global.’’ Although there is a variety of ways in which Internet use is defined and measured, the Internet World Stats service ‘‘adopts as its benchmark a broad definition and defines an Internet user as anyone currently in capacity to use the Internet,’’ something for which there are only two criteria: ‘‘(1) The person must have available access to an Internet connection point, and (2) the person must have the basic knowledge required to use this technology.’’19 These data become more significant when we consider the ‘‘digital divide’’ by which vast numbers of people around the world are separated.20 Although Asia contains more than 55 percent of the world’s population, for example, less than 10 percent of the people there are considered Internet users according to these criteria.21 While Internet penetration in Africa is growing more rapidly than anywhere else, still less than 2 percent of the population has both access to the Web and the technological ability to take advantage of that access.22 In both Asia and Africa, nearly half the countries have an Internet penetration of less than 1 percent. Not surprisingly, on the other hand, North America has the deepest Internet penetration, with nearly 70 percent of the population defined as Internet users. Most of these, especially those who access the Web through broadband

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connections, are in urban centers. As Manuel Castells reminds us, there is also a significant ‘‘ethnic digital divide . . . indicative of the fact that the Information Age is not blind to color.’’23 According to the most recent data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which tracks Internet usage and trends in the United States, ‘‘63% of the adults in the country, or about 128 million people age 18 or older’’ have access to the Internet. Although this may seem like a lot at first glance, only 70 million of those, or slightly more than half (55%), go online on any given day.24 Nearly 60 million people who have access seem to manage to get through their day without surfing the Web. But what do they do when those who can go online do so? Once again, commercial hyperbole would have us believe that the Internet is the technological doorway, quite literally, to another world. Through it we can ‘‘navigate’’ anywhere we want, ‘‘explore’’ places we might never get to see apart from our computer screen, ‘‘virtually tour’’ the wonders of the world from the safety and comfort of our workstation. Or, simply by pointing and clicking, we can become instant experts on almost any topic, electronically filling the gaps in our knowledge with Web-based brain spackle.25 Wired in to the Net, we become qualitatively different people, enjoying a qualitatively different kind of life experience. Like so many things in life, however, the reality of the situation is decidedly different from the hyperbole. Indeed, despite advertising hype, the basic categories of online activity have remained fairly constant since groups such as the Pew Internet and American Life Project began tracking them several years ago. On any given day, the most popular use of the Web by Americans is to send and receive email (58 million, or 83 percent of those with access). Second, 35 million or so (50 percent of those with access) use the Net to read news of one kind or another. What should be noted here is that ‘‘news’’ is defined no more carefully than that; while some users may be reading the New York Times online, others in this category are checking TV Guide to see who has been voted off the island or out of the house in the seemingly endless round of ‘‘reality’’ programming. Third, 25 million (36 percent) go online to check the weather. Sending email, reading the news, and checking the weather are all fairly mundane activities that use online information services to inform and enhance offline activity. Given this, ‘‘life online’’ seems anything but.

RELIGION ON THE INTERNET: A CLOSER LOOK When we narrow the view to look at Internet activities that are related in some way to religion—what, in Faith Online, Hoover, Clark, and Rainie call ‘‘religious and spiritual uses of the Internet’’26—we find very similar data. We learn that ‘‘the most common online activities among those in this study were news reading, the sending, forwarding and receiving of email with religious or spiritual content, and the sending of greeting cards for religious holidays.’’27 In this case, however, it is important to point out that, rather than looking at online religious activity ‘‘on any given day,’’ Hoover, Clark, and Rainie investigated whether Internet users had

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ever used the Web for particular religious or spiritual purposes. They found that 38 percent of the user population had at some time ‘‘sent, received, or forwarded email with spiritual content,’’28 though they don’t really define what ‘‘spiritual content’’ means and their survey did not differentiate between those who received email ‘‘with spiritual content’’ because they wanted to or because they were spammed by it. Thirty-two percent, on the other hand, had sent an online greeting card related to a religious holiday, though, as I noted above, this tells us little about the religiosity of either the sender or the recipient. Typologically, these two activities could easily be collapsed into one category, since there is very likely a high correlation between email users and greeting card senders. Because online greeting cards are a function of email in the same way offline greeting cards are a function of the postal service—you cannot send an online greeting card except to an email address—it is difficult to imagine a significant portion of ‘‘greeting card senders and receivers’’ who don’t use email on a regular, even daily basis. Next, they noted that 32 percent had ‘‘read online news accounts about religious events/affairs,’’ and 21 percent had researched ‘‘how to celebrate holidays or other significant religious events.’’29 Only 17 percent, on the other hand, about one in six Internet users, had ‘‘searched for places in their communities where they could attend religious services’’30—this despite the fact that one of the most common (and durable) forms of ‘‘religion on the Internet’’ is the congregational Web site. The difference here between ‘‘ever used’’ and ‘‘use on any given day’’ is crucial, since we can infer from these data that daily use of the Internet for religious or spiritual purposes is considerably lower than for those who have ever used the Internet—perhaps only once or once in awhile—for those purposes. According to the Pew Internet and American Life data, this is precisely what we find. While 64 percent of Internet users may have gone online for religious or spiritual purposes at one time or another,31 less than 5 percent do so on any given day.32 Far down the list in terms of Internet religiosity is activity that is actually and directly related to one’s religious or spiritual practice. Only 7 percent, for example, indicate that they have ever ‘‘made or responded to a prayer request online.’’33 The Hoover, Clark, and Rainie survey does not ask whether Internet users have participated in online devotions or ritual practices, whether they have requested something like a puja electronically or performed one online on a site like www.dfwhindutemple.org, whether devout Catholics have participated in online adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at a site like www.savior.org, or whether believers have ever used the World Wide Web to make a ‘‘virtual pilgrimage.’’34 Though this is a matter for further investigation, based on research I carried out into modern Pagans on the Internet,35 I would suggest that the number of Internet users who participate in online devotional, ritual, or liturgical practices is a tiny fraction of that 5 percent who are pursuing religion on the Internet on a daily basis. So, given all this, what do we tend to find when we look for religion on the Internet? One of the most basic and important distinctions in

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terms of computer-mediated religion, and one that has been noted for some years now, is between religion online and online religion, that is, respectively, between the provision of and the search for information about particular religious groups, beliefs, rituals, and practices, and the online participation in or performance of those rituals and practices.36 There is a fundamental difference, for example, between searching online to find the location of a prayer group in one’s neighborhood and taking part in an online prayer group that is conducted in a chat room and that may include participants from around the world. Similarly, there is a vast difference between looking up the meaning of puja in an online encyclopedia and performing the ritual worship of one’s patron deity over the World Wide Web. Rather than as discrete categories, however, it is more useful to conceptualize religion online and online religion as theoretical endpoints and to locate particular Web sites, discussion forums, chat rooms, such limited virtual reality spaces as there are, and the use Internet visitors make of these somewhere along the continuum that stretches across the Web between them. Many congregational Web sites have information about prayer groups, but also offer Internet visitors the opportunity either to email prayer requests or to participate in online prayer forums. As I noted above, the Web site for a Hindu temple in Dallas, Texas, not only provides members with information about the various puja available, but also offers them the opportunity to request one electronically, as well as to perform one online. That said, while much of what constitutes religion on the Internet falls somewhere along the continuum between religion online and online religion, the data indicate that the lion’s share clusters toward the provision of, search for, and sharing of information about religion, whether one’s own or another. At the religion online end of the continuum, then, we find a number of information services, which include (but are not limited to): 1. Information supplied by the religious group itself, and intended either for members, querents, or both. This includes Web sites that are in some way globally official: e.g., the Holy See (www.vatican.va) or the Church of Scientology (www.scientology.org); globally informative, but unofficial for lack of a controlling magisterium: e.g., The Witches’ Voice (www.witchvox.com); regionally official (e.g., the Missouri West Conference of the United Methodist Church [www.moumethodist.org]) or unofficial (e.g., the Heartland Spiritual Alliance [www. kchsa.org]); locally official (e.g., the Rime Buddhist Center [www. rime.org] or Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Kansas City [www. htccofkc.org]) or unofficial in all respects (e.g., the Summerlands [www.summerlands.com] or ‘‘Catholic and Enjoying It!’’ [markshea. blogspot.com]). 2. Information supplied by sources other than the religious group, and intended for general consumption by Internet visitors. This includes general information sites (e.g., Beliefnet [www.belief.net] or Adherents.com [www.adherents.com]), as well as sites that are limited to specific phenomena such as new religious movements (e.g., the

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Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance [www.religioustolerance. org]). 3. Information supplied by religious countermovements against other social or religious groups: for example, Apologetics Index (www. apologeticsindex.org); Concerned Methodists Homepage (www.cmpage. org); the Society of Saint Pius X (www.sspx.org); Hindu Unity (www.hinduuinty.org); and Christian Answers for the New Age (cana. userworld.com).37 4. Information supplied in the context of scholarship, education, data collection, or other secondary research and interpretation: for example, the American Academy of Religion (www.aarweb.org); the Religious Movements Homepage Project (www.religious movements.org); or the American Religion Data Archive (www.thearda.com).38 5. Commercial enterprises related to various religious traditions—most obviously online catalogues, but also the computer-mediated commodification of religious education and authorization: for example, the Universal Life Church (www.ulc.org); the Islamic Giftshop (www. islamicgiftshop.co.uk); Christian Book Distributors (www.cbd.com); the Esoteric Theological Seminary (www.northernway.org); or Shasta Abbey Buddhist Supplies (www.buddhistsupplies.com). What these different services have in common is that they are all related in some way to the exchange of information or of goods and services, by far the most common uses made of the World Wide Web. As I indicated above, however, a great many Web sites combine the provision of information with more interactive elements—email discussion forums, chat rooms, instant messaging services—all of which can draw participants along toward the practice of online religion. Clustered around this end of the spectrum we find the Internet used in a variety of ways as a dedicated electronic space for the practice of religious ritual, devotion, prayer and meditation, or divination—the ‘‘three blessings from cyberspace’’ I discussed above. That is, rather than a medium for the exchange of information about or the simple commodification of religious goods, as online religion the World Wide Web has become an interactive venue for lived religious experience. Christian prayer forums connect believers from around the world. Wiccan cybercovens offer teaching and degree initiation exclusively online. Web-based Hindu puja and Roman Catholic adoration of the Blessed Sacrament provide opportunities for the devout to worship apart from their offline ritual venues. Computer-mediated Tarot, I Ching, and astrological readings are the latest entries into the millennia-old technologies of divination. And all of these are examples of the ways in which some believers are using the World Wide Web to augment and reinforce their offline religious beliefs and practices. Although far fewer in number and, as I will suggest at the end of this chapter, with no real chance of ever supplanting their offline counterparts, it is closer to this online religion end of the Internet spectrum that we find some of the most interesting aspects of religious life in cyberspace.

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THINKING THE WEB INTO BEING: CONCEPTUALIZING COMPUTER-MEDIATED RELIGION Cyberspace is a mindspace. That is, it does not exist physically apart from the hardware and software used to create it. As I have noted elsewhere, it is ‘‘metatechnological in that it is not the material world of hardware and wiring, not the interrelated command-and-control processes of software and programming, and not even the communication that takes place between Internet users. Rather, it is that which is conceived and experienced in the interactive interstices between all three.’’39 Although this rather mundane observation should be obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with the Internet, it is often obscured by commercial and enthusiast hyperbole that rhapsodizes about the fullness, the totality, the completeness of the online experience. It is worth remembering, however, that the World Wide Web is little more than an information space, a landscape of the imagination triggered by the text and images we call up onscreen. At its most elementary level, it is ones-and-zeroes, countless trillions of binary switches that are either open or closed, on or off, and whose particular arrangement in onscreen space and time determines whether we are looking at an online puja or online pornography. Commercial and enthusiast embroidery notwithstanding, at this point in its technological evolution, surfing the Web remains an incomplete sensory experience, one that privileges the visual and marginalizes sense information, like smell and taste, that cannot at present be computer-mediated. This does not mean, of course, that it is only an information space, nor that being an information space is unimportant. The popularity of the Internet among members of the technologically developed countries in the world attests to that. This is especially so when it comes to religion on the Internet. Many sociologists of religion, though by no means all, have carried on their work informed by one of the principal rules of a sociology of knowledge articulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann a generation ago in their classic text, The Social Construction of Reality: ‘‘the sociology of knowledge must concern itself with whatever passes for ÔknowledgeÕ in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such Ôknowledge.Õ’’40 When confronted, for example, by a new religious movement whose beliefs and practices seem distinctly at odds with reality as it is experienced and constructed by the academic observer, the task of the sociologist of religion is not to point out where and how the beliefs of the group are wrong and its practices absurd, but to understand how members of the group come to give rational assent to those beliefs and participate meaningfully in those rituals even, and perhaps most especially, when the content of each is open to immediate and conclusive disconfirmation. Following this, there is no reason to assume a priori that the operators of the Ekta Mandir site are not entirely serious. Though there are no discussion forums on their site, like the chatter that followed The Cauldron’s Ostara ritual, other online discussions about the efficacy of

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computer-mediated devotional activities clearly establish its value for some participants. Although one could be forgiven, I suppose, for questioning the authenticity of DigiBless.com, there is no evidence on the site that they mean to be taken anything but seriously. In many ways, that isn’t really the point. The point is how seriously those who participate take it. Until proven otherwise, there are at least three reasons to accept the sincerity of Web site operators and patrons. First, epistemologically, what makes sense to one person religiously often makes very little sense to another, and religious believers have on occasion made drastic choices on the basis of beliefs that made no sense to those outside the group (e.g., Heaven’s Gate in 1997). Second, theologically, if the Divine (however conceptualized) does act in the lives of believers, it makes little sense to exclude the possibility of that activity simply because it takes place online or is mediated through the microcircuitry of a server farm and not in the pews of a cathedral or through the words and actions of a priest. Finally, sociologically, following the important methodological dictum of Emile Durkheim, whether the cause of a social phenomenon is questionable or not is an entirely separate issue from the social fact of that phenomenon among believers.41 Put in terms of the examples we have encountered so far in this chapter, in one sense, it does not matter whether we consider an online puja efficacious, whether we consider computer-mediated Wiccan ritual a viable religious practice, or whether we believe that a .jpeg of one’s ailing friend routed through the DigiBless Holy Server will have any effect on that person’s physical condition. What matters is whether those who participate believe it, why they believe it, and how they account for continued belief when confronted with ecclesial sanction, challenge from co-religionists, or a lack of improvement in the patient’s condition. Fortunately, we have two other extended examples to help us explore these questions more fully: Savior.org and the Monks of Adoration, both of which offer Roman Catholic visitors the chance to engage in forms of online religious devotion, and both of which offer us a glimpse into the online religion end of the Internet spectrum.

SAVIOR.ORG: ONLINE ADORATION OR INCIPIENT IDOLATRY? Using a Web camera placed in Philadelphia’s Chapel of Divine Love, which has been a ministry of perpetual adoration for the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters since 1916, Savior.org (www.savior.org) takes a digital photograph of the Blessed Sacrament in its monstrance, and uploads a .jpeg image to its Web site every minute, twenty-four hours a day. Calling their service ‘‘a new and powerful channel of grace,’’ Savior.org’s operators claim that: The goal of on-line adoration is not to replace or minimize the hours spent in PHYSICAL presence of the Blessed Sacrament, but rather to multiply them. Our mission is to bring the live electronic image of Our Lord in the

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Blessed Sacrament to those who can’t be physically present in Adoration. . . . As Our Faithful Shepherd, we trust in Jesus to utilize technology to create a true multiplication of His Living Presence.42

It is important to note here, however, as critics of the site are quick to point out, that this image is not ‘‘live,’’ even in the online sense. The Webcam does not offer streaming video in real time, but instead takes a photograph and uploads that to the Web site. Critics contend that this is no different than placing a picture of the Blessed Sacrament on one’s desk and using it in devotional adoration—not a bad practice, perhaps, but definitely not adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. In its June 1999 newsletter, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy issued a statement in response to questions from Roman Catholic faithful about the viability and efficacy of various electronically mediated sacraments. In terms of the sacraments, bearing in mind that adoration is a devotional practice and not a sacrament in and of itself, the bishops’ response was unequivocal: ‘‘[Electronic] communication via telephone, television, video conference or internet is not sufficient for the celebration of the sacraments. The celebration of the sacraments requires the physical and geographical presence of both the gathered faithful and the bishop, priest, deacon, or other presiding minister.’’43 Although I suspect that, given the choice, the bishops would rather Catholics watch a televised mass than, say, the Jerry Springer show, as channels of grace electronically mediated sacraments can in no way substitute for the physical gathering of the faithful. The operators of the cyberadoration site, however, claim that ‘‘the on-line access available through Savior.org provides new hope for [the aged, lonely, and suffering] stemming from the electronic access they can now have to the Living Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament.’’44 Paradoxically, though they recognize that ‘‘Jesus is not necessarily physically present with you when visiting the Blessed Sacrament on-line,’’ as devout Catholics believe him to be during adoration in a church or chapel, they do contend that users of their service have access ‘‘to the Living Presence of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament.’’ Not surprisingly, this has confused some visitors to the site. Though Savior.org urges visitors to ‘‘still consider following the traditional Catholic expressions of reverence for the Most Blessed Sacrament,’’45 for many the theologically crucial question remains: Is it adoration, or merely the simulacrum of adoration? Like DigiBless.com, Savior.org has an almost de rigeur page for testimonials to the power of its service. While there is no way to confirm the authenticity of these comments, although the vast difference in tone and prose style certainly suggests they are authentic, let us for the moment stipulate that they constitute real feedback from real visitors to the site. ‘‘You have no idea,’’ writes ‘‘a catholic living in Dubai,’’ ‘‘how extremely joyous and comforting is your ministry of bringing a live picture of the Blessed Sacrament over the internet to us here. . . . I have no doubt that it is Jesus Himself who has given you this concept and the grace to sustain it.’’46 ‘‘It is so wonderful to have access to the Divine Presence on the

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Internet,’’ adds Lyn, an invalid from Australia who can only rarely attend mass. ‘‘You are being Jesus’ link.’’47 Another visitor relates a mystical experience that occurred following her online devotions. ‘‘Tonight was the first time I prayed my rosary in front of Jesus online,’’ writes Cindy from Alabama. ‘‘Right after I finished saying the rosary, I saw a distinct face. I can still see his eyes, crown of thorns, nose and beard. I cannot explain it, but I guess he must be very pleased with your work.’’ She concludes her note: ‘‘I am not crazy.’’48 ‘‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’’ writes Arianne, who continues: At first I didn’t know what it would be like to see Him online, but it is really He, that is immediately perceptible. Thank you! What a strange and wonderful thing. I was myself a little shocked at first, because the computer carries a tone of inherent commercialism and falseness, as does television, and so we think of it as entirely within the realm of human social communication. But the Lord was really present. There was no question about that. If He can bear to be broadcast by this means—and He longs so to visit us in intimacy, so it probably is His idea in the first place—and if we can see His appearance in so mundane a context as the computer as a witness to the magnificence of His humility—then who are we to stand in judgement of Him?49

For these site visitors, regardless of any individual reservations they may have had about the practice itself or concerns about possible ecclesiastical sanction, the experience of online adoration appears to be both real and profoundly meaningful. If we think in terms of Clifford Geertz’s classic definition of religion,50 whether these participants are in the physical presence of the Blessed Sacrament or not, the .jpeg image provided by Savior. org appears sufficient to actualize the symbolic content of the practice that lies at the heart of devotional adoration. Not all Internet Catholics agree, however, and some have taken Savior. org’s Webmaster to task for, among other things, encouraging an incipient idolatry among devout Catholics. Objecting to the site on both theological and ecclesiastical grounds, Alan Phipps wrote to an online discussion forum that ‘‘online adoration is not at all the same as being physically present with Christ.’’51 Also, he pointed out, ‘‘there is no mention at the site of any Bishop’s approval.’’52 Later, he added that he thought the Savior.org site was ‘‘misleading,’’ that ‘‘Christ’s presence is not transmitted via electronic media.’’53 A few days later, Sam Damico, the Webmaster for Savior.org responded, comparing online adoration with using the telephone—not the same as being there, but infinitely better than no communication at all. Not surprisingly, he cited the many testimonials he has received about the Web site. Phipps was not persuaded. ‘‘Certainly,’’ he admitted, ‘‘Christ’s power is not limited to being in His physical presence, and He can work in any way He sees fit, but I am merely suggesting that an electronic image of the Blessed Sacrament, in whatever format, is not suitable for adoration in any way whatsoever.’’54 Rather than demonstrate the worth of a service like Savior.org, Phipps argued that testimonials on the site highlighted the theological confusion surrounding the issue.

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Damico was shocked, though he maintained that the root issue was likely ‘‘semantic’’ and that the Savior.org staff ‘‘would welcome input from any authoritative source on the wording on the site.’’55 He was more concerned, however, about the underlying implication of Phipps’s challenge: ‘‘My concern here is your subtle suggestion that online viewers might inadvertantly [sic] be participating in idolatry!!!’’56 To which Phipps responded: ‘‘You are right that I am deeply concerned that an indvertant [sic] form of idolatry may very well be taking place! So now you realize why this issue is significant to me.’’57 Responding as contending religionists so often do, Damico resorted to quoting scripture and reminded Phipps to ‘‘remember Luke 10:21’’58—Jesus’s words in prayer, ‘‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.’’

THE MONKS OF ADORATION: ONLINE VIEWING IS NOT ONLINE ADORATION Though the Monks of Adoration in Englewood, Florida, also maintain a digital camera in their sanctuary and regularly upload images to their Web site (http://monksofadoration.org), unlike Savior.org, they make no claim that the computer-mediated image of the Host is available for anything other than simply viewing. That is, it is not intended for the purpose of devotional adoration—a not insignificant difference among devout Roman Catholics.59 The monks encourage visitors ‘‘to use the Webcam for personal devotion,’’ writes Brother John Raymond, the Webmaster, and believe that visitors will be rewarded for their piety.60 However, they are equally clear that online viewing of the Blessed Sacrament is in no way meant to ‘‘replace visiting Jesus in church. It is for those times when you cannot visit Him in a church.’’61 Brother Craig Driscoll adds, ‘‘Seeing our tabernacle or the Holy Eucharist is not the same as praying before the tabernacle at church. There is a certain, and I don’t mean this in a new age way, power that emanates from the Holy Eucharist. . . . The Holy Eucharist unlike grace is very incarnational. You could almost say that the Holy Eucharist is very human.’’62 Whatever the monks believe should happen when people visit their Web site, what is significant for our purposes, especially in terms of analyses of Internet religiosity that proceed from the perspective of a sociology of knowledge, are the various ways in which those who do participate conceptualize their activity, regardless of what others say is happening (or not). The ‘‘Chapel Webcam Witness Stories’’63 catalogue the testimonials of site visitors, some of whom even have the Webcam set as their Internet home page. ‘‘I have been on your site many times in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep,’’ writes one visitor, ‘‘adoring Jesus via your chapel webcam, and praying the chanted rosary.’’ ‘‘If our computers are working right,’’ says another, ‘‘sometimes I can pull up your small chapel window, then ÔlightÕ a small candle at Gratefulness.org and have that tiny candle window overlapping your chapel window.’’ A young mother wrote that ‘‘the first time we visited my 6 year old son Austin and I sat and were mesmerized.

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He extended his arms toward my laptop screen to give Jesus a big hug. He definitely felt the power of Christ coming thru the computer screen.’’ For some, part of the thrill is catching a monk on camera as he participates in adoration. ‘‘In my quest to see a monk on your monk-cam,’’ writes one visitor, ‘‘I have set up a web ring of a few friends of mine to watch the monk-cam at most hours of the day. This is the exciting part. Sister Sarah saw a monk! I was not fortunate enough to lay eyes on him, but I know you guys are out there! Thank you for putting your web-cam up. We love it!’’ In this way and for these participants, at least, cyber‘‘adoration’’ of the Blessed Sacrament has become both perpetual and communal, an online experience that takes place both within their small Web community and between that community and the Monks of Adoration in Florida. Like Cindy, who claims to have seen the head of Christ after praying the rosary at Savior.org, some visitors attribute mystical experience, even miracles, to their computer-mediated practice of adoration. Writes one: I just had to write to tell you that as I joined you today for adoration at 4:00 CST that an image of an angel with head bowed and hands folded appeared on my screen after the exposition. The image appeared to the left of the tabernacle and behind the altar. It looked like an angel on its knees behind the altar adoring the Blessed Sacrament.

And another: I was praying by your site, and in front of Our Lord, when I asked him to left [sic] me receive the miracle of the sun seen at Medjugorje and Fatima. Well, I heard in my heart, ÔSeek and you shall findÕ and went to my window and saw the miracle. I was able to look at the sun for 10 minutes or more without any pain to my eyes. PRAISE THE LORD! Afterwards I went back to my computer a little in awe.

There are a number of threads to be explored in these testimonial anecdotes, all of which illustrate ways in which online participation impacts and supports offline religious devotion. First, the comment ‘‘when our computers are working right’’ goes to the heart of the issue of technological fragility and the relative ephemerality of computer-mediated communication. As robust as the network is becoming, as sophisticated as browsers, firewalls, antivirus and antispam software become, indeed as common a tool as the World Wide Web becomes in the ebb and flow of life in the technologically based world, every new layer of technology, every new link in the chain or strand in the Web, also represents a potential weak spot that could either fail or be exploited. In terms of the successful interaction of hardware and software, Internet activity depends on a tremendous number of technological components working together. Even though the prime directive of the Internet is that ‘‘Information Must Flow’’ and the system has evolved to allow for data packets that are blocked by one route to find an alternate quickly and easily, any one of a number of circumstances could bring the

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relationship between the user, the Internet, and the site the user wants to visit to a crashing halt. Second, however implicit, there is the conflict between the institutional mandate of what the faith is meant to look like and the lived religion of devout Roman Catholics around the world. What would the local bishopric have to say about the words of the young mother: ‘‘[My son] extended his arms toward my laptop screen to give Jesus a big hug. He definitely felt the power of Christ coming thru the computer screen’’? Would they consider this a misguided demonstration of faith, a dangerous misinterpretation that could, as Alan Phipps fears, lead both mother and child down the path of idolatry? Or, would they celebrate the faith of a devout parent, and the fact that her devotion is being passed on to her son in such a remarkable way? Third, though many (perhaps most) of those who have posted testimonials to the Monks of Adoration site clearly recognize that there is a difference between physical adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in a church and the online viewing of a Webcam image and that the latter in no way supplants the former either experientially or theologically, it is equally clear that, for some, online viewing is a profound spiritual experience in its own right. As it does with all miracle stories that occur outside the carefully circumscribed institutional boundaries of acceptable faith, though, this raises the intriguing and omnipresent question of meaning. What do these people believe that they have experienced? How has it stimulated and supported their faith? What are the secondary effects? Has their testimony of the experience resulted in a larger viewing audience, for example? How has it impacted the offline practice of their faith? Finally, in terms of those visitors who claim to have had visionary experiences, phenomena that skeptics might explain away as residual retinal stimulation caused by staring for lengthy periods at the computer screen, there are miracle stories associated with the online mediation of grace. Once again, we have to ask the questions: What do those who experience these sorts of things believe has happened to them? What do they think it means? Regardless of the institutional position on apparitions of this type (which, I think we could fairly accurately predict), how do experiencers communicate it to others, and how does it impact the rest of their lives? Rather than simply cataloguing ‘‘religion on the Internet,’’ if we are to come closer to understanding the effect of the Internet on religious belief and practice, these are some of the most important areas that will need to be explored in systematic fashion.

PREDICTING THE WEB: FROM RELIGION ON THE INTERNET TO INTERNET RELIGION? Many commentators have cited Christian market researcher George Barna’s contention that in the near future millions of erstwhile worshippers would leave their churches, temples, and synagogues to search for religious fulfillment online. In Give Me That Online Religion, sociologist Brenda Brasher opines that ‘‘online religion is the most portentous development

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for the future of religion to come out of the twentieth century.’’64 Though Brasher recognizes that this is a rather risky claim to make, she suggests that ‘‘using a computer for online religious activity could become the dominant form of religion and religious experience in the next century.’’65 Will it, though? Does the popular advent of the Internet in the technologized countries of the world mean that the pews in already declining mainline Protestant churches will empty further as parishioners seek their religious experience in cyberspace? Will the priests at Ekta Mandir find themselves at loose ends when temple members perform pujas online and request the personal services of their religious leaders less and less often? Hardly, and for a number of reasons. First, there is the digital divide discussed earlier. Far fewer people have Internet access than industry rhetoric would have us believe. Second, empirical research into what those with Internet access actually do when they are online paints a much more pedestrian picture. Recall that the three top uses for the Internet are to send and receive email, to read news online, and to check the weather. Indeed, a 2003 Pew report indicates that on any given day four times as many Internet users go online to check the weather as to look for religious or spiritual information.66 Third, by and large the Internet is a medium of information exchange and communication; the most popular uses of the World Wide Web demonstrate this clearly. As such, those aspects of human social life that are based in information exchange are the ones most likely to be impacted by it. As Spanish researcher Jordi Barrat i Esteve noted in response to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s survey on The Future of the Internet, however, ‘‘religion is above all a personal field and the internet is here a tool with less influence.’’67 Fourth, and related to Barrat i Esteve’s point, there is the limited technological capability of the Internet to replicate full sensory experience. Once again, commercial hyperbole notwithstanding, this is the difference between virtual reality and simply being online. Although the two are often used synonymously, they represent very different domains of experience. Virtual reality technology works by convincing users that they are wholly experiencing bodily sensation, when in fact those sensations are computer-generated. The online experience engages only two of the senses in any direct way—sight and hearing—and leaves all other aspects of sensation to the user’s imagination. The ‘‘virtual tour,’’ for example, is little more than a series of images over which site visitors have some interactive control. That control, however, is usually limited to what one looks at, on what part of an image one concentrates, and the speed with which one moves through the ‘‘tour.’’ Few, however, would confuse an online pictorial tour of the LDS temple in Salt Lake City with a Saturday afternoon visit to Temple Square. At least, one would hope not. Finally, this brings us to the issue of embodiment. Though there are certainly spiritual traditions whose apex is the final abandonment of the body, whether through meditative or pharmacological technology, we remain embodied beings. We can exist offline without ever going online, but we can never go online apart from our offline existence. As I noted in

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Cyberhenge, ‘‘ultimately, our bodies are not separate from our experiences and our imagination; instead, they contribute in essential ways to the quality of those experiences and they shape both the contours and the limits of those imaginings.’’68 As more and more religious organizations, merchants, adherents, and consumers recognize the cost benefits of moving information on the World Wide Web, as Web authoring tools (such as Weblogs) become even more common and more user-friendly, there is little doubt that the religion online end of the spectrum will continue to expand. Though this landscape has been fairly well mapped to this point, scholars will still need to track its development and evolution. In terms of how the computermediated communication is affecting lived religious experience, on the other hand, considerably more detailed research is needed into online religion. Even though this represents only a tiny fraction of online activity, religious or not, it is here that the most significant stories will be revealed about the interface between the oldest of human pursuits and the newest of human technologies.

NOTES 1. Because the World Wide Web has so quickly become an integral part of daily life in the technologized parts of the world, it is easy to forget that it is only one manifestation of the Internet. There are also dedicated commercial, governmental, scientific, and military networks that exist and operate distinct from the Internet. In this essay, however, I use ‘‘Internet,’’ ‘‘World Wide Web,’’ and their respective diminutives interchangeably. 2. On computers and the rise of the Antichrist, see Dave Hunt, Y2K: A Reasoned Response to Mass Hysteria (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1999). On various evangelical Christian responses to the Y2K nonevent, see Douglas E. Cowan, ‘‘Confronting the Failed Failure: Y2K and Evangelical Eschatology in Light of the Passed Millennium,’’ Nova Religio 7, 2 (2003): 71–85. 3. ‘‘Testimonials,’’ retrieved from www.digibless.com/testimonials.phb, July 27, 2005. 4. ‘‘How it works,’’ retrieved from www.digibless.com/how_works.phb, July 27, 2005. 5. ‘‘Contact DigiBless’’ retrieved from www.digibless.com/about_us.phb, July 27, 2005. 6. Messages reach recipients with the tag line: ‘‘This email has been blessed using DigiBless.’’ Recipients are invited to visit the DigiBless site ‘‘for all your spiritual needs.’’ 7. ‘‘Legals,’’ retrieved from www.digibless.com/legals/phb, July 27, 2005. 8. Unfortunately, but not insignificantly, numerous attempts to contact DigiBless staff by email went unanswered while I was researching and writing this essay. 9. ‘‘Legals,’’ retrieved July 27, 2005. 10. DigiBless is not the only example of divine benediction on the World Wide Web; Modern Pagans Sirona Knight and Patricia Telesco attribute computermediated powers and properties to a wide variety of deities from around the world. Annapurna, for example, the ‘‘Great Hindu Mother Goddess . . . can make your Web site profitable, within the cyber world’’; the Buddha ‘‘embodies the . . . ÔfreeÕ energy in calculators, toys, laptops, homes, and automobiles’’; and Morgana ‘‘is a

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Celtic Goddess of fertility and war who can help you reconfigure your [computer] system’’ (Sirona Knight and Patricia Telesco, The Cyber Spellbook: Magick in the Virtual World [Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2002], 51, 56, 70). 11. See Douglas E. Cowan, Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2005), 119–51. 12. Cauldron, ‘‘1998 Ostara Ritual Log,’’ retrieved from www.ecauldron.com/ riteostara98.phb, July 27, 2005. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. See, for example, the online puja page for Sri Durga Mata (Kali) at www. dfwhindutemple.org/durga_puja.htm, or for Lord Ganesh at www.dfwhindutemple. org/ganesh_puja.htm. 16. There are other, more elaborate online puja sites, many offering a variety of onscreen altar arrangements, a more colorful devotional palate, as it were. The interactive graphics at www.urday.com, for example, allow the visitor-devotee to place a flower garland around the deity as well as drop blossoms and leaves around the altar. By clicking on the appropriate icon, one can mark the onscreen deity figure with either sandalwood (yellow) or turmeric (red) tilak; once placed, though, these icons become inoperative, encouraging the devotee to be careful and deliberate when placing the marks. These online puja sites also allow for washing the deity and offering it ritual milk. 17. Consider, for example, how modern pagan Lisa McSherry, who as Lady Ma’at operates the JaguarMoon Cyber Coven (www.jaguarmoon.org), conceptualizes the Web. ‘‘Cyberspace,’’ she writes, ‘‘is a technological doorway to the astral plane. . . . Once we enter Cyberspace, we are no longer in the physical plane; we literally stand in a place between the worlds’’ (Lisa McSherry, The Virtual Pagan: Exploring Wicca and Paganism through the Internet [Boston: Weiser Books, 2002], 5). 18. ‘‘Internet Usage Statistics—the Big Picture,’’ retrieved from www.internetworld stats.com/stats.htm, July 30, 2005. 19. ‘‘Internet World Stats Surfing and Site Guide,’’ retrieved from www. internetworld.stats.com/surfing.htm, July 30, 2005; emphasis in the original. 20. On the ‘‘digital divide,’’ see Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Mary Stansbury, Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003); and Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 21. ‘‘Internet Usage Statistics—the Big Picture.’’ 22. Ibid. 23. Castells, 249. 24. ‘‘Internet: The Mainstreaming of Online Life,’’ Trends 2005 (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005), 58. 25. S. Wright, ‘‘Instant Genius! Just Add the Net,’’ Net (June 2000): 50–58. 26. See Stewart Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark, and Lee Rainie, Faith Online (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2004). 27. Ibid., 4. Between November 18 and December 14, 2003, 1,358 Internet users were surveyed by phone about their ‘‘personal religious and spiritual uses’’ of the World Wide Web. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid.

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30. Ibid. What is significant about this particular datum is the overall research context in which the survey questions were asked: Of those surveyed, how many ‘‘have employed the Internet for at least one of these faith-related activities.’’ Put differently, how many times would a given user reasonably expect to search the Internet for a place in their community where they could attend religious services? Once you’ve found the Catholic parish, the Society of Friends meeting, the local mosques, temple, or synagogue in one’s given area, how many more times does one have to go to the Internet for that information? 31. Ibid. 32. ‘‘Internet: The Mainstreaming of Online Life,’’ 58. 33. Hoover, Clark, and Rainie, 4. 34. On the ‘‘virtual pilgrimage,’’ in two different religious contexts, see Gary R. Bunt, ‘‘Surfing Islam: Ayatollahs, Shayks and Hajjis on the Superhighway,’’ in Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises, ed. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan (London: JAI Press/Elsevier Science, 2000), 127–51; and Mark W. MacWilliams, ‘‘Virtual Pilgrimage to Ireland’s Croagh Patrick,’’ in Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, ed. Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan (New York: Routledge, 2004), 223–37. For a critique of the concept of ‘‘virtuality’’ in ordinary Internet activity, see Cowan, Cyberhenge, 51–54. 35. See Cowan, Cyberhenge, esp. 119–51. 36. For further discussions of this concept, see Cowan, Cyberhenge, 18–22; Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Dawson and Cowan, eds., 1–16; Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan, ‘‘The Promised Land or Electronic Chaos? Toward Understanding Religion on the Internet,’’ in Hadden and Cowan, eds., 3–21; Christopher Helland, ‘‘On-Line Religion and Virtual Communitas,’’ in ibid., 205–23; Morten T. Hojsgaard, ‘‘Cyber-religion: On the cutting edge between the virtual and the real,’’ in Religion and Cyberspace, ed. Morten T. Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg (London: Routledge, 2005), 50–62. 37. For a further exploration of countermovement activity online, see Douglas E. Cowan, ‘‘Contested Spaces: Movement, Countermovement, and E-Space Propaganda,’’ in Dawson and Cowan, eds., 255–71; Massivo Introvigne, ‘‘ÔSo Many Evil ThingsÕ: Anti-Cult Terrorism via the Internet,’’ in Hadden and Dawson, eds., 277–306; and Jean-Francois Mayer, ‘‘Religious Movements and the Internet: The New Frontier of Cult Controversies,’’ in ibid., 249–76. 38. On the Religious Movements Homepage Project, see Jeffrey K. Hadden, ‘‘Confessions of a Recovering Technophobe: A Brief History of the Religious Movements Homepage Project,’’ in Hadden and Cowan, eds., 345–62; and Roger Finke, Jennifer McKinney, and Matt Bahr, ‘‘Doing Research and Teaching with the American Religious Data Archive: Initial Efforts to Democratize Access to Data,’’ in ibid., 81–99. 39. Cowan, Cyberhenge, 5. 40. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1966), 15. 41. See Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982). 42. ‘‘On-Line Adoration: Ushering in a New Era of Eucharistic Devotion,’’ retrieved from www.savior.org/webadoration.htm, July 29, 2005. 43. ‘‘The Sacraments via Electronic Communication,’’ United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy Newsletter, June 1999, retrieved from www.usccb.org/liturgy/innews/699.shtml, August 1, 2005. 44. ‘‘On-Line Adoration.’’

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45. Ibid. 46. Tena, ‘‘Testimonials,’’ retrieved from www.savior.org/testimonials, July 29, 2005. 47. Lyn, ‘‘Testimonials,’’ ibid. 48. Cindy, ‘‘Testimonials,’’ ibid. 49. Arianne, ‘‘Testimonials,’’ ibid. 50. See Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Religion as a Cultural System,’’ in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Banton (London: 1966), 1–46. 51. Alan Phipps, ‘‘On-Line Adoration #1’’ (February 21, 2003), retrieved from www.envoymagazine.com/envoyencore, July 29, 2005. 52. Alan Phipps, ‘‘On-Line Adoration #2,’’ ibid. 53. Alan Phipps, ‘‘On-Line Adoration #4,’’ ibid. 54. Alan Phipps, ‘‘On-Line Adoration #11,’’ February 24, 2004, ibid. 55. Sam Damico, ‘‘On-Line Adoration #12,’’ ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Alan Phipps, ‘‘On-Line Adoration #13,’’ ibid. 58. Sam Damico, ‘‘On-Line Adoration #14,’’ ibid. 59. According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ‘‘the adoration paid to the Bl. Sacrament depends on the doctrine of the Real Presence, among its most striking manifestations being the practices of the *Forty Hours and of Perpetual Adoration, cultivated by many religious congregations’’ (F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, eds., Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2d ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], s.v. ‘‘Adoration,’’ 19). 60. Brother John, ‘‘The Webcam and Adoration in Church,’’ retrieved from monksofadoration.org/webadore.html, August 7, 2005. 61. Ibid. 62. Brother Craig Driscoll, ‘‘The Webcam and Adoration in Church,’’ retrieved from ibid., August 7, 2005. 63. All testimonials from ‘‘Chapel Webcam Stories,’’ retrieved from monksofadoration.org/webcamst.html, August 7, 2005. 64. Brenda E. Brasher, Give Me That Online Religion (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2001), 17. 65. Ibid., 19. 66. Pew Internet and American Life Project, ‘‘Daily Internet Activities’’ (2003), retrieved from www.pewinternet.org/reports, September 1, 2005. 67. Jordi Barrat i Esteve, in Susannah Fox, Janna Quitney Anderson, and Lee Rainie, The Future of the Internet (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005), 7. 68. Cowan, Cyberhenge, 201.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Cowan, Douglas E. Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2005. Dawson, Lorne L., and Douglas E. Cowan, eds. Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hadden, Jeffrey K., and Douglas E. Cowan, eds. Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects. London: JAI Press/Elsevier Science, 2000. Hojsgaard, Morten T., and Margit Warburg, eds. Religion and Cyberspace. London: Routledge, 2005.

CHAPTER 8

Workplace Spirituality Lake Lambert

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n the ancient world, the Greek term for household—oikos—captured as part of its meaning all areas of human life. Used throughout the New Testament, oikos meant much more than a household does today because in that time the household was the center of economic production, faith, and family life. Homes were also placed on land with deep ancestral ties. On the land and in the household, all the necessities of life were produced, and at the hearth symbols of faith and devotion would remind the family of the gods and their ancestors. The centrality of the household in so many areas can be seen in the diversity of English terms that have been derived from oikos, including economy, ecology, and ecumenical. Much of modern Western history can be understood as the effort to divide the household into distinctive spheres with their own institutions, leaders, and logics. As a result, the home is no longer a center of production but only a center of consumption. What limited production may have existed one hundred years ago in activities like sewing and canning has also been lost as these goods have been mass produced and grown cheaper and cheaper. Spirituality, while still very much a part of home life for many, has also been focused away from the home and towards religious institutions and organizations that transcend family life. As Americans increasingly feel the segmentation that exists in their lives between family, faith, work, and community, we are now witnessing a variety of efforts to create a new whole and break down the walls that divide different areas of life. The contemporary search for meaning and spirituality in work is part of the larger quest for a sense of wholeness in life that has been lost over the centuries. Most recently, this has meant embracing spirituality as a business practice.

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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES Several antecedent themes are connected to the contemporary workplace spirituality movement. The Christian theological concept of vocation is central and reflects the strong cultural influence of Christian thought in American society. Perverted by the American gospel of success, vocation took a new form in a new land, and when work has gone through its metamorphosis from farm to factory to computer, new ideas about the meaning of work have taken shape. The result is a new way of being and expressing religiosity in the workplaces where Americans spend a large percentage of their time. For centuries the Christian tradition has proclaimed a connection between work and spirituality through the doctrine of vocation. The idea of a ‘‘calling’’ is rooted in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, with the Bible offering multiple accounts of individuals and peoples being summoned into the service of God. Theological understandings of vocation began to develop, however, in the fourth century, when orders of monks and nuns began to cloister themselves for lives of spiritual devotion. Monasticism created a new division of labor in the church between the material and the spiritual. Those outside the monastery were said to preserve creation and propagate the human race; those inside were ‘‘called out’’ to give thanks for Christ and to pray for the world’s salvation. While this offered an affirmation to many forms of labor and activity, the spiritual life was soon seen as decidedly superior to material life. Thus, only the work of the monk was truly a calling from God.1 The distinction between the more perfect ‘‘spiritual work’’ of monks and the less perfect ‘‘material work’’ of everyone else eventually produced a monastic monopoly of vocation. By the beginning of the Middle Ages, it was increasingly clear that those ‘‘called out’’ in the church consisted entirely of bishops, clergy, monks, and nuns.2 It was against the clerical monopoly of vocation and meaningful work that Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers sought to reaffirm the labor and calling of all Christians for a ministry in everyday life. After a long period of trying to be faithful and obedient as an Augustinian monk, Martin Luther came to the conclusion that the foundations of monasticism were mistaken. Luther’s own experience proved to him that monasticism was no way to know the grace of Jesus, and it actually posed more barriers than helps. It taught that an individual’s spiritual efforts and devotion could merit divine favor and salvation and that normal work in the world had no spiritual meaning. Even more, attention to spirituality often resulted in neglect of others. Luther repeatedly affirmed even the lowest occupations of his day as places of spiritual meaning because they served God by serving others. For Luther and later Protestants, any work that does not serve other people is demonic and to be avoided. The modern Roman Catholic social tradition has similarly affirmed the sacramental character of work in the world. This can be seen beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum: The Condition of Labor (1891) and continuing in the more recent work by Pope John Paul II in Laborem

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Exercens: On Human Work (1981) and Centesimus Annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum (1991). The work of John Paul II has been particularly influential because of his affirmation of free market principles but under the authority of moral laws that uphold the primacy of the human worker in the economic processes. John Paul II affirmed that work is necessary because it is an expression of humanity’s creation in the identity of God which is then connected to work’s role in shaping and building community for the common good. He spoke specifically of a ‘‘spirituality of work’’ that is grounded in humanity’s relationship with Jesus Christ who worked himself and who affirmed the work of others as part of God’s plan.3 In 1954, the newly formed World Council of Churches (WCC) devoted special attention at its first two assemblies to the significance of the laity in the life of the church. In particular, they began to use the phrase ‘‘ministry of the laity’’ to describe the important service done by Christians in their work and in all other areas of life.4 The WCC asserted that all Christians had the power to transform the world through their daily work and that the church must be with the laity so that ‘‘the laity in their turn (will) become genuine representatives of the Church in areas of modern life to which the Church has no access.’’5 Over the next fifty years, an emphasis on vocation would episodically reemerge as an interest for mainline Protestants in the United States, and this has included a concern for integrating faith and work. American denominations have issued statements, and church publishing houses have prepared resources, but the recurring theme in surveys and studies has been that churches do not do enough to help Christians connect spirituality and work.6 In colonial America, the Protestant teachings on vocation were easily manipulated into an ethic of success. Since its recognized beginnings in Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, Advice to a Young Tradesman, and Autobiography, American success writing has often had a connection to values and spiritual themes, making it an important predecessor to contemporary workplace spirituality. The path to success, when tied to the individual’s character, was founded on the values and the good habits taught by Christian religion. A second path to success was even more explicitly spiritual, arguing that the mind, spirit, and God were one so that tapping into the full power of the mind was also accessing the power of God for success, health, and happiness in life. Religious proponents of mind power traced their roots to the various New Thought movements of the nineteenth century. One’s individual power is directly related to unlocking the power of the mind, in attitudes, and in using the mind effectively.7 This is then a pathway to health, happiness, and, frequently, business success. In the twentieth century, the most well-known advocate of religious mind power was the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. Through books such as A Guide to Confident Living (1948) and The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) as well as Guideposts magazine, Peale set the tone for this new vision of Christian vocation, focusing less on service and more on success and happiness.8 In The Power of Positive Thinking, Peale tells readers to employ

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visualization by ‘‘formulat(ing) and stamp(ing) indelibly on your mind a mental picture of your life succeeding,’’ and he encourages auto-suggestion by the frequent repetition of scripture passages such as Philippians 4:13 (‘‘I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me’’) and Romans 8:31 (‘‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’’).9 Likewise, prayer is a ‘‘method through which you can stimulate the power of God to flow into your mind.’’10 Another stream of faith-based success literature was exemplified by Bruce Barton. His The Man Nobody Knows became a run-away best-seller, with more than 250,000 copies sold in 1925 and 1926 alone. Translations were made into several languages, and a silent movie was made by the same title.11 Barton’s Jesus was a business leader who ‘‘built the greatest organization of all,’’ demonstrating success as a salesman, a supervisor, and master of his own destiny.12 Barton was also able to capitalize on the success of The Man Nobody Knows with several sequels, and Barton’s corpus established a pattern for success books where Jesus was the model of workplace success to be emulated. The result was that the book fell prey to a two-pronged attack by critics and reviewers. For religious conservatives, it was faulted for its failure to affirm Christ’s divinity and basic tenets of Christian theology. From more liberal Christians, it was criticized for using Jesus to bless capitalism and the business practices of the day.13 The Christian Century attacked The Man Nobody Knows for making Jesus into a mere ‘‘efficiency expert.’’14 Given his context and background, Barton was also influenced by the Social Gospel tradition and its interest in the teachings of Jesus. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had witnessed great economic and social change through industrialization and urbanization, and, as ethicist Max Stackhouse describes it, ‘‘the primary moral response to these developments . . . (was) to apply the teachings of Jesus to economic structures.’’15 The focus on the ‘‘historical Jesus’’ by biblical scholars at the time made this a logical development. ‘‘Higher’’ biblical criticism directed attention to the message of Jesus as a prophet and sage while ‘‘liberal’’ theologians of the period became interested in the Kingdom of God as a theological vision and as the central theme in Jesus’s teachings. Social Gospel advocates like Walter Rauschenbusch turned to these themes repeatedly. Using a devotional study form, Rauschenbusch himself explained the relationship of Jesus to practical issues like leadership and business in The Social Principles of Jesus, published in 1920. What divided liberal Protestants was not the centrality of Jesus and his teaching for economic problem-solving but whether Jesus was an ally of the poor and working class or a businessman.16 For Rauschenbusch, it was clearly the former, but Barton went the other way. What they held in common, however, was that the life and teachings of Jesus were decisive in guiding Christians in economic life. But the history of workplace spirituality is not exclusively or even primarily intellectual. Changing forms of economic organization have also created new patterns of integration between faith and economics. One of the most important developments was increased specialization and concentration on limited areas of economic production. By the Middle Ages, a

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division of labor had increasingly produced a multitude of craftsmen in a variety of fields, even as most people labored at home and on small farms. Craftsmen would sometimes congregate in a city for the ease of suppliers and customers, and this led to the development of a guild system that regulated the quality of workmanship among members and stipulated the requirements for training and admission into a particular craft. The guilds also included a religious-ethical dimension as well with the organization providing support for needy members, widows, and orphans. Rules stipulating the quality of goods and the limits of competition were also developed. In ancient times and into the medieval era, guild members would worship together in communal services, and specific fields of work became identified with devotion to particular saints.17 While specialization may have more sharply distinguished work and home, much of life remained unified, including work and spirituality. In the new industrial organization of the nineteenth century there was an increased effort to break skilled work into several unskilled parts so that anyone could do the work with only limited training and so that the overall work processes could be streamlined. The problem with such efforts was that any creativity exercised by workers in accomplishing a task was taken away. The assembly line was born. Industrial work increasingly became monotonous with no use for the intellectual (and some would say, spiritual) contribution of the worker. The most well-known advocate for this new style of industrialization was Frederick W. Taylor, and the process is frequently called ‘‘Taylorism.’’ One response to industrialization was a series of programs and policies by business corporations that became known as ‘‘welfare capitalism.’’ While the idea of living in housing owned by your employer sounds odd today, by 1916 approximately 3 percent of the U.S. population lived in company-owned housing and ‘‘company towns.’’18 Companies also built and supported churches in many of these towns with pastors as part of the regular corporate payroll. Together with recreational opportunities, schools, company-employed social workers, and various provisions for medical care, American businesses during this period showed a growing attention to the overall well-being of employees by meeting a wide scope of human needs as part of the business enterprise.19 Included in this focus was a concern for the morality and religious practices of employees since, in the long term, this would lead to more stable, loyal, dependable, and productive workers. One of the most common practices of the time was for companies to organize YMCA-led Bible studies among employees; in 1904, the YMCA reported that the organization was working in 175 factories in 115 cities with an average attendance of 25,000.20 Overall, welfare capitalism was an industrial form of enlightened self-interest that drew upon communitarian ideals and themes from the Social Gospel to emphasize the importance of sharing wealth and respecting workers as more than mere cogs in the industrial machine.21 It also sought to mitigate against union organization and rising socialist sentiments. However, as welfare capitalism developed further, it was not spirituality that assumed predominance. Rather, the behavioral sciences became the

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primary resources. New ‘‘personnel managers’’ began to rebel from the rigid orthodoxy of Taylorism. They sought to develop new methods and systems of motivation and work organization that would be persuasive rather than domineering. Historian Stanford Jacoby notes that ‘‘behavioral scientists defended their approach by arguing that consensus forms of persuasion were preferable to the drive system and to the spiritless ideas—such as Taylorism—that underpinned it.’’22 Personnel managers and professional industrial psychologists used interviews to gauge employee attitudes and morale, and foremen were trained to be more sensitive, appealing to an employee’s feelings rather than through harsh disciplinary measures.23 Management theorists and organizational psychologists frequently emphasized the social dimension of work as well as the human needs of workers beyond a wage. Abraham Maslow argued that meaning in work was a characteristic that could be placed within a hierarchy of human needs alongside religion and spirituality.24 Frederick Herzberg’s study of the motivation to work distinguished negative and positive factors in workplace organization. While the negative (what he called ‘‘hygiene’’) factors like supervision, working conditions, salary, benefits, and job security were important, they alone were not sufficient to provide higher productivity. Herzberg argued that achievement, responsibility, advancement, and the possibility for growth were the real motivators for high productivity.25 Primitive forms of external motivation, either by economic incentives or fear, were supplemented or replaced by corporate efforts to create internal incentives for hard work based on the employee’s desire for relationships, creativity, recognition, and inherent meaning in work. This was the hallmark of the ‘‘human relations’’ school of management that emerged after World War II, and it set the stage for a corporate focus on spirituality in the future.

NEW FORMS OF WELFARE CAPITALISM The move into psychology set the stage for corporate-sponsored personal development programs that emerged in the 1960s and which continue today. Designed for and appealing especially to white-collar employees, personal development programs seek to foster personal growth and increase personal effectiveness. They tap into a desire for selfimprovement and success that are part of American culture broadly, but they do so with the assumption that the personal improvement of employees will benefit the business. Usually offered by training departments or outside consultants, personal development programs can include challenging outdoor experiences like white-water rafting or a ropes course, and they can also be conducted within the corporate office involving techniques such as meditation and visioning. Overall, personal development programs are distinguished by their lack of a direct link to specific job responsibilities.26 For some workers, offering a Spanish class at work could be for personal development while for others it could be a prerequisite for a promotion or a new corporate initiative. Likewise, white-water rafting may not have a direct tie to corporate mission, but the teamwork and confidence it inspires may have measurable effects at work.

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Use of the behavioral sciences as well as a growing distaste for the methods of Taylorism has also led managers and scholars to think of corporations as having distinctive cultures that affect how work is done and how decisions are made. These theories argue that corporations are communities with their own rules, policies, procedures, and etiquette, and the reality of corporate culture has led managers and management theory away from seeing corporate leadership and institutional change as strictly a rational process. Cultures are often highly irrational, even though they may intend to be efficient and well-structured. Different processes of decision-making, perspectives, and values often influence results more than the facts and problems themselves. By focusing on the ‘‘organized anarchy’’ of corporate institutions, culture becomes central, and attention has been given to activities and relationships that can be understood as mythic and ritualistic. Knowledge of these spiritual characteristics of the corporate organization as well as the norms that the organization seeks to propagate helps workers to become part of the workplace community, but they also can be forces to harness, manipulate, and control by employers.27 Old-style welfare capitalism has also reemerged in recent years with a new set of benefits. We now see corporate interest as well as employee support for benefits that harmonize one’s work with other areas of life as well as corporate organizations that respond to deep psychic needs and desires. Fortune magazine reported this development in January 2001 when it proclaimed the rebirth of the company town. In their new corporate campus and through the growth in nontraditional benefits, we are seeing a reestablishment of the company town that is appealing to whitecollar employees and employers who are increasingly strained for time and talent. As Fortune describes it, [The modern corporation is] where you can eat, nap, swim, shop, pray, kickbox, drink beer, run your errands, start a romance, get your dental work done. . . . It’s where you can bring your whole self—mind, body and spirit—to work each day. Which is a good thing, because you’ll be here, if not from cradle to grave like the old company towns, then certainly from dawn to dusk.28

The new company town tends to be more like a shopping mall than an oldfashioned city. Housing is no longer the centerpiece. Instead, the realities of dual-career families and longer hours have come together. Time is the most precious commodity for both worker and employer, and the convenience of multiple services and opportunities means that employees do not have to leave the office to meet other needs. Energy and think-time can be devoted exclusively to the enterprise and away from personal concerns. As with the old company town, these benefits help to recruit and retain workers by providing services that meet basic needs, inspire loyalty, and promote increased productivity. One area of growth is in health-related services produced by companies in addition to traditional health insurance benefits. Wellness programs as well as ‘‘employee assistance programs’’ that provide counseling and assistance with substance abuse problems have been added by many firms.29 One of the distinguishing features of the

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Hewitt Associates’ 100 Best Companies to Work for in America is the presence of health facilities at the workplace and/or subsidized or discounted health club memberships because they are such desired perks.30 Although there is a well-documented link between physical fitness and personal job advancement, companies too expect a financial return from wellness programs since they produce healthier, more productive employees.31 The diverse services provided by American corporations (everything from child care to personal development programs to fitness centers) seek to recreate holism in an employee’s life but on corporate property. The company becomes the new oikos—except that you do not sleep there (except possibly for a nap in a company-provided ‘‘nap tent’’ or meditation room). The most basic and even very intimate tasks can be accomplished through employer-provided concierge services; this includes everything from car repair to buying birthday cards for family members.32 Employers are now concerned about all areas of a worker’s life. ‘‘While employee assistance programs, wellness centers, leadership training and family care programs may look widely different . . . they share a common goal of enabling workers to improve their work effectiveness and performance through the development and improvement of personal abilities.’’ The whole human person and economic productivity are thus joined in a symbiotic relationship.33

BEING EXPLICITLY SPIRITUAL AT WORK The move from later forms of welfare capitalism to an explicit concern for spirituality has not been a major leap. In many ways, it has simply been a matter of semantics as certain benefits have been repackaged and reinterpreted as being part of an employee’s and employer’s spiritual identity. But this change in language has also required some precision in words as well. Most companies focused on ‘‘spirituality’’ (except for the evangelical Christians described below) actively avoid direct connections to ‘‘religion’’ and religious traditions in order to be more ecumenical, engaging, and noncontroversial. Since employers and employees want to maintain a clear distinction between religion and spirituality in the workplace, the result is a very general definition of spirituality. As management professor Judith Neal defines it, Spirituality in the workplace is about people seeing their work as a spiritual path, as an opportunity to grow personally and to contribute to society in a meaningful way. It is about learning to be more caring and compassionate with fellow employees, with bosses, with subordinates and customers. It is about integrity, being true to oneself, and telling the truth to others. Spirituality in the workplace can refer to an individual’s attempt to live his or her values more fully in the workplace. Or it can refer to the ways in which organizations structure themselves to support the spiritual growth of employees.34

Author and consultant Martin Rutte refuses even to define spirituality since he fears that this will alienate rather than invite; instead, he claims that spirituality should be a question or inquiry into the meaning in life and work rather than an answer that compels agreement.35

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Within the corporate organization, the manifestation of spirituality most often occurs through a set of shared values and practices that are understood as spiritual in character. An interest in spirituality will lead corporate leaders to talk about creativity, inner wisdom, happiness, relationships, service, and ethics as a seamless unity tied to an eternal (or deeply personal) source. Openness to the language of spirituality itself is an important step in the process since many business organizations, business education, and the rationality of the business ethos influenced by ‘‘scientific’’ management have been resistant to such terms. Coupled with a changing vocabulary is a values shift whereby managers recognize that profits are not the primary focus of business but are instead a means to measure the quality of relationships built between customers, workers, communities, and the environment. Overall, advocates of spirituality in business desire to change the very values that drive enterprise. All this is directly tied to the quest for wholeness that is articulated by both workers and corporate leaders. Workers wanted to be recognized as holistic beings, and companies believe that the full potential and creativity of an employee requires holistic happiness as well as holistic dedication to corporate work. This has now been classified as an expression of spirituality. Family-friendly policies and fitness rooms can thus be an expression of a company’s spirit as well as the firm’s openness to the spirituality of workers when such terms are defined as harmony between all aspects of life. The system of values found in self-described spiritual companies can focus further on a wider understanding of corporate stakeholders that values relationships between workers, customers, and suppliers, seeing them not as competitive or antagonistic but as cooperative and synergistic. Firms may have an enlightened or environmentally conscious approach to growth that does not assume more is better. They can also affirm that proper role of business in society while not challenging capitalism but making capitalism and the individual company subordinate to the common good.36 Support for these values and the new ethos sought is often found by engaging a variety of resources and practices. Some are recognizable as tied to ancient faith traditions while others are novel or a recasting of the secular into the sacred. An often uplifted practice of spirituality in corporate life is storytelling. This can take a variety of forms, including reading and discussing existing stories from a source outside the group or telling personal stories and engaging in dialogue about them. Many of the books written about and for workplace spirituality are now sources for the practice of storytelling. By far the most well-known example is Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work, a collection of 101 stories about life at work. The authors of this Chicken Soup book (one of a growing collection on almost every conceivable topic) have even developed a guide for readers to use in establishing a ‘‘Chicken Soup Group’’ in the workplace. The steps focus on group organization, but they also prompt personal reflection and awareness of feelings as stories from the book are read in the group. They also ‘‘ask participants if they want to make a commitment to do something this week that will make a difference at work.’’37 Other books and essays affirm the value of storytelling or provide a forum for the author to share his own story of

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triumph, failure, and enlightenment. Still another genre of books are those that use fables to communicate a message about business management. Storytelling as a practice affirms many of the values named as attributes of workplace spirituality, and it also demonstrates the close tie between forms of spirituality and theories of corporate culture. Telling stories creates an intimacy, fosters stronger relationships among the conversation’s partners, and socializes new employees into the group. It also affirms the holistic character of life since many of the stories may not be directly work-related. However, telling about a sick parent, a divorce, or some other seemingly ‘‘personal’’ matter at work affirms the workplace as a space and set of relationships where the whole self is welcomed and valued. Management theorist Peter Senge has also argued that dialogue fosters creativity and builds relationships of trust that enable further dialogue to take place. Development of skills for dialogue is essential, according to Senge, because it allows the work group to access a higher level of thinking and creativity than can be done individually.38 In 1994, poet David Whyte published a book titled The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. He now makes a living reading poetry at corporate meetings and encouraging business leaders to write poetry as a stimulus for creativity, change, and spirituality in their work. Whyte contends that storytelling, including poetry, can evoke the spiritual forces that are necessary for corporate happiness and well-being. As he describes it, The corporation, in calling for a little more creative fire from their people, must make room for a little more soul. Making room for creativity, it must make room for the source of that fire and the hearth where it burns—the heart and the soul of the individual.39

For Whyte, poetry and storytelling are ‘‘kindling’’ for this creative process. He uses classics like Beowulf, the Gaelic myth of Fion, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry to connect with the soul—what he defines as the ‘‘undeniable essence of a person’s being and spirit.’’40 But others have identified and used methods and practices besides storytelling for similar purposes. At Xerox Corporation, three hundred employees were involved in a Native American ‘‘vision quest’’ that included twentyfour hours of isolation in remote environments. BusinessWeek reported that Xerox employees ‘‘from senior managers to clerks’’ participated in the program as a means to spark new ideas and creativity for product development. Such activities seek to make a connection to ‘‘inner wisdom’’ that can only be heard when much of the ‘‘noise’ of our modern culture has been silenced or escaped. To promote creativity through dialogue, Xerox has used Native American talking circles to facilitate meetings. In these events, a ‘‘talking stick’’ is shared among participants to encourage deep listening to the one person speaking. BusinessWeek also reported that the results of these practices were a highly profitable new copier-fax-printer as well as inquiries about similar programs from corporate giants like Nike and Harley Davidson.41

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Using a more traditional approach to spirituality, the Ford Motor Company has operated a training center located in a Roman Catholic seminary outside of Detroit since the 1980s. Some employees visit the center twice a year for workshops that include an ‘‘awareness hour’’ and ‘‘creativity building exercises.’’42 Rick Gutherie, the former director of the center, developed a program that combined the latest in management theories about communication, team-building, and creativity with a climate that has ‘‘value boundaries’’ derived from the Bible and defined as faith, love, and truth. Gutherie and Ford call this synthesis ‘‘self-organizing leadership,’’ and it is the very opposite of Taylorism. The paradigm developed at this monastic retreat ‘‘provided a new business structure for making decisions based on agreed upon principles. This eliminated the need for top-down control and unleashed the creative power of our spirit.’’43 A smaller company that can be said to embody forms of workplace spirituality is Tom’s of Maine. Founded by Tom Chappell, Tom’s of Maine is a personal care products company that specializes in natural and environmentally friendly products. As the CEO and majority owner of the company, Chappell almost single-handedly transformed Tom’s of Maine into a company with a spiritual focus. Facing a spiritual crisis of his own, Chappell enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, and he was soon bringing Harvard professors as well as the books they assigned to corporate board meetings and employee gatherings. Chappell understands workplace spirituality to be a deep sense of connection, service, and commonality. For example, Tom’s of Maine seeks to build partnerships with sales outlets; therefore he encourages meetings between the marketing and community relations departments of both companies with the intent of fostering commitments and relationships rather than deals and competition. As the owner and CEO, Chappell has also sought to let people engage the company’s spirit on their own terms and with their own language. This means that biblically rooted terms like ‘‘tithing’’ are replaced by alternatives like ‘‘giving back’’ to the community and the environment.44 A whole collection of new entrepreneurs like Chappell have sought to create a similar spiritual ethos in their businesses. The well-known Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream founded their company as a socially responsible organization that refuses, in their words, to operate under the ‘‘absurd’’ belief that ‘‘because spiritual connection is intangible or quantifiably immeasurable, it does not exist.’’45 Howard Schultz has told a similar story about the values, spirit, and explosive growth of Starbuck’s Coffee in Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (1997). Interestingly, the founders of all three companies have written books that share their management philosophy and their connection to spirituality and values. Chappell’s The Soul of a Business (1993) has made him a popular speaker on the subject of integrating spirituality and work, and Cohen and Greenfield wrote Ben & Jerry’s Double Dip (1997) to advance their business philosophy and spiritual vision. Other self-proclaimed spiritual or enlightened entrepreneurs who have told their story in a book include Mel and Patricia Zigler and Bill Rosenzweig in The Republic of Tea: Letters to a Young

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Zentrepreneur, (1992), and furniture maker Herman Miller’s Max DePree who wrote Leadership Is an Art (1989) and Leadership Jazz (1992).46 On the ‘‘supply’’ end of workplace spirituality, there appears to be a growing interest in spirituality by organizational consultants. Attending conferences on workplace spirituality, it is impossible not to notice the large number of professional consultants especially in the area of organizational development. Also present are Feng Shui advisors who practice the ancient Chinese art of spiritual alignment for workplace organization. A recent dissertation by Katja H. D’Errico at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst considered the impact of spirituality on business consultants, including the ‘‘tools’’ it provides for consulting work as well as the level of openness there is to explicit consideration of spirituality in organizational consulting. The consultants D’Errico interviewed noted that: bringing a spiritual focus to their consulting work enhanced the team work of their clients. Fostering positive attitude and creating win/win situations allowed teams to build positive energy and experience synergy. These participants felt that such synergy enhanced group motivation and productivity.

Yet there was still a hesitance among the consultants interviewed to mention spirituality directly or use the language of ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘soul’’ even though the consultants admitted that their work was inherently spiritual.47 In 1998, management professor Judy Neal estimated that 10 percent of management consultants focused on spirituality or drew upon spiritual themes.48 Specialty consulting firms now provide psychic services, astrologers, and enneagram readings to assist employers in finding employees that will be the right fit. Advisor Associates, a consultant in New Jersey, offers companies a psychic reading of potential employees that can tell an employer how the applicant will relate to other employees, whether she or he has psychological problems or addictions, the level of honesty, and dependability.49 It seems likely that increased interest in spirituality by workers and corporate leaders combined with promises of enhanced productivity will create an expanded market for consultants who use spirituality explicitly or implicitly. Already companies like Boeing, AT&T, Lotus, TRW, Pacific Bell, and Procter & Gamble have used spirituality consultants. Consultants who address spiritual themes have a variety of origins with some being religious practitioners of some sort (like Feng Shui advisors or Christian ministers) while others emerged from organizational psychology and previous consulting work in organizational development that was attentive to issues of corporate culture. A further step in the direction of spirituality and religiosity has come as companies have hired corporate chaplains. Often as part of an organization’s employee assistance program (EAP), corporate chaplains complete the link back to the company towns of a century ago. Through an EAP, a company might make a psychologist or counselor available to employees for personal or workplace concerns, and similarly corporate chaplains are paid by the business to be available for the employee’s consultation. If an employee feels uncomfortable talking to a company-provided ‘‘secular’’

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counselor, a workplace chaplain may be a good alternative, but there is no guarantee that a company will provide either or both, leaving some employees without the option of a spiritual counselor and others with a pastor as the only choice.50 The Wall Street Journal reported in late 2001 that interest in workplace chaplaincy was rising due to the increased uncertainty brought by the September 11th attacks. While chaplains were available already in many locales to discuss personal problems, family illnesses and death, terrorism brought new, more existential questions that were the specialty of religious leaders. A chaplain at Herr Foods in New Jersey reported that employees were concerned about the apparent absence of God in the wake of the attacks and a few inquired about biblical prophecy concerning the end of the world.51 The motivation of managers to enlist the services of workplace chaplains vary. Some managers, influenced by their own religious commitments, seek to add chaplains. Others appear to recognize that, although almost all Americans profess some sort of religious belief, not all are members of a church or religious community.52 Even more, religious leaders are seldom found visiting their congregants’ workplace. Outside of the corporate organization, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has a twenty-year tradition of providing workplace chaplains who are also union workers. UAW chaplains may vary in their training, but they share a common motto of ‘‘Caring in the Workplace.’’53 To meet the need of companies seeking corporate chaplains, other enterprises have emerged to supply chaplaincy services. Marketplace Ministries, Inc., is over twenty years old and claims to have ‘‘more than 1,500 chaplains spread from California to Massachusetts, caring for more than a million employees and their family members.’’54 Firms like Marketplace Ministries function like other EAP providers, working on a contractual basis with employers. The nonprofit Corporate Chaplains of America operates similarly and includes testimonials from client companies on its Web site along with an evangelical statement of faith to which all its chaplains must adhere.55 A different type of chaplaincy organization is the National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains (NIBIC), based in Houston, which functions more like a professional association and accrediting organization for business chaplains, specifying a code of ethics as well as offering educational standards and courses. The NIBIC is broadly ecumenical in its orientation and appears to want workplace chaplaincy to have the same level of standards and prestige as heath care and military chaplaincies where evangelization is frowned upon and spiritual care is more the rule. Full ‘‘clinical membership’’ in the organization requires a Master of Divinity degree, ordination, ecclesiastical endorsement, and at least 1,600 additional hours of training in a clinical setting.56

EVANGELICALS IN BUSINESSES Another distinctive form of workplace spirituality is being developed by evangelical Christians in the growing number of self-styled ‘‘Christian businesses.’’ The model of the Christian company is so well known that it

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has been featured in the Wall Street Journal (1985), Fortune (1987), U.S. News & World Report (1995), and Time (2005). Each of these publications recognized that evangelicals are increasingly flexing their economic strength and leading businesses guided by the Bible, prayer, and a strict code of ethics. Bob Reese, an evangelical and president of a Dallas manufacturing firm, told U.S. News & World Report that ‘‘support of Christian business is one area where we can (regain control of) our culture.’’57 In the same article from 1995, U.S. News reported that almost half of small business owners in the United States described themselves as evangelicals.58 The characteristics of a ‘‘Christian business’’ will vary widely, but many firms offer onsite religious activities and others emphasize the manager’s responsibility as a role model.59 Specific practices may include inviting customers to meetings where Christian testimonies are heard, displaying Christian principles in prominent areas, inviting customers to church, giving Christian gifts to customers, using Christian symbols, and naming God or Christ in a mission or policy statement.60 Although the vast majority of Christian businesses are small, there are several large ones as well. Examples of Christian companies include many prominent retailers and other firms in the United States today. The trucking company Covenant Transport offers Bible studies at the corporate headquarters and displays pro-life messages on every truck.61 Touch1 Communications, a small telecommunications company in southern Alabama, has used its marketing literature to proclaim the Christian message and to accentuate the Christian orientation of the company, including what that means for service to its customers. Chik-fil-A, a fast-food chain with more than $1 billion in sales and more than 950 restaurants, closes its stores on Sunday, and the company’s mission statement describes its purpose as ‘‘to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us.’’62 The headquarters of The ServiceMaster Company is unique among large corporations in the United States because it includes an eleven-foot-high statue of Jesus washing the feet of a disciple.63 As the corporate name indicates, the company is in the service business, but the name also communicates a dual message that the organization seeks to be the ‘‘master of service’’ and to provide ‘‘service to the Master.’’64 Unlike Chik-fil-A, ServiceMaster is a publicly traded company with its stock available for purchase by individual and institutional investors. But despite its public status, the company has charted a distinctive course because it claims that its first objective is ‘‘to honor God in all we do.’’65 Those who live near a Hobby Lobby store may have seen one of the company’s Christmas or Easter advertisements; since 1997 the company has placed full-page ads offering a devotional message on these Christian holidays with all of the messages including the Hobby Lobby name, a scripture passage printed in full, and the statement: ‘‘If you would like to know Jesus as Savior and Lord, call the Need Him Ministry at 1-888 NEED HIM.’’66 Still other companies like Amway do not use Christian language or symbols, but they borrow from evangelical practices so that employee motivation and testimonies of success closely mimic revivalist methods.

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With the increasing prominence of evangelicals in business and the rapid rise in Christian companies, parachurch organizations have been formed to provide support, networking, and resources. Fellowship of Companies for Christ (FCC) was formed specifically for owners and chief executives who understand their business leadership and ownership as an act of Christian stewardship, and their unabashed goal is to change the world for Christ, one company at a time. FCC offers workshops and training events for CEOs and company owners; they support local groups for study, prayer, and fellowship; and they produce a variety of books, manuals, and magazines for use by Christian business leaders in their own companies. FCC claims that company leaders serve a special function in the Body of Christ, and Christian owners and CEOs must understand themselves to be the stewards of the companies that God has entrusted to them. The organization has both national and regional offices with programs available at each of these levels and across denominational lines.67 An older but similar parachurch organization, the Christian Businessmen’s Committee, has been in existence for more than sixty years and appeals to a broader range of business professionals (not just owners and CEOs) with similar programs and a regular magazine.68 Christian businesses can distinguish themselves by advertising their theological convictions in organs like The Shepherd’s Guide—a type of Christian Yellow Pages. The Shepherd’s Guide was started in 1980, and it is now published in more than 125 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada.69 Like any other Yellow Pages, the guides include advertising from many different types of business, including attorneys, physicians, car dealers, contractors, and mortgage companies. Also included is a complete list of churches in the area (including Catholic), inspirational messages and quotes from the Bible interspersed with the advertisements, and calls to be saved with the steps involved in the process.70 Advertising in more mainstream and ‘‘secular’’ sources can also include distinctive markers that indicate the identity of a Christian company. Using verses of scripture is one example, but the most common is the ancient Christian fish symbol.71 With a history dating back to the second century, it has long been a marker of Christian identity. Its business advantage is its subtlety compared to a cross since it is likely only other Christians will recognize it as a Christian symbol. This describes the difficulty of marketing to Christians since a desire to solicit business from other Christians is often coupled with a desire not to alienate customers who may not be Christian (or evangelical). David A. Lehrer, an attorney for the AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith, has cautioned Christian business owners that ‘‘your intentions may be quite noble, but if you’re wearing your religion on your sleeve, others will feel that they’re not welcome.’’ But this may be precisely the point. The use of Christian symbols or even advertising in distinctively Christian outlets like The Shepherd’s Guide is often described by business owners not as a crass marketing tool but as a statement of faith and method of evangelism.72 For evangelical Christians who do not work in Christian businesses (and even for those who do), a variety of books and other resources are

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now available to help make a connection between work and faith. In 1995, Laurie Beth Jones wrote Jesus, CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership. Although not the first book of this genre, in the last ten years Jones’s best-seller has been translated into four languages, and it marked the beginning of a new emphasis on Jesus as a teacher of business management techniques.73 Jones has replicated this format in four other books. Books that connect work, business, and faith easily blend both ancient wisdom and self-help, especially if self-help is expanded beyond the therapeutic to embrace success and advice literature. The subject headings given by the Library of Congress are also illustrative. We now have books under subject headings such as Management—Religious Aspects; Business— Religious Aspects; Jesus Christ—Leadership; Executive Ability—Biblical Teaching. Jones’s Jesus, CEO includes three subject headings: ‘‘1. Success, 2. Success in business, and 3. Jesus Christ—Leadership,’’ and it appears that Jesus, CEO was the first use by the Library of Congress of the heading ‘‘Jesus Christ—Leadership.’’ Ironically, the Library of Congress appears reluctant to do what Christian book publishers have done already—that is, link Jesus directly to business or management. There currently are no subclassifications under ‘‘Jesus’’ that make a tie to business or management. The connection to leadership ranks Jesus alongside winning coaches, successful CEOs, and heroic political and military figures. The ‘‘Jesus in business’’ movement is not limited to books alone. Laurie Beth Jones has moved from being author to corporate trainer and consultant. Her Web site, www.jesusceo.com, describes the full range of services she offers that build on her insight into the relationship of Jesus to the workplace. Jones’s books after Jesus, CEO highlight many of her encounters as a consultant. The ‘‘Lead Like Jesus’’ celebration, which premiered through a national video conference in November 2003, is a similar phenomenon. Led by Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One-Minute Manager, and Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, ‘‘Lead Like Jesus’’ is a multimedia effort, combining books, videos, study guides, and local ‘‘Leadership Encounters’’ with an organizational base in Blanchard’s Center for Faithwalk Leadership. A second celebration event was held in April 2004 that also included Bill Hybels, pastor of the Willow Creek megachurch in suburban Chicago.

EMERGING TRENDS AND ISSUES One of the most interesting phenomena related to workplace spirituality is the emergence of executive and life ‘‘coaching’’ as a professional field. While the idea of coaching usually connects to the athletic field or gymnasium, this new form of coaching is a highly individualized form of professional consulting. An individual or firm may hire a coach to motivate, counsel, and develop an employee, working on tasks such as listening or assertiveness skills, navigating a difficult decision (like lay-offs), and setting priorities.74 The activities of coaches often draw upon psychology and psychoanalysis as well as business strategy, but coaches are also giving

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increased attention to spirituality as part of their work, serving as gurus to clients who seek meaning and vision.75 When coaches help clients establish priorities, find work-life balance, articulate values, and identify life purpose, a tie to spirituality becomes evident. One author describes coaching as a potential counterbalance to the pressures of modern life because ‘‘by enlisting a coach we can often begin to focus on what really is important to us, and begin to shape what we need to do to be more in line with that.’’76 Yet at the same time, this concern for ‘‘deeper’’ issues must be packaged and sold for a fast-paced, success-oriented culture, leading one coaching organization to advertise its ‘‘short-term, results-oriented approach for finding meaning, purpose, and direction.’’77 This same organization promises to answer important philosophical and spiritual questions like ‘‘who am I?’’ and ‘‘how can I integrate my spirituality into my everyday life?’’ into the same short time frame.78 Much of coaching is even done over the phone.79 Because it is so new, there has been little analysis of the coaching trend. Journalistic accounts of coaching estimate that there are 20,000 to 40,000 executive and life coaches around the world, and more than 8,000 are members of the International Coach Federation.80 According to the Christian Science Monitor, coaching is an overwhelmingly women-dominated occupation with a male to female ratio of 30 to 70, and training and background can vary dramatically.81 Some life coaches may have no training at all, and forms of training can vary from weekend conferences to online courses to a new graduate level certificate in coaching offered by the University of Texas at Dallas. The latter includes course work in coaching as well as supervised coaching not unlike the field work requirements of professional counselors and clergy. Another important set of distinction is between internal and external coaches as well as who is paying the coach’s bill. With internal coaching, a fellow employee of the client’s organization serves as the coach, and with corporate-sponsored external coaches, too, there may not be as much focus on questions like the meaning of life. The unemployed or just plain spiritual seekers may turn to a coach for something like spiritual guidance, especially when work is identified as a central characteristic of personal identity. Because coaches are supposed to be value neutral, they also may be more attractive than professional clergy who could be seen as potentially judgmental of certain values and life priorities. Coaching thus meets a cultural need of our time: fast and highly individualized attention to spirituality and questions of ultimate meaning that are tied to professional work. While workplace spirituality grows, it also appears that there may be a growing backlash. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) of the United States has reported an 85 percent rise in religionbased complaints of employment discrimination from 1992 to 2002. Although complaints for gender and racial discrimination far outnumber religion complaints, complaints about race and sex have remained fairly constant over the same period while religion-based complaints have almost doubled.82 The 1964 Civil Rights Act made religion a protected activity in the workplace, requiring that places of employment not discriminate on

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the basis of religion and that they make ‘‘reasonable accommodations’’ for religious expression in the workplace. A survey by the Society for Human Resources Management found that requests for time off for religious observances were the most frequent accommodation requested, and ‘‘display of religious materials’’ was the second.83 The EEOC has further broadened its interpretation of the 1964 law so that religious protection includes ‘‘moral or ethical beliefs’’ and any other belief that an individual might hold—whether it is found among a religious group or not.84 In other words, spirituality in the workplace is recognized and even protected by federal law. It is impossible to explain the exact cause of rising workplace discrimination complaints, but journalists and scholars are already developing several hypotheses. First, increasing religious diversity in the workplace may be an obvious source of tension. As the United States has become more religiously diverse, especially with immigration from Asia and Africa, the workplace has become more religiously diverse as well.85 Although growing diversity does not necessarily lead to tension or discrimination, it is certainly possible, and the possibility is magnified when religious belief has public manifestations in the workplace. James Morgan theorizes that new immigrants have not been ‘‘indoctrinated with the traditional U.S. view that expressing faith at work is inappropriate’’ and may in fact believe that such religious expression at work, including display of symbols and practices, is essential to faithfulness.86 The need for space and time for Muslim prayers, the addition of a scarf or kipa to a work uniform, or a small painting of Lakshmi on a desk can all be understood as forms of workplace spirituality, but they each push boundaries and force a decision on what constitutes a ‘‘reasonable accommodation’’ to an employee’s religious beliefs as well as what constitutes religious discrimination. The rise of Christian companies raises similar concerns. Even though an owner may identify his or her business as Christian, religious discrimination in employment is still illegal. A Christian business cannot hire only Christians, employ only Christians as managers, favor Christians in any way connected to their employment, or discriminate against non-Christian employees. But in practice, a firm that has fish and cross on its job advertisements may not appear to be a very hospitable place for a Buddhist or an atheist. One Christian business owner has reported that in speaking to job candidates at interviews he ‘‘explain(s) to them that we’re doing God’s work.’’87 Under the law, this is not religious discrimination, but it may allow a Christian company to hire only Christians (and especially evangelicals) because candidates self-select this type of enterprise for employment. One of the more challenging questions is how spiritual practices are being received when they are presented under the guise of professional development programs. Meditation, yoga, the writing of personal mission statements, and even Native American spiritual practices are used for team building and to tap the creative processes of employees.88 To many employees, these practices may be inoffensive and fit naturally into a ‘‘spiritual but not religious’’ lifestyle. But to a fundamentalist Christian or a devout Muslim, these same practices may be the very essence of idolatry.

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The question that remains is whether employees who are compelled to participate in these practices are really being required to participate in objectionable religious activity. An employee who refuses to participate and is then fired, demoted, or denied promotion may have a legitimate religious discrimination complaint. As spiritual practices sneak into corporate America through mainstream training programs, it will be increasingly difficult to parse out what is religious or spiritual and what is legitimate professional and organizational development. Another bellwether of the backlash against workplace spirituality can be found in Dilbert, the cartoon that parodies all corporate and managerial fads. Scott Adams, Dilbert’s creator, has made repeated references to workplace spirituality themes over the last eight years. The character Dogbert has been the frequent focus of these parodies, presenting himself to the pointy headed manager as a consultant who ‘‘can make your employees more creative and spiritually fulfilled’’ via poetry and dance and as a Feng Shui consultant who identifies evil spirits in the office. Feng Shui has been a particular object of Adams’s scorn with at least four strips ridiculing it. Office prayer has also been ridiculed at least twice with a character in one dressed as a witchdoctor asking for ‘‘permission to hold daily prayer services in a conference room’’ and promising to ‘‘do it before work’’ and ‘‘of course clean up any blood.’’89 While practitioners of workplace spirituality in its different forms likely find Adams’s treatment to be insulting, Dilbert’s attention to these themes indicates workplace spirituality’s ‘‘arrival’’ as a cultural trend. Parody may not be the highest form of flattery, but it is only warranted (and funny) when enough people understand the basic premise. Spirituality in the workplace has crossed that threshold and is now a significant theme in both American religious life and business practice.

NOTES 1. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 242; Wade H. Boggs, Jr., All Ye Who Labor (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1961), 47–48. 2. Hendrik Kraemer, A Theology of the Laity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958), 60. 3. Pope John Paul II, ‘‘Laborem Exercens’’ in Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage, ed. David O’Brien and Thomas Shannon (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), 384–89. 4. World Council of Churches, ‘‘The Laity: The Christian in His Vocation,’’ in The Evanston Report, ed. W.A. Visser Ôt Hooft (New York: Harper, 1955), 161. 5. Ibid, 168. 6. For empirical studies on this issue, see Robert Wuthnow, The Crisis in the Churches (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Laura Nash and Scotty McLennan, Church on Sunday, Work on Monday (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001). 7. Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 135.

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8. Dennis Voskuil, Mountains into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 125. 9. Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952), 16–17. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. Richard M. Fried, introduction to Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2000), vii–viii; Leo P. Ribuffo, ‘‘Jesus Christ as Business Statesman: Bruce Barton and the Selling of Corporate Capitalism,’’ American Quarterly 33 (Summer 1981): 221. 12. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill Co., 1925; reprint, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2000), 4. 13. Rolf Lunden, Business and Religion in the American 1920s (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988), 105. 14. ‘‘Jesus As Efficiency Expert,’’ Christian Century 42 (July 2, 1925): 352. 15. Max L. Stackhouse, ‘‘Jesus and Economics: A Century of Reflection,’’ in The Bible in American Law, Politics and Rhetoric, ed. James Turner Johnson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 109. 16. Ribuffo, 211. 17. Melvin Kranzberg and Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 41, 66–68. 18. Stuart Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 38. 19. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), 126. 20. Brandes, 67. 21. Ibid., 1–2; Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 12–14. 22. Jacoby, 44. 23. Ibid., 19–20, 84. 24. Neal Chalofsky, Patricia Daly, Janet Silverthorne, and Lauren Turner, ‘‘The Meaning of Work: A Literature Review,’’ unpublished paper distributed at the preconference workshop for ‘‘Spirituality at Work: The New Values-Based Productivity’’ conference, Washington, D.C., June 28, 1998. 25. Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, and Barbara Bloch Snyderman, The Motivation to Work (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1959), 60, 113. 26. Mary B. Young, ‘‘Hard Bodies, Soft Issues, and the Whole Person,’’ in A Fatal Embrace?, ed. Frank W. Heuberger and Laura Nash (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 21–22. 27. Paul DiMaggio, ‘‘The Relevance of Organizational Theory to the Study of Religion’’ in Sacred Companies, ed. N.J. Demerath III, Peter Dobkin Hall, Terry Schmitt, and Rhys H. Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8–9. 28. Jerry Useem and Ann Harrington, Fortune, January 10, 2000, 65. 29. Young, 18–19. 30. ‘‘100 Best Companies Have an Edge,’’ Compensation and Benefits Review 31 (May 1999): 9. 31. Young, 18–19. 32. Jill Elswick, ‘‘A Symphony of Nontraditional Benefits,’’ Employee Benefits News 14 (March 2000): 39, 52. 33. Frank W. Heuberger and Laura Nash, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in A Fatal Embrace?, 2–3. 34. Judith A. Neal, ‘‘Spirituality in Management Education: A Guide to Resources,’’ Journal of Management Education 21 (1997): 123.

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35. Bob Ronser, ‘‘Is There Room for the Soul at Work?’’ Workforce 80 (February 2001): 82–83. 36. Ian I. Mitroff and Elizabeth A. Denton, A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), 125–30. 37. Martin Rutte, ‘‘Create a Chicken Soup Group in Your Workplace,’’ www.martinrutte.com/creategroup.html, accessed November 5, 2005. 38. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 239–45. 39. David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 79–80. 40. Ibid., 13. 41. Michelle Conlin, ‘‘Religion in the Workplace,’’ BusinessWeek (November 1, 1999): 151–52. 42. Stephen E. Plum, ‘‘Ford Teams Take Vows in Detroit Monastery,’’ Ward’s Auto World 29 (June 1993): 40–41. 43. www.workingwithspirit.com, accessed July 25, 2001. 44. Tom Chappell, unpublished presentation to the ‘‘Spirituality at Work: The New Values-Based Productivity’’ Conference, Washington, D.C., June 28, 1998. 45. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Ben & Jerry’s Double Dip (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 51. 46. Self-promotion of enlightened business practices is not without risks. Charges of hypocrisy come when firms fail to measure up to self-described values. The Body Shop, founded by Anita Brock, was for many years uplifted as an example of values-centered business, but it has also been faulted for failing to live up to its mission and even outright deception on the natural quality of its ingredients. See John Entine, ‘‘Shattered Image,’’ Business Ethics (September/October 1994), reprinted in Business Ethics Annotated Edition, ed. John Richardson (Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing, 1996), 2001–6. 47. Katja Hahn D’Errico, ‘‘The Impact of Spirituality on the Work of Organization Development Consulting Practice’’ (Ed.D. diss., University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1998), 320–22. 48. Anne Colby, ‘‘The Soul at Work: The Missing Links,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1998, 6. 49. Patricia Hardin, ‘‘What’s Your Sign? Companies Use Otherworldly Assessment Methods to Choose the Right Employees,’’ Personnel Journal 74 (September 1995): 66. 50. Associated Press, ‘‘Corporate Chaplains Offer Guidance to Troubled Employees,’’ Waterloo Courier, May 28, 2003, D5. 51. Rachel Emma Silverman, ‘‘More Christians Take Ministering Into the Workplace,’’ Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2001, B1. 52. Wayne Tompkins, ‘‘Workers Find Spiritual Support,’’ Louisville CourierJournal, January 2, 2001, C5–C6. 53. ‘‘The UAW Chaplaincy Program: Caring in the Workplace,’’ Solidarity (September 1996): 26. 54. Marketplace Ministries, ‘‘Who Are We?’’ www.marketplaceministries.com/ about.html, accessed October 20, 2005. 55. Corporate Chaplains of America, http://www.inneractiveministries.org/, accessed June 3, 2003. 56. Silverman; National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains, ‘‘Application for Membership’’ (Houston: n.p., n.d.). 57. Jeffery L. Sheler, ‘‘The Christian Capitalists,’’ U.S. News and World Report (March 13, 1995): 54. 58. Ibid.

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59. Nabil A. Ibrahim, Leslie W. Rue, Patricia P. McDougall, and G. Robert Green, ‘‘Characteristics and Practices of ÔChristian-BasedÕ Companies,’’ Journal of Business Ethics 10 (1991): 127. 60. Ibid., 128. 61. Daniel Machalaba, ‘‘More Employees Are Seeking to Worship God on the Job,’’ Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2002, B1. 62. S. Truett Cathy, It’s Easier to Succeed Than to Fail (Nashville: Oliver Nelson, 1989), 156–57. 63. C. William Pollard, The Soul of the Firm (Grand Rapids, MI: Harper Business and Zondervan Publishing Co., 1996), 32. 64. Joseph A. Maciariello, ‘‘Credo and Credibility’’ in Faith in Leadership, ed. Robert Banks and Kimberly Powell (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 213. 65. Pollard, 18. 66. Hobby Lobby, ‘‘Message Ads,’’ www.hobbylobby.com/site3/ministry/message. cfm, accessed July 1, 2003. 67. Fellowship of Companies for Christ International, ‘‘About Us.’’ http://www. fcci.org/articles.asp?area=articles§ionID=11¤tmainSection=About+Us, accessed August 7, 2003. 68. Robert J. Tamasy, ed. Jesus Works Here (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 1995), 252–53. 69. Shepherds Guide, ‘‘About TSG,’’ www.shepherdsguide.com/about_home. html, accessed February 12, 2002. 70. The Shepherd’s Guide: Greater Louisville, Ninth Annual Edition (Louisville, KY: n.p., 2001). 71. Tammerlin Drummond, ‘‘In God We Advertise,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1991, 2. 72. Ibid. 73. Laurie Beth Jones, The Path (New York: Hyperion, 1996), 215ff. 74. Douglas T. Hall, ‘‘Behind Closed Doors: What Really Happens in Executive Coaching,’’ Organizational Dynamics 27 (Winter 1999): 43. 75. Young, 25. 76. Julie Starr, The Coaching Manual (London: Pearson Education Ltd., 2003), 10. 77. Life Purpose Institute, ‘‘Coaching and Consulting,’’ www.lifepurposeinstitute. com/lifepurpose.html, accessed September 13, 2005. 78. Ibid. 79. Jennifer Wolcott, ‘‘Get a Life!’’ Christian Science Monitor, April 4, 2001, 11. 80. Jennifer Wolcott and Jordon Robertson, ‘‘Motivational Speaking,’’ Waterloo Courier, September 4, 2005, D10. 81. Wolcott, ‘‘Get a Life!’’ 82. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, ‘‘Statistics,’’ www.eeoc.gov/stats, accessed September 13, 2005. 83. Karen C. Cash and George R. Gray, ‘‘A Framework for Accommodating Religion and Spirituality in the Workplace,’’ Academy of Management Executive 14 (2000): 125. 84. James F. Morgan, ‘‘How Should Business Respond to a More Religious Workplace?’’ SAM Advanced Management Journal 69 (2004): 14. 85. Ibid., 13; Russell Shorto, ‘‘Faith at Work,’’ New York Times Magazine (October 31, 2004): 43. 86. Morgan, 13. 87. Shorto, ‘‘Faith at Work.’’

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88. Cash and Gray, 127. 89. ‘‘Dilbert Archives,’’ http://members.comics.com/members/extra/addtofa voritestrips.do?, accessed September 22, 2005.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Heuberger, Frank W., and Laura Nash, eds. A Fatal Embrace? Assessing Holistic Trends in Human Resources Programs. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994. Mitroff, Ian I., and Elizabeth A. Denton. A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999. Nash, Laura, and Scotty McLennan. Church on Sunday, Work on Monday. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. Pollard, C. William. The Soul of the Firm. Grand Rapids, MI: HarperBusiness and Zondervan, 1996. Whyte, David. The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

CHAPTER 9

Nature Religion and Environmentalism in North America Bron R. Taylor and Gavin Van Horn

I

n western New Jersey, after learning about straw-bale housing and organic gardening, a group of workshop participants are led in walking meditation by a Catholic nun dressed in blue jeans as she describes for the group the evolutionary story of the universe. Pulling out of a church parking lot in the Midwest, an evangelical Christian puts her hybrid car into gear: On the bumper of the car is a sticker asking, ‘‘What Would Jesus Drive?’’ Just north of San Francisco, Zen Buddhists practice mindfulness while tending their organic tomatoes at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. At the Lothlorien Nature Sanctuary in southern Indiana, Neopagan practitioners gather together to ‘‘regreen’’ their lives and the land, celebrating an annual calendar that includes, among other items, earth steward weekends, colorful maypole dances, and solstice festivals that bring people together for camping and workshops.1 Such examples are just a small selection of the many ways that diverse Americans are drawing upon religious and spiritual commitments in response to environmental concerns. Yet, regard for the natural world is not always welcomed on the American landscape. For some, environmentalism is viewed with suspicion, particularly when it is seen as tied to deep reverence for or even worship of the earth. Some conservative Christians, for example, consider environmentalism to be a Trojan horse that threatens Western civilization with a revitalized Paganism.2 Thus, concern about environmental problems is often a contested realm of conflicting religious perceptions. In this chapter, we argue that religious perceptions and practices have decisively shaped American environmentalism and have done so to such an extent that much environmentalism can be considered a form of nature religion. At least three major types of what can be called ‘‘green religion’’

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have emerged in American culture. By reflecting on the impact of such religious configurations, one can speculate as to their long-term influences upon religion and environmental politics in America. An examination of the historical and present manifestations of ‘‘green religion’’ and ‘‘nature religion’’ suggests that such phenomena, which have been very important in North American religious history, will continue to shape environmentalism both domestically and internationally.

RELIGION AND NATURE RELIGION This analysis must first clarify the terms religion, nature religion, and green religion. With regard to religion in general, religion scholar David Chidester provided a broad but helpful definition when he wrote that religion can be defined as ‘‘that dimension of human experience engaged with sacred norms’’ that are related to experiences of extraordinary, transformative, or healing power.3 Although this may be a circular definition (religion is whatever people consider sacred and the sacred demarcates the religious realm), it does reflect the ways in which people actually speak about religion, as Chidester points out. It has the added advantage of allowing one to sidestep thorny issues such as whether one must have otherworldly divine beings to have religion, for such a definition requires the observer to take sides in implicitly religious disputes about what constitutes an ‘‘authentic’’ religion. Deploying a vague and admittedly circular definition allows an analytic, religion-focused lens to be employed whenever people use rhetoric of the sacred (or its opposite) to describe and promote what they most deeply feel and experience.4 The term ‘‘nature religion’’ and its plural nature religions will be used here simply as umbrella terms for religious perceptions and practices that, despite substantial diversity, are characterized by a reverence for nature and consider nature to be sacred in some way. Another helpful way to think about religion (in general) harkens back to its Latin root, religare, which originally meant to tie fast or to bind. With this in mind, nature religion involves the feeling some people have of being bound, connected, or belonging to nature. ‘‘Green religion’’ will be used to refer to religious sensibilities that consider environmental concern a religious duty, regardless of whether nature itself evokes reverence or is considered sacred.

EUROPEAN AMERICANS AND NATURE: FROM EUROPEAN CONTACT TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In North America, scholars have been asking questions explicitly about the intersections among religion, nature, and culture since the late 1960s.5 In part, this scholarly examination has proceeded from the recognition that religious narratives shape the landscape in significant ways, even as these narratives themselves are shaped by contact with the land. American soil has indeed proven fertile ground for alternative and conflicting religious valuations of nature.

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European Americans were deeply conditioned by the attitudes typical of the continent from which they had come. Consequently, their perceptions and feelings regarding nature were often characterized by fear and hostility, or, at least, by a deep ambivalence toward the wild landscapes that differed greatly from the domesticated agricultural and pastoral ones they left behind. In the region that came to be known as New England, these attitudes were shaped decisively by Christianity, especially Puritanism, whose devotees sometimes viewed American Indians as not only physically but spiritually dangerous, even in league with Satan. Early colonial leader and minister William Bradford, for example, described his first impressions of the landscape in no uncertain terms as ‘‘a hidious & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & willd men.’’6 In other parts of the continent, Spanish explorers and friars, who founded missions and settlements in what would become Florida, Mexico, and the American Southwest, held many of the same ambivalent views about the American landscape and its inhabitants and generally sought to convert both the land and native populations from a ‘‘savage’’ to a more ‘‘civilized’’ condition. Such beliefs played an important role in the violent subjugation of American Indians and the land they inhabited. Although Native American religions at the time of European contact were shaped by local relationships to particular lands and nonhuman animals, and thus consisted of diverse cosmologies and ritual practices, many scholars recognize distinctive differences in their respective perceptions of the natural world. Religious historian Catherine Albanese lists some of these religious commonalities among Native Americans: a fundamentally relational universe, a belief in other-than-human persons, a sense of kinship with the natural world, mythological narratives that included birth-out-of-nature origin accounts, a mythic sense of time, rituals to restore harmony, a belief in shape-shifting (i.e., humans and animals are able to change physical forms with one another), an ‘‘ethos of reciprocity,’’ and an understanding that primary foods had sacred origins.7 For these reasons, Native American religions are often described as religions that hold nature to be sacred or as place-based spiritualities.8 By way of contrast, Christianity in general, and Puritanism in particular, provided a cosmology and theology that reinforced the general impetus among European settlers to consider land not as something sacred and worthy of reverence, but as a resource to be exploited for both material and spiritual ends. For such Christians, both the material and spiritual ends had something to do with glorifying and satisfying a deity who resided beyond the earth and thus should not be too closely identified with it. Nevertheless, some early colonial writings also expressed the belief that one could learn about this deity through nature and that people could grow spiritually through the challenges and dangers posed by nature. Therefore, for many early settlers, the natural world was not only a material inheritance but a spiritual gift. Puritan ministers such as Cotton Mather and especially Jonathan Edwards, who published important works in the early eighteenth century, promoted a Platonic doctrine of correspondence, in which nature on earth was seen as corresponding to divine

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realities. For example, in expounding upon the traditional Christian doctrine that the book of nature complemented the book of scripture, Mather encouraged people to take walks in the ‘‘public library’’ of nature. Edwards also viewed the natural world as a place to read divine ‘‘signs,’’ and wrote that the natural world was not merely a commodity, but had inherent worth, since it was the effulgence of divine glory. This notion helped fertilize American ground for the appreciation of nature that was soon to grow wildly, including the Transcendental movement and the many other forms of nature religion that would follow.9 According to such historical interpretations, nature in early European America was invested with complicated religious meanings.10 Perhaps the most prevalent scholarly narrative suggests that American attitudes did not shift toward nature appreciation until this had first occurred in Europe, beginning with the Enlightenment, and then, with the Romantic reaction to it. Roderick Nash, for example, spotlights figures such as the English philosopher Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), along with Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), linked the aesthetic and the sublime. Meanwhile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who did as much if not more than any other figure to precipitate the Romantic movement, grounded his critique of civilization by appealing to nature’s sacred purity. As Nash puts it, ‘‘Rousseau argued in Emile (1762) that modern man should incorporate primitive qualities into his presently distorted civilized life. And his Julie ou La Nouvelle He´loise (1761) heaped such praise on the sublimity of wilderness scenes in the Alps that it stimulated a generation of artists and writers to adopt the Romantic mode.’’11 Soon European literary figures would visit America, where wildlands could be experienced directly, helping to reshape the perceptual possibilities for the intelligentsia of America’s cities during a period when wild landscapes were retreating rapidly. By the late eighteenth century and with accelerating frequency during the nineteenth century, nature was increasingly described as sublime in American arts and letters. Meanwhile, the influence of Deism (a religious movement that relied on basic Christian teachings purged of their supernatural elements) made its own contribution to nature religion in America, for Deists understood God to be revealed exclusively through the laws of nature. Many figures and movements could be featured in this history in which an appreciation for the sacred dimensions of nature gained momentum. Some of these include the Deistic third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, whose Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) linked the ‘‘sacred fire’’ of liberty to the connection of the people to the land;12 Christian thinkers, including a number of prominent figures from the Religious Society of Friends (popularly known as the Quakers), who found nature sacred and articulated what could be called a kinship ethic with nonhuman creatures;13 artists such as Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of artists, who depicted wildlands as mysterious, sacred places; poets such as William Cullen Bryant, whose ‘‘A Forest Hymn’’ (1825) expressed that the Creator’s hand could be found in the very forests that

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most European Americans had previously found perilous, and Walt Whitman, who wrote famously in Leaves of Grass (1855), ‘‘This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and animals,’’ thus articulating an early, religious kinship ethic toward all creatures; and novelists such as James Fenimore Cooper, whose Leatherstocking tales (published as five novels between 1826 and 1841) not only expressed a reverence for nature but also appreciation for Native American lifeways, which Cooper understood to be deeply dependent on and embedded in nature.14 Cooper’s perspective later became a feature typical of much environmentalist thinking, but this perspective was also evident in early calls for nature preservation, such as when in 1832 George Catlin, ‘‘an early student and painter of the American Indian,’’ was the first to promote the idea of setting aside large national parks that, in his view, should include both wild natural beauty as well as Indians and wild animals.15 Better known are developments that gained momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, some of which were precipitated by the rise of the Transcendentalists, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature (1836), who argued that all natural objects can awaken reverence, ‘‘when the mind is open to their influence.’’16 Indeed, at times, Emerson sounded an animistic tone, speaking of the spiritual truths conveyed by nonhuman beings. Other times he struck a pantheistic note, speaking effusively about the beauty and sublime character of nature. In contrast to the confusions and clutter created by the urban world, Emerson wrote, ‘‘In the woods . . . a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reigns. . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith.’’17 Although some interpreters note his Platonic idealism, which led him to view nature more as the pathway to spiritual truth than as a spiritual end, he nevertheless contributed decisively to the dramatic rise in nature appreciation in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.18 Emerson’s influence includes his impact on Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, both of whom were, by most accounts, far more interested in nature for its own sake than Emerson. Indeed, in Walden (first published in 1854), Thoreau seems to provide an early example of what can be called nonsupernaturalistic nature religion, which will be discussed in more detail below. He also represented an archetype, even if he only partly embodied it himself, of the personal, spiritual return to nature.19 By the end of the century and into the next, John Burroughs would more consistently follow through on such impulses, fusing a scientific naturalism and a religious pantheism in what was perhaps the best early example of the back-to-the-land movement that became an important characteristic of the American counterculture in the second half of the twentieth century.20 Burroughs, Thoreau, and Muir were all naturalists who were more scientifically inclined than Emerson. For this reason, they fueled a more naturalistic form of nature spirituality than Emerson and most other Transcendentalists, and they pioneered an approach more amenable to the veneration of nature through environmental activism and bioregional

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experimentation than those of a more Transcendentalist bent (or those today who might be considered New Age in spiritual orientation). This race through time brings us to the cusp of the age of conservation, which is most often traced to Thoreau, Muir, and the utilitarian forester and founder of the United States Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot who, for his own part, was influenced by the Social Gospel movement that flourished at the turn of the century.21 A central reason for sketching this history is to underscore that by the beginning of the twentieth century, most of the main features of religious environmentalism had become manifest and were beginning to spread. A key rationale for this presentation is to emphasize that the American experience is a result of complex reciprocal influences between European and American experiences, perceptions, and worldviews, and to suggest that the land itself, so wild and different from the domesticated landscapes in Europe, had its own influence on the minds and hearts of those engaged with it. Less well studied and understood are the reciprocal influences among the experiences of those who came to North America from Africa, and later those from Latin America and Asia, as they encountered the land and other peoples here.22 More clear is that by the time the historian Fredrick Jackson Turner proclaimed and lamented the end of the American frontier (circa 1890 with the end of significant, armed, Indian resistance), many Americans of European ancestry were regretting the steady decline of wild landscapes.23 Turner himself asserted that this loss threatened the virility and spiritual health of the nation. Such anxieties helped set the stage for the further development and increasing diversity of nature religions, many of which, during the twentieth century, also came to promote a spiritual or religious environmentalism.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY NATURE RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENTALISM UNTIL EARTH DAY The first two-thirds of the twentieth century was characterized by developments that built on those sketched above. A few examples of particular importance, however, should be highlighted because of their influence. Among the most noteworthy was the emergence of nature-based youth movements such as the Boy Scouts and Indian Guides. Ernest Thompson Seton set this trend in motion when, during the first decade of the new century, he established the ‘‘Woodcraft Indians’’ movement and subsequently helped shape the Boy Scouts (founded in 1910) and Indian Guides (1925). Through these movements, Seton spread his view that American Indians provided ideal models for spirituality and ethics. Influenced by Darwinian thought, Seton also wrote widely about the emotional and altruistic lives of animals, although his critics claimed he did so in an unscientific and anthropomorphic way. Whatever the truth in these criticisms, Seton fostered a more positive evaluation of the continent’s first human inhabitants, promoted a nature-based spirituality that understood nature as a sacred place where God can be encountered and virtue developed, and thereby helped shape the century’s environmentalist discourse.

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Better known is John Muir, who was born in Scotland, immigrated to rural Wisconsin as a youngster, wandered widely as a young adult, and eventually found his own Shangri-la in the wildlands of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Whether by clinging to the top of a tree during a windstorm, tromping across the continent from north to south, or jumping crevasses in an Alaskan blizzard, Muir embraced the natural world and it seemed to enter into him ‘‘not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat.’’24 His writings expressed a sacramental communion with nature that went beyond philosophical symbolism. As he wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra, ‘‘We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.’’25 His writings are replete with similar passages, which arose out of the belief that ‘‘In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.’’26 Reflecting the influence of both Transcendental thought and Darwinian theory, nature’s totality, particularly its grandeur, thrilled Muir, and these perceptions led him to underscore human insignificance in some of his writings. Such feelings led Muir to become a champion of the areas he considered sacred. According to Albanese, ‘‘To go to the mountains and the sequoia forests, for Muir, was to engage in religious worship of utter seriousness and dedication; to come down from the mountains and preach the gospel of preservation was to live out his life according to the ethic that his religion compelled.’’27 In 1892, Muir co-founded the Sierra Club, which articulated the preservationist ethic that would undergird the wilderness movement in general, and, at least in theory, guide the management of the National Park Service.28 Using both theistic and nontheistic religious language (he often sounded more pantheistic and animistic than theistic), Muir described his own spiritual experiences in nature, called on Americans to travel to wild places to experience the earth’s sacred voices for themselves, and battled the more politically powerful Gifford Pinchot on a number of issues related to wildlands management. The most famous conflict was over a dam Pinchot sought to build at Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park. The nation’s first forester who became its initial United States Forest Service director, Pinchot had a more orthodox, anthropocentric, and utilitarian religious ethic than Muir. He succeeded in establishing the ‘‘multiple use’’ doctrine as the management philosophy for governing most federal lands. Although Muir lost most of the specific battles he waged, he contributed to the more preservationist ethic undergirding the National Parks and designated wilderness areas in the United States, and he helped to make the wilderness movement an important social force, if not a new religious movement. Some scholars, such as Stephen Fox and Michael P. Cohen, portray Muir as more pagan than theistic. Fox builds a compelling case that Muir’s use of theistic tropes was motivated more out of a desire for political

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effectiveness (convincing a predominantly Christian nation to protect his own sacred places) than out of a theistic cosmology. Whatever one’s judgment about whether Muir remained theistic in some way or became more of a pantheistic or animistic pagan, the tension between Muir and Pinchot can be seen as archetypal all the way into the twenty-first century. Conflicts among those who are more traditionally theistic (if not always orthodox), but believe there is a religious duty to conserve nature (at least for people’s sake), and those who believe that nature is directly sacred in some way, have contributed to at least some of the internal tensions among environmentally concerned people in America. So the battles between Muir and Pinchot, which were especially heated in the first dozen years of the new century, are noteworthy for presaging much of what was to follow later in the century.29 No longer would nature be assigned a role as merely picturesque theater or as a backdrop for human accomplishment, but increasingly in the twentieth century, nature became a stage for new productions: a place for theatrical battles over sacred space. Such was the case in another monumental dam battle at Echo Park in the Dinosaur National Monument. If Echo Park Dam became the ‘‘test case,’’ as historian Roderick Nash suggests, to measure wilderness enthusiasm in the mid-twentieth century, then the victory there may well have represented a tally mark in favor of a particular form of religion. As one Sierra Club member noted before the Senate subcommittee that heard arguments from both preservationist and development constituencies, ‘‘We have had money changers in our temples before. We have thrown them out in the past, and with the help of this good committee we shall do it again.’’30 Similar rhetorical flourishes were involved in the battle over dams in the Grand Canyon, such as the infamous advertisement run by then-Sierra club director David Brower, which pointedly asked Americans, ‘‘Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?’’ This remark, and others like it, were a summary confession of a belief in the sacrality of the natural world and implied that natural spaces could be desecrated by commercial or utilitarian interests. Another twentieth-century development that indicated a growing religious apprehension of the natural world can be discerned in the writings of two well-known scientific writers, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Their nature-related spiritualities and influence on later environmentalists are underappreciated by many scholars, who instead focus on their influence in popularizing ecological understandings. Leopold, who died shortly before the publication of A Sand County Almanac (1948), is now considered the greatest ecological ethicist of the twentieth century, in large measure for articulating a holistic and biocentric ‘‘land ethic,’’ as, for example, in these famous passages: The land is one organism. . . . If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.31

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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts . . . [and] The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.32 A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.33

Less well known is the influence on his thought by the Russian mystic Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky, who was in turn influenced by Theosophy as well as other Russian mystical thinkers, including Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Leopold’s holism, which anticipated James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and considered life to be integrally connected and interdependent, can be traced to these influences.34 Also not well known are that Leopold confided to his daughter that his own religion came from nature, and that his family considered his (as well as their own) religious understandings to be best characterized as a pantheistic spirituality in which there was no personal God orchestrating things, but nevertheless, a sense of the land as sacred and valuable apart from human needs.35 Carson also had a deep, nature-based spirituality. This is less known than her role in precipitating the modern environmental movement through Silent Spring (1962), which assimilated current scientific understandings to express alarm about the threats posed by pesticides and herbicides.36 Of course, when writing Silent Spring, Carson was concerned about her scientific credibility, and so her spirituality and ethics were only subtly expressed. But careful reading of her work, especially her earlier books focused on the oceans and talks presented to women’s organizations, make her own nature religion clearer, as well as the deeper reasons for her environmental activism.37 Her spirituality did not involve extra-worldly divine beings, yet her language sometimes expressed a subtle animistic perception,38 as well as a spirituality that appreciated the miracle and mystery of life on its own terms. She even dedicated Silent Spring to Albert Schweitzer, whose reverence for life ethics had become famous, thereby making clear her own affinity with such ethics. As a marine biologist, Carson often highlighted the evolutionary, geologic forces of a world where ‘‘man is an uneasy trespasser’’ and the natural cycles and rhythms of the ocean continually created and destroyed, giving and taking life.39 The boundaries that Carson explored were not just the ocean’s edges, but the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, wherein the nonhuman formed a kind of ecological baseline. Thus, Carson called into question two kinds of faith: faith in ‘‘scientism’’ (the benevolent impacts of human technological mastery) and faith in a God disconnected from natural processes. The impact (and controversy) of Silent Spring can be partially attributed to Carson’s willingness to question these dominant cultural faiths.

NATURE RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENTALISM SINCE THE 1960s Between the end of the Second World War and the publication of Silent Spring, Americans focused on recovering from the trauma of war, and

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environmental issues were little discussed. The 1960s brought many upheavals, from those surrounding the civil rights movement to cold war ideology. The cold war precipitated both a reliance on atomic weapons for security and engagement in the bloody war in Vietnam. These events not only led to widespread distrust of the government and its anti-communist ideology; they also forced many into a serious reappraisal of Christianity, the country’s dominant religion. Those looking for new forms of religious meaning and political engagement found a greater array of religious alternatives than had ever been the case previously. This was in part owing to immigration from Asia, but also to the proliferation of new religious movements that appealed directly to those disenchanted with the dominant, organized, institutional religions. Less often noticed, for it was not always understood as religious, was the growth of a spiritually holistic environmentalism that challenged the anthropocentric ethics of the culture’s mainstreams. The movements and figures previously discussed made available such religious and ethical alternatives, and when the broader social and environmental conditions were ripe in the 1960s, they grew more rapidly and widespread than ever before. A key watermark in this development was the celebration of Earth Day on April 22, 1970, which not only publicized but also ritualized a growing national consciousness regarding environmental problems. Media coverage of this event was extensive, and it is likely that key pieces of national legislation that followed in the 1970s (such as the Endangered Species Act) were influenced by this visible, mainstream recognition of our environmental predicament.40 For some among the diverse constituencies that rallied to commemorate Earth Day the event assumed a religious character, delineating a special time of ritual remembrance, celebration, and solidarity. Since then, a tripartite typology of religious environmentalism and activism has come more clearly into view. The first, a sense that ‘‘green religions’’ are environmentally concerned world religions, emerged from a great ferment over religion and nature in America during and since the 1960s that was rooted in scholarship focusing on the relationships between religions, cultures, and the earth’s living systems.41 Among the most interesting work was that of anthropologists, including Roy Rappaport, Marvin Harris, and Gerrardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, who focused on the role ritual and religion can play in regulating ecosystems in a way that supports traditional livelihoods and prevents environmental deterioration.42 But these theorists had little impact on popular green religion. A number of other scholars, however, engendered a strong reaction among both scholars and some lay people by arguing that some of the world’s major religious traditions are especially responsible for environmental deterioration because they foster environmentally destructive attitudes and behaviors.43 The most commonly identified culprit was Christianity (especially the most powerful Protestant forms), and sometimes scholars articulated prescriptions to fix such religions, or offered alternatives to them.44

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Such critiques and suggestions drew two reactions. In the first, religious thinkers either defended their traditions arguing that, properly understood, they are environmentally friendly. Others argued that some streams within their traditions provide green alternatives. In the second approach, culpability was forthrightly acknowledged, and ideas for the ‘‘greening,’’ or for the environmentally friendly reform of the tradition, were advanced. In America, the bulk of such reflection occurred within Christianity for a number of reasons. A large number of Americans identified with Christianity, which had been the tradition most often blamed for environmental destruction, so Christians felt a need to respond directly to such criticisms. As well, the tradition’s emphasis on sin and repentance provided an internal, theological basis for reevaluating life and making changes in the light of faith.45 Although there was a greater quantity and range of debate within and about Christianity and the environment than in other world religions, similar questioning about and soul-searching within other traditions began in earnest.46 Scholars of religion also began to respond to such concerns. A scholarly field, now best known as ‘‘religion and ecology,’’ emerged in the early 1990s, which sought to identify obstacles the world’s religions might pose to environmental sustainability, uncover the resources within such traditions for promoting sound environmental behavior, or alternatively, to discover the ways in which these traditions would need to change in order to become more green. By the early twenty-first century, significant scholarly work had explored the world’s major religious traditions to understand their environmental attitudes and impacts, as well as to lay a foundation for steering them in greener directions.47 Reforming religious thinking and action along environmental lines was not easy and did not, by all available evidence, extend widely. Indeed, it has always been difficult to assess the extent to which environmental attitudes and behaviors cohered, and under what set of circumstances they were more or less likely to do so.48 It is clear, however, that some intellectuals and lay people have been pushing their traditions to understand the quest for environmental sustainability as a central religious imperative.49 For example, once a year, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an Episcopal church in New York City, humans are not the only animals that attend the worship service. On the feast day of St. Francis (the patron saint of ecology), in addition to a ‘‘Gaian Mass’’ intended to promote ecological consciousness, the church conducts a ceremonial blessing of animals, which often involves a lively assortment of creatures, ranging from an African elephant to llamas to birds, dogs, cats, and even blue-green algae. For over three decades, the cathedral has spearheaded many efforts to promote ‘‘green’’ perceptions among its congregants, including an ‘‘ecology trail’’ and architectural and artistic additions both inside and outside the sanctuary that draw attention to humanity’s place within the larger earthen ecosystem.50 On the opposite coast of America, a different type of ‘‘cathedral’’ has been recognized as worthy of reverence and protection, as California oldgrowth forests have become popularly known as ‘‘cathedral groves.’’

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Interfaith groups like the Religious Campaign for Forest Protection contend that these majestic trees are part of God’s sacred creation, and seek to protect these groves from further exploitative development. Drawing especially on Jewish and Christian theological traditions, this group grounds its forest conservation efforts in a stewardship ethic and an apprehension that the natural world can lead people to understand divine truths.51 Yet another example of religiously motivated environmental ethics comes from a type of American Buddhist practice popularly known as ‘‘engaged Buddhism.’’ Religious studies scholar and practicing Buddhist Kenneth Kraft has highlighted the role that American Buddhists have played in protests at nuclear waste facilities and test sites in Nevada, where participants have performed ceremonies and walking meditations as a way to draw attention to this environmental threat. Kraft proposes that a collective environmental ethic, which he calls ‘‘eco-karma,’’ may further alert Buddhists to their long-term obligation to the natural world.52 Though many other examples of institutional religious ‘‘greening’’ could be given, the above selections reveal the creative manner in which environmental concerns are being translated through the filter of religious practice. Many lay practitioners, religious leaders, and scholars continue to dialogue and respond to environmental inequities and degradation with the understanding that these problems mandate appropriate religious attention. The second typology suggests that green religions are ‘‘nature-assacred’’ religions. However, the boundaries among these types are fluid. This is not a problem if one remembers with Jonathan Z. Smith that ‘‘map is not territory’’; in other words, typologies do not perfectly mirror the world but are useful if they help orient us to the terrain.53 Natureas-sacred religions provide a general map for detecting an increasingly substantial piece of religious terrain in the American context. Regardless of the social scientific curiosities that may animate scholars involved in the emerging ‘‘religion and ecology’’ field and regardless of whether the scholars involved feel loyalty or affinity toward the traditions they focus upon, most of them seem to consider nature to be sacred in some way. This conviction appears to be tethered to an ethical concern about environmental decline. Such religion is the second general type of green religion that has emerged with some force in American culture. Because nature is considered a sacred point of reference that should inform one’s ethical and political motivations, this type of religion may be defined as nature religion. This definition is apt, for the perception that nature is sacred and worthy of reverent care is central to the identities of a number of groups whose participants consider themselves to be engaged in what they also sometimes call nature religion. Such religions include Paganism, many if not most indigenous religions, and some New Religious movements and branches of New Age spirituality. The survey of earlier environmental thinkers and groups revealed that such spirituality is not new in North America, but that such trends have been strengthened since Earth Day.54

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The revival or reinvention (depending on one’s historiography) of Paganism is an especially important contemporary manifestation of the sensibility that the earth is sacred.55 In rhetoric and sometimes in practice, pagans support environmental causes. Indeed, those who consider themselves to be pagan have been deeply involved in radical environmentalism, including through participation in Earth First! (from 1980) and the Earth Liberation Front (from the early 1990s).56 Such groups have alternatively deployed demonstrations, civil disobedience, sabotage, and even arson, as well as more mainstream tactics from boycotts to electoral politics, in their efforts to save the living beings they consider to be intrinsically valuable, and a ‘‘Mother Earth’’ they consider sacred. Indeed, those who are selfconsciously pagan in their religious identity are the ones most likely to be at the forefront of ecological resistance movements in America. This is because when the earth is itself considered sacred, and not only indirectly so because it was created by a divine being, then the earth itself becomes the locus of religious and ethical devotion. Like some of the earliest environmental advocates in America, politically radical pagans generally express affinity with what they perceive to be the nature-beneficent spiritualities and lifeways of indigenous peoples. Some try to draw on such spiritualities in their own religious lives, even though this can be problematic and controversial. They have sometimes, as well, expressed solidarity through political action by supporting Native American groups who are struggling for cultural survival and to protect places sacred to them.57 Indeed, there has been a stunning revival of indigenous cultures and spiritualities purporting to consider nature sacred and promoting ethics of kinship toward all creatures. This development has nowhere been stronger than in North America. Evidence ranges from the engagements of indigenous peoples in lobbying and other forms of activism seeking to protect places considered sacred and essential to their traditional livelihoods;58 to scholarly analyses of ‘‘traditional ecological knowledge’’ which argue for the value of such knowledge in the management of ecosystems;59 to the hard work that goes into preventing the extinction of indigenous languages, upon which ceremonies and connections with the natural and spirit worlds are thought to depend;60 to other forms of ethnographic and archeological work, which can help indigenous people protect and reconstruct their traditions. Native Americans have also contributed their own comparative analyses of native religious perceptions in relation to forms of theology that are traditionally more transcendent in orientation. As early as 1973, for example, Native American scholar Vine Deloria contrasted indigenous American perceptions with Christianity, noting differences in conceptions of space and time that he believed to be crucial for religiously informed relationships with the natural world. This is captured well in the following statement: ‘‘The major step to be taken to understand religion today is to understand the nature of religion as it occurs in specific places. . . . Rather than attempt to graft contemporary ecological concern onto basic Christian doctrines and avoid blame for the current planetary disaster,

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Christians would be well advised to surrender many of their doctrines and come to grips with the lands now occupied.’’ Highlighting the importance of place to religion, Deloria continued, ‘‘To admit that certain lands will create divergent beliefs and practices and to change to accommodate to those realities is certainly preferable to extinction. . . . That a fundamental element of religion is an intimate relationship with the land on which the religion is practiced should be a major premise of future theological concern.’’61 Deloria’s contention underscored that conceptions of land are critical to religious understandings, and particularly to nature-as-sacred religions. The impact of what is now several generations of reappraisal of the value of indigenous culture has led to an increasing affirmation in Western popular culture of the nature religions of indigenous peoples.62 Two additional examples that have reached large audiences are noteworthy. The motion picture Pocahontas (1995), which celebrated a form of indigenous spirituality, offers one such example. Directors Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg reported after the release of the movie how they ‘‘tried to tap into [Pocahontas’s] spirituality and the spirituality of the Native Americans, especially in the way they relate to nature.’’63 The animistic nature spirituality and environmental kinship ethic depicted in this Disneyproduced movie was reincarnated at its Animal Kingdom theme park in Florida, which opened in 1998. There a performance titled ‘‘Pocahontas and Her Forest Friends’’ reprised the story and the quest for kinship and harmony among all creatures, beseeching audiences, ‘‘Will you be a protector of the forest?’’64 The opening ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, provide a second example, when an assumed American Indian reverence for Mother Earth was celebrated on ice. During the opening ceremony, representatives from five of the region’s indigenous nations offered in their own languages both welcoming messages and spiritual blessings; these were then translated into the official Olympic languages. To tunes played on indigenous flutes, skaters in Indian-inspired costumes performed a dance, choreographed in synch with native drumming depicting the ‘‘heartbeat of Mother Earth’’ herself. The narrator underscored the value of this indigenous Mother Earth spirituality, and many of the Native American participants were thrilled to be able to present their cultures in a positive way to a television audience estimated at three billion.65 In North America it is not only pagan, radical environmentalist, and American Indian groups, however, that consider nature to be intrinsically sacred. Some of those involved in New Age subcultures and New Religious movements share such perceptions, even though these groups have acquired a reputation for otherworldliness and political apathy. Some in these movements, for example, view consciousness change as a prerequisite to both positive social change and environmental well-being. They also consider efforts to protect and restore nature as important ways to educate and foster the needed transformation of attitudes. Some even think that healthy ecosystems themselves contribute critically important energies to the envisioned consciousness transformations, such that

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without environmental protection and restoration movements, and the resulting healthier natural energies, consciousness change is unlikely to occur.66 Yet another nature-as-sacred movement that has gained momentum in the post–civil rights era is homesteading. Rebecca Gould traces the homesteading impulse to John Burroughs, but also to Thoreau’s Walden, a text that remains a centerpiece in the sacred canon of many homesteaders. Like Thoreau’s pondside adventures, Gould asserts that homesteading has been ‘‘the turn to nature as a form of spiritual regeneration and cultural dissent,’’ with nature serving as the ‘‘ultimate reference point.’’67 Though nature may be thought of as timeless or foundational in some sense by homesteaders, Gould contends that their choices reflect a larger American story of the ‘‘turn to ÔnatureÕ and the extraecclesial quest for Ôthe religiousÕ’’ in the face of modern social dilemmas.68 Homesteading, thus, serves as one example of the ferment over religion and nature in North America, representing a mode of dissent from dominant cultural streams by turning to nature as a place of proper physical and spiritual habitation. The ‘‘greening of religions’’ phenomenon and the growth of nature religions involve a diversity of religionists, activists, and scholars, all of whom believe the earth is in peril by human behavior yet worthy of reverent care. Hence initiatives are underway to bridge the gap between what is (ecological decline) and what ought to be (environmentally sustainable lifeways). In this respect, the ‘‘Earth Charter’’ is one example of green religious production that might prove globally significant. The Earth Charter was first proposed by Maurice Strong, a Canadian who served as general secretary for the 1992 ‘‘World Summit on Environment and Development,’’ which was sponsored by the United Nations and held in Rio de Janeiro. During the late 1990s the Earth Charter went through an extensive drafting and review process within a number of nongovernmental, religious, ‘‘civil society’’ organizations that are engaged with the United Nations.69 The drafting process was designed to gain maximum support from the international community. A draft presented to the United Nations during the ‘‘World Summit on Sustainable Development’’ (WSSD), a follow-up to the Rio conference held a decade later in Johannesburg, South Africa, spoke of ‘‘respect and care for the community of life in all of its diversity’’ and proclaimed that protecting and restoring the ecological integrity of the earth was a ‘‘sacred trust,’’ inseparable from the quest for justice and peace. The document concluded, ‘‘let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life.’’70 As has been noted, individuals involved in green religious production frequently use rhetoric of the sacred to express awe and reverence toward the ‘‘miracle’’ of life. We have reviewed early and recent examples where science has been an important source of such perception. In addition to these forms of green religion, it appears that evolutionary understandings introduce yet another possibility: nature religion without supernaturalism. By speculating on current trends, one may surmise that nonsupernaturalistic nature religion will likely become an important feature in the religious life of America and beyond, and such religion will increasingly

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become a wellspring for environmental action based on kinship ethics and a reverence for life. A good way to explore this hypothesis is to address two sets of questions: 1. How strong are the trends leading to the three types of green religious production under analysis? More specifically, are the social and environmental conditions that gave rise to them likely to wane or increase and intensify? 2. What are the drivers of ‘‘nonsupernaturalistic’’ nature religion? Are these likely to become more or less important influences on naturerelated religion? With regard to the first set of questions, two critical factors catapult forward all three forms of nature religion: environmental degradation and evolutionary science. These variables are intertwined in a complex mix with many other variables, but they are, for a number of reasons, becoming decisive elements in religious production. For many people, environmental degradation is increasingly obvious and alarming. Thus, responses to such perceptions have been grafted onto existing religions (green religion type 1), and mixed in with revitalized and new forms of nature-as-sacred religions (green religion/nature religion type 2). This development represents a significant innovation in the history of religion. Increasingly and for the first time, apocalyptic expectation arises not from the fear of angry divinities, or incomprehensible natural disasters, but from environmental science. With regard to the second set of the preceding questions, although environmental science is reshaping green religions of type 1 and 2, evolutionary narratives may also serve to erode the otherworldly beliefs that usually accompany such religious forms. Most relevant to speculations about the future of religion (in general) and green and nature religions (in particular) is the conviction that evolutionary science is the central driver producing or at least shaping green religions of type 1 and 2, yet this science makes less plausible certain metaphysical tenets of such religion. The reason for this is because evolutionary narratives provide a cosmogony that, while leaving many mysteries unexplained, has explanatory power apart from beliefs in intelligent design or other forms of divine creativity. Thus, evolutionary science can challenge religious ideas that locate divinity beyond the terrestrial world, even as various religions begin to turn green through an appreciation of what are, at their roots, evolutionary insights. Indeed, within hardly more than a century, notwithstanding polling data in America revealing that less than half of Americans believe that natural selection provides the best account of the diversity of life and human origins, it appears that evolutionary understandings have gained a solid foothold, if not widespread acceptance, among the world’s better educated sectors.71 Moreover, despite resistance from conservative religionists, evolution is increasingly taught globally and appears to be well along the way toward acceptance among both well and less well educated sectors, at least when taking a long view and realizing that gestalt shifts usually take time.

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Meanwhile, within only the past several decades, large numbers of people began to recognize that environmental degradation is severe and threatens both the quality of life, and the processes integral to life itself. Such recognition appears to have grown even more rapidly than beliefs in evolution, probably because such dynamics are more easily observed (often through global media) than are evolutionary processes. Sometimes this degradation is depicted in moral or aesthetic terms, or explicitly or implicitly as desecration, accompanied by dismay since it is believed to threaten the beautiful if not miraculous and awe-inspiring diversity of life on earth. Given the comfort that an otherworldly existence offers to humans facing an apparent mortality, it would be a fool’s errand to suggest the total eclipse of such beliefs. It seems a reasonable hypothesis, however, in the light of recent decades of intellectual, cultural, and religious developments, to expect, at least when thinking in very long time frames, that supernatural religions, including those forms that fit green religion types 1 and 2, will gradually decline or be significantly reshaped. It may be that the third, nonsupernaturalistic type, now only nascent and growing within small enclaves of devotees around the world, will inherit much of the religious future. With such religion, people feel awe and reverence toward the earth’s living systems and even feel themselves as connected and belonging to these systems, but without believing in deities that exist independently from these systems. Many scientists, alarmed by the implications of ecological fragmentation, have become more explicit about such a reverential attitude, oftentimes using metaphors of the sacred to describe the natural world and its evolutionary processes. A statement issued in the early 1990s by a group of prominent scientists including Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Schneider, and Carl Sagan, expressed the following sentiment: ‘‘As Scientists, many of us have had profound personal experiences of awe and reverence before the universe. We understand that what is regarded as sacred is more likely to be treated with care and respect. Our planetary home should be so regarded. Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment should be infused with a vision of the sacred.’’72 David Takacs, when interviewing scientists who had devoted their lives to the conservation of biological diversity, found such sentiments to be common, concluding: ‘‘Some biologists have found their own brand of religion, and it is based on biodiversity. [They] attach the label spiritual to deep, driving feelings they can’t understand, but that give their lives meaning, impel their professional activities, and make them ardent conservationists.’’73 The impact of Darwinian theory upon religious perceptions has helped shape many scientifically informed types of nature religion. In the early twentieth century, those like John Burroughs were already expressing such perceptions. For Burroughs, Darwin’s claims did not lessen the wonder of existence; rather, he writes, ‘‘It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life.’’74 Burroughs undoubtedly summarizes the feelings of many who view evolution as a sacred process when he wrote, ‘‘The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion—the wonder

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and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe—persists. . . . If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers, we go to the woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them than they were.’’75 Though modern scientists may be less inclined to put it as boldly as Burroughs, increasing numbers of books written by scientists illustrate how, for some, the natural world evokes a religious reverence for life.76 For example, twentieth-century anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley, in his wide-ranging books and essays, expressed a deep reverence for life and its mysteries. He came to this reverence in no small part through scientific inquiry, for although he was a believer in evolution, he averred that science was unable to fully explain the beauty, value, and mystery of life. The following passages succinctly capture this sensibility: I am an evolutionist . . . [but] in the world there is nothing to explain the world. Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life, nothing to explain why the stolid realm of rock and soil and mineral should diversify itself into beauty, terror, and uncertainty.77 No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal, no doctrine of use or disuse. Water has merely leapt out of vapor and thin nothingness in the night sky to array itself in form. There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and green leaves.78

Eiseley concluded his life without any pretension that he understood what the explanation for life was, yet he never wavered regarding his intuition that it was a miracle and worthy of reverent care.79 Such an affectively grounded spirituality of connection might not resemble today’s more common supernaturalistic religions. They might, nevertheless, require religious terminology to capture the feelings. It might also require ritual forms to physically venerate the living systems for which the word ‘‘sacred’’ is used as a way to express their ultimate value.80 It may be that such a religion, in which an evolutionary story becomes intertwined with reverence for life, and combined with practices designed to protect and restore nature, will play a major role in the religious future of Americans. Whatever the future may hold, it is clear that ever since the arrival of Europeans in North America, the relationships among the continent’s diverse peoples, environments, and religions have been complex, contested, and sometimes violent. Religious traditions have played a prominent role in American interpretations of the natural world. Likewise, the American landscape itself has inspired new religious vision and practice. Thus, in North America, religious history has had a great deal to do with nature and nature a great deal to do with religious history. This relationship has and will continue to have a great deal to do with the rest of the biosphere and the fate of all those who depend upon it.

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NOTES This chapter expands ideas first discussed in Bron Taylor, ‘‘Religion and Environmentalism in North America and Beyond,’’ Oxford Handbook on Religion and Ecology, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 1. The first example in this paragraph refers to Genesis Farm, an ecological learning center that was founded by Dominican sister Mary Ann McGillis; see Sarah McFarland Taylor, ‘‘Genesis Farm’’ in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (New York: Continuum, 2005), 691–92. Among its many programs, Genesis Farm promotes the work of Catholic priest and ‘‘geologian’’ Thomas Berry, whose ‘‘universe story’’ narrates evolutionary events as sacred events; on the Web at www.genesisfarm.org. The play on the phrase ‘‘What Would Jesus Do?’’ by substituting ‘‘Drive’’ for ‘‘Do’’ was an effort that began in 2001 among Christian activists in Boston. The phrase soon caught on and spread geographically, gaining considerable momentum among Christians who connected their transportation choices to global warming; see Bill McKibben, ‘‘What Would Jesus Drive?’’ in Taylor, ed., 318. For information about Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center, see Wendy Johnson, ‘‘Garden Practice,’’ in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 335–39; on the Web at www.sfzc.com/ggfindex.htm. For information about Lothlorien, see Sarah Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); on the Web at www. elflore.org/lothlorien.htm. 2. See Samantha Smith, Goddess Earth: Exposing the Pagan Agenda of the Environmental Movement (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1994); and Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park (San Diego, CA: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), especially chapter 16, ‘‘The New Pantheists.’’ 3. David Chidester, Patterns of Action: Religion and Ethics in a Comparative Perspective (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1987), 4. 4. See Bron Taylor, ‘‘Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part I): From Deep Ecology to Radical Environmentalism,’’ Religion 31, 2 (2001): 175–93, especially 175–77 for further discussion of definitional conundrums related to religion and nature. This and the second part of this study, ‘‘Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part II): From Earth First! and Bioregionalism to Scientific Paganism and the New Age,’’ Religion 31, 3 (2001): 225–45, which focuses on the period from 1960 to the present, complement the material discussed in this chapter. 5. See, for example, Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Lynn White, ‘‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,’’ Science 155 (March 10, 1967): 1203–7. 6. Quoted in Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 34. 7. Ibid., 19–28. 8. For two brief, introductory texts that deal with such themes, see Joel Martin, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Howard Harrod, The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000).

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9. Albanese, 42–45. 10. In addition to Albanese’s Nature Religion in America, other commonly cited scholarly sources include Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956 and 1984); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1620–1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); and Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. More recently, John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), added interesting interpretations of early Christian attitudes toward nature, including a novel reading of the Puritan evangelist Jonathan Edwards, who Gatta claims anticipated Aldo Leopold’s biocentric land ethic earlier than John Muir. Albanese recently revisited her work on American nature religion in Reconsidering Nature Religion (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). 11. Nash, 49. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry onto the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1999); Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764; reprint: Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004). 12. See Gatta, 27. 13. See ibid., 35–70, for a provocative discussion of the nature-related spirituality of both Calvinist and Quaker thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 14. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Gatta’s Making Nature Sacred provides excellent discussions of these and many other influential artistic figures; for Cole, Bryant, and Cooper, see 71–88; for Whitman, 110–16; and for Herman Melville, 116–25. For more discussion of these figures and movements see also Nash, 67–83. 15. See Nash, 100–101. 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000). 17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Penguin, 1983), 10. 18. For Emerson, though occasional forays into ‘‘wild’’ country were good fodder for thought, nature was a place to think, not to live. Eschewing Muir’s camping invitation and later beckoning Muir to join him in New England since nature ‘‘is a sublime mistress but an intolerable wife’’ (Nash, 126), Emerson’s writing primarily appealed to nature as a conduit for divinity (not the resting place of divinity). As Gatta (89) puts it, Emerson ultimately seems to reduce the nonhuman world to an epiphenomenon. Thus, despite his disdain for nature’s commodification, nature was more useful for Emerson as symbol rather than reality. Emerson’s influence, however, cannot be denied, and Albanese points out that many streams of nature religion that championed nature’s healing capacities (including the New Thought movement in the late nineteenth century and the New Age movement in the late twentieth century) esteemed Emerson’s writings (Albanese, 114–15). 19. Gatta names Thoreau ‘‘the presiding spirit of American environmental literature,’’ adding, ‘‘For Thoreau, the accumulation of merely factual knowledge never offered sufficient ground for understanding the essential nature of nature. No literary figure of the antebellum era grasped more deeply than he what it might mean in religious terms to extend revisionist notions of biblical hermeneutics toward formation of a new hermeneutics of nature. No one felt more intensely than he what Emerson’s call to shift the locus of spiritual authority—away from the revelation

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preserved in scripture toward a Ôrevelation to usÕ through nature—would mean in practical experience. And no one pursued more deliberately the spiritual implications of emergent ÔdevelopmentalÕ or evolutionary scientific discoveries’’ (Gatta, 72). 20. For an excellent analysis with Burroughs at the center, see Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). 21. Keith Naylor, ‘‘Gifford Pinchot,’’ in Taylor, ed., 1280–81. 22. Until recently there has been a dearth of scholarship exploring the nature-related spiritual attitudes and practices of African Americans, although scholars are beginning to remedy this. For an interesting introduction and a recent review of pertinent references see Kimberly K. Smith, ‘‘What Is Africa to Me? Wilderness in Black Thought, 1860–1930,’’ Environmental Ethics 27, 3 (2005): 279–97, and Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). For one of the best general overviews of ethnic African identity and its influence on African American social and religious understandings, see Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Two other books worth noting for their regional attention to the reciprocal impact of land and African American cultures upon one another are Mart Stewart’s historical study of coastal Georgia in ‘‘What Nature Suffers to Groe’’: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), and portions of Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). However, there are still many topics that deserve further attention. Mart Stewart, for example, points to the ‘‘counterlandscape’’ experienced by slaves, who moved between the spaces created by plantation owners and field bosses, and thereby constructed cultural identities influenced by their familiarity with the Georgia lowlands. It has also been noted that swamplands served an archetypal function as a space of liberation and religious resistance in African American literature. In Making Nature Sacred, Gatta briefly examines the religiously liminal and ambivalent properties of swampland in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Dred and in W.E.B. Du Bois’s underappreciated novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). In a more contemporary milieu, the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison stand out for their use of nature religion themes. Comparing and contrasting the African experience and its contribution to nature religion in America remains an open area of opportunity for scholarly research. 23. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History,’’ in The Frontier in American History (Collected Works) (Melbourne, FL: Krieger, 1962). 24. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (New York: Penguin, 1987), 228. 25. Ibid., 16. 26. Ibid., 270. 27. Albanese, 101. 28. Muir has been criticized by some for his apparent disdain toward the ‘‘unclean’’ and ‘‘dirty’’ Indians he encountered in the California Sierras. While it could be argued that Muir felt wilderness was threatened by people in general, regardless of their ethnicity, ambivalence, if not hostility, toward Native Americans framed a good deal of the ideology behind early National Parks policy, which often excluded native peoples from areas believed to be sullied by human habitation.

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These policies of exclusion have since been exported globally, sometimes creating acute conflict in areas that have been sustainably utilized by local peoples for long periods of time. For a first-rate treatment of Native Americans in relation to the National Parks, see Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 29. Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981); Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); and Steven J. Holmes, The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 30. Nash, 215. 31. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Essays from Round River (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 190. 32. Ibid., 239. 33. Ibid., 262. 34. David Pecotic, ‘‘Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky’’ (1225–27), and ‘‘Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’’ (730–32) in Taylor, ed. See also Lovelock’s fascinating ‘‘Gaian Pilgrimage’’ in ibid., 683–85. For his original theory, see James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 35. For the most revealing discussion, see Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 506–7. 36. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 37. For example, see Rachel Carson, The Sea around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). But an even more forthcoming expression of her spirituality can be found in ‘‘The real world around us,’’ an address she presented in 1954 to nearly 1,000 women journalists, and finally published in Linda Lear, ed., Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 148–63, especially 159. Here one finds her expansive love of nature and the mysteries of the cosmos, as well as the underpinnings for her engagement as an environmental activist, for she concludes with a call to action. Also of special interest is her early claim about the superior moral intuition of women, which would be echoed later by at least some of those who would call themselves ‘‘ecofeminists.’’ 38. A 1942 memo from Carson to a person in the marketing department of the publisher of her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941; reprint, New York: Dutton, 1991), provides a revealing window into Carson’s biocentric motive and, arguably, reveals a kind of animistic imagination. For this memo, see Lear, ed., 54–62. 39. Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 255. 40. For the importance of Earth Day as a social movement as well as an assessment of its contested character, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), esp. 105–14. 41. Bron Taylor, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Taylor, ed., vii–xxi. 42. Roy A. Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning and Religion (Richmond, CA: North Atlantic, 1979), and Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Marvin Harris, ‘‘The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle,’’ Current Anthropology 7 (1966): 51–66; Gerardo ReichelDolmatoff, ‘‘Cosmology As Ecological Analysis: A View From the Rainforest’’ Man 2, 3 (1976): 307–18; and, idem, The Forest Within: The Worldview of the Tukano Amazonian Indians (Totnes, United Kingdom: Themis-Green, 1996).

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43. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; Lynn White, ‘‘The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,’’ Science 155 (1967): 1203–7; Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘‘Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour: Examples from Europe and China,’’ Canadian Geographer 12 (1968): 176–91; Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 44. Vine Deloria, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1972; updated 1994); Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (New York: Scribners, 1973); Rene Dubos, The Wooing of Earth (New York: Scribners, 1980); Baird Callicott and Thomas Overholt, Clothed-in-Fur and Other Tales: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982); J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames, eds., Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); J. Baird Callicott, Earth’s Insights: A Survey of Ecological Ethics From the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994). 45. For an excellent starting point on the ferment regarding Christianity, see Elspeth Whitney, ‘‘Thesis of Lynn White’’ (1735–1736), and the Christianity section (316–75), in Taylor, ed. 46. As early as 1989, Roderick Nash published a chapter in The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), describing the ‘‘greening of religion’’ phenomena he believed to be occurring in America, noting not only prominent Christian theologians but the influence of Buddhism and Native American views on the environmental movement. 47. The efforts of scholars with the Religion and Ecology group of the American Academy of Religion, and Forum on Religion and Ecology (see www. religionandecology.org) are especially noteworthy in this regard. For a brief history of the role of religion-related scholarship in fostering environmental concern, see Bron Taylor, ‘‘Religious Studies and Environmental Concern,’’ in Taylor, ed., 1373–79. 48. See James Proctor and Evan Berry, ‘‘Social Science on Religion and Nature,’’ in Taylor, ed., 1571–77, for an important introduction to the current state and difficulties that inhere to social scientific inquiry into the links between environment-related beliefs and practices. 49. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature has many examples of such efforts, and with regard to all of the world’s major religious traditions, and many small groups and individuals. A good starting point is with the entries beginning with the tradition one is interested in, following with the cross-references found in them. 50. Sarah McFarland Taylor, ‘‘Cathedral of St. John the Divine,’’ in Taylor, ed., 274–76. 51. Michael Llewellyn Humphreys, ‘‘Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation,’’ in Taylor, ed., 1365–67. 52. Kenneth Kraft, ‘‘Nuclear Ecology and Engaged Buddhism,’’ in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 393–408. 53. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (1978; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 54. See Bron Taylor, ‘‘Resacralizing Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island,’’ in American Sacred Space, ed. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 97–151.

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55. There has been an explosion of scholarly and popular books devoted to pagan spirituality. The best include Graham Harvey, Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Sarah Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (London: Routledge, 2001); Michael York, The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-Pagan Movements (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). 56. For primers and references, see Bron Taylor, ‘‘Radical Environmentalism’’ (1326–35), and ‘‘Radical Environmentalism’’ (518–24), in Taylor, ed. See also the writings on radical environmentalism featured at www.religionandnature.com/ bron. For a global overview, see Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 57. Amanda Porterfield, ‘‘American Indian Spirituality as a Countercultural Movement,’’ in Religion in Native North America, ed. Christopher Vecsey (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1990), 152–62; Andy Smith, ‘‘For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life’’ in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol Adams (New York: Continuum, 1993), 172–80; Wendy Rose, ‘‘The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism,’’ in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. Annette M. Jaimes (Boston: South End, 1992), 403–21; Bron Taylor, ‘‘Earthen Spirituality or Cultural Genocide: Radical Environmentalism’s Appropriation of Native American Spirituality,’’ Religion 17, 2 (1997): 183–215; Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao, eds., Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 58. Jace Weaver, ed., Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996); JeDon Emenhiser, ‘‘G-O Road’’ (701–2), Brandt Peterson, ‘‘Indigenous Activism and Environmentalism in Latin America’’ (833–38), Tom Goldtooth, ‘‘Indigenous Environmental Network’’ (838–45), in Taylor, ed. 59. Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 1999); Darrell A. Posey and William Bale´e, eds., Resource Management in Amazonia: Indigenous and Folk Strategies (New York: New York Botanical Gardens, 1989); Nancy M. Williams and Graham Baines, Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Wisdom for Sustainable Development (Canberra: Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, 1993); Merideth Dudley and William Bale´e, ‘‘Ethnobotany’’ (617–22), and Fikret Berkes, ‘‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’’ (1646–49), in Taylor, ed. 60. Richard Grounds, ‘‘Native American Languages,’’ in Taylor, ed., 1160–62. 61. Deloria, 287–89. 62. For a good representative overview of such a view see David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson, Wisdom of the Elders: Honoring Sacred Native Visions of Nature (New York: Bantam, 1992). Some scholars have challenged the ‘‘ecological Indian’’ stereotype. For example, Sam Gill argued that the notion of ‘‘Mother Earth’’ in Native American cosmology is a relatively recent invention created largely by Westerners and creative Indians responding to them, rather than a longterm aspect of Native American cultures. See his Mother Earth: An American Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Shepard Krech has challenged

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directly the stereotype of the ecological Indian who leaves the land untouched and has always lived in perfect harmony with it in The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999). For good introductions to such claims and rejoinders, see Matthew Glass, ‘‘Mother Earth’’ (1102–5), and Shepard Krech, ‘‘American Indians as First Ecologists’’ (42–45), in Taylor, ed. 63. See www.movieweb.com/movie/pocahontas/pocprod1.txt. This is from an anonymously written movie review available in May 2003. 64. This quote is from park literature describing the show. Some Native Americans have objected to Disney’s Pocahontas, however, seeing it as a distortion of the Native American past that also obscures current struggles. As Thom White Wolf Fasset put it, ‘‘Disney’s ÔPocahontasÕ may be a box-office success story in movie houses, but there is little resemblance between this environmentally correct fairytale and the continuing struggles of today’s native peoples to secure redress or halt the movement of history toward certain ecological Armageddon’’ (quoted in Weaver, 185). 65. See, for example, the article by Kenny Frost of the Southern Ute Drum, published by Canku Ota (Many Paths), March 9, 2002, issue #56, an ‘‘online newsletter celebrating Native America’’ found at www.turtletrack.org. The article conveys the pride many American Indians felt at the performance. It was reviewed in June 2003 at www.turtletrack.org/Issues02/Co03092002/CO_03092002_ Olympics.htm. 66. James Redfield’s series of books on the ‘‘Celestine Prophecy’’ provide such a perspective. For an introduction to the New Age and nature religion, see Michael York, ‘‘New Age’’ (1193–97) and Bron Taylor, ‘‘Celestine Prophesy’’ (278–80), both in Taylor, ed. Redfield’s most important and representative books are The Celestine Prophecy (New York: Warner, 1993) and The Tenth Insight (New York: Warner, 1996). The influence of Redfield’s novels and an increasing number of other books in the New Age genre that express environmental themes helps to explain both the greening of the New Age movement, as well as why New Age thinking often permeates contemporary environmentalism. On hybridity in contemporary green religion, see also Bron Taylor, ‘‘Diggers, Wolfs, Ents, Elves and Expanding Universes: Bricolage, Religion, and Violence from Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front to the Antiglobalization Resistance,’’ in J. Kaplan and H. Lo¨o¨w, eds., The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization (Lanham, MD: Altamira/Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 26–74. 67. Gould, 4. 68. Ibid., 9. 69. See Stephen Rockefeller, ‘‘Earth Charter,’’ in Taylor, ed., 516–18. 70. See www.earthcharter.org for the entire text, from which these quotes are drawn. 71. The Gallup Organizations asked people about their beliefs on evolution and creation in 1982, 1991, 1993, and 1997. The wording of the questions was identical and the responses nearly identical during this period. Looking at the 1997 data for the general public, 44 percent of adults held a creationist view, 39 percent held a theistic evolution view, and 10 percent held a naturalistic evolution view, while among the scientists, 5 percent held a creationist view, and 40 percent held a theistic evolution view. See also, Cornelia Dean, ‘‘Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes,’’ New York Times, February 1, 2005. 72. Suzuki and Knudtson, 227. 73. David Takacs, The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 270, but see also 254–70.

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74. John Burroughs, Time and Change (1924; reprint, Amsterdam: Fredonia Books 2001), 4. 75. Ibid., 246. 76. See, for example, Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Edward Osborne Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); Stephen R. Kellert and Timothy J. Farnham, eds., The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World (Covelo, CA: Island Press, 2002); and Loyal Rue, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 77. Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 242. Here, Eisley’s thought, perhaps unsurprisingly, echoes Aldo Leopold’s reflections on the mysterious (even religious) qualities of wildlife that seemingly cannot be reduced to mechanistic explanations: ‘‘I heard of a boy once who was brought up an atheist. He changed his mind when he saw that there were a hundred odd species of warblers, each bedecked like to the rainbow, and each performing yearly sundry thousands of miles of migration about which scientists wrote wisely but did not understand. No Ôfortuitous concourse of elementsÕ working blindly through any number of millions of years could quite account for why warblers are so beautiful. No mechanistic theory, even bolstered by mutations, has ever quite answered for the colors of the cerulean warbler, or the vespers of the woodthrush or the swansong, or—goose music’’ (Sand County Almanac, 230–31). 78. Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1946; New York: Vintage, 1959), 27. 79. See also Eiseley, The Immense Journey, and The Unexpected Universe (New York: Harcourt, 1972), which includes ‘‘The Star Thrower’’ (62–92), his bestknown essay and probably the best place to start when reading his work; or another anthology, The Star Thrower (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), which also reprints this essay (169–85) and many others, including ‘‘Science and the Sense of the Holy’’ (186–201). 80. For example, see Bron Taylor, ‘‘Conservation Biology’’ (415–18), and William Jordan III, ‘‘Restoration Ecology and Ritual’’ (1379–81), in Taylor, ed.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Albanese, Catherine. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Folz, Richard, ed. Worldviews, Religion, and the Environment: A Global Anthology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003. Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Taylor, Bron, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. New York: Continuum, 2005.

CHAPTER 10

Religion and the Environment in America Lisa Sideris

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lthough the study of ecology, and a general concern with wildlife conservation, have much older roots, ecology as a broad social movement, both religious and secular, is a fairly recent phenomenon. As both a social movement and a branch of science, the term ‘‘ecology’’ is often associated with ‘‘environmentalism.’’ Yet it is not always clear what the connection is between the two, or even what it means to be an environmentalist. Since its inception, environmentalism in America has been fundamentally shaped by distinctly American values like individual rights and wilderness values, as well as some recurring American tensions such as those that have existed and continue to exist between science and religion. Many of these issues and tensions remain unresolved, including what is perhaps the most basic issue of whether ecology ought to be considered a social movement at all. In much of what follows, I focus on a prominent body of literature within religious environmentalism and ecological theology, while also noting some similarities between this literature and ‘‘secular’’ environmentalism. My contention throughout is that environmentalists would do well to draw upon scientific data in ways that are both more critical and less selective. Selective use of science has a great deal to do with how ‘‘ecology’’ came to be defined by both religious and secular environmentalists.1

THE RISE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM IN AMERICA The moral status of nature and animals became a topic of serious discussion in America in the 1960s and 1970s. The decade between 1963 and 1973 saw a flurry of environmental activity in the form of new legislation and the creation of environmental organizations and animal advocacy groups; these years also witnessed the rise of religious environmentalism,

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or what is sometimes referred to today as ‘‘ecological theology.’’ In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned of species destruction and an almost apocalyptic aftermath of widespread use of pesticides, or as Carson called them, biocides, particularly DDT. Two years later, Ruth Harrison published Animal Machines, a Silent Spring–like expose of the often abominable conditions of factory farms in the United Kingdom and America.2 The study of both ecology and ethology in the 1960s reinforced a concern for nature and animals. Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees and gorillas emphasized human kinship with primates and the urgent need to protect them.3 At the same time, arguably as a result of Rachel Carson’s call for rethinking our relationship to the natural world, new and stricter environmental laws were introduced: the Clean Air Act in 1963, the Wilderness Act in 1964, an early version of the Endangered Species Act in 1966, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and an expanded version of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Reflecting this intensified concern with clean air, land, and water, a law was passed in 1970 that established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By the end of the 1970s, a number of environmental organizations had also sprung up in America, including the World Wildlife Fund (1961), the Environmental Defense Fund (1967), Greenpeace (1969), and the Natural Resources Defense Council (1970). In 1968 and 1969, the first manned lunar orbits gave Americans and the world an entirely new picture of the earth from space and underscored a growing sense of the beauty and uniqueness, as well as the fragility, of our planet. The first Earth Day, held on April 22, 1970, galvanized grassroots support for environmentalism and set the tone for embracing what was increasingly understood as the transformative, subversive potential of thinking and living ‘‘ecologically.’’

HOLISM AND INDIVIDUALISM In America, the environmental movement, understood as organized efforts to conserve or protect entire natural ‘‘communities,’’ has often shared an uneasy relationship with animal rights and liberation movements that tend to focus more attention on individual organisms. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 marks a turning point in ethical (and legal) reasoning about the moral status not just of individual beings but of a collective and somewhat intangible entity that has both temporal and spatial dimensions. The loss of a species is the loss of something that has accumulated particular traits and, by extension, a distinct value over hundreds of thousands of years. Unlike the death of an individual, the extinction of species ‘‘constitutes the irreversible loss of a suite of unique genetic adaptations that have been acquired (much like interest) over a long history of investment.’’4 This implies that ethical reasoning applied to individuals and their interests is not always a good fit for thinking about species protection. Yet a large body of current theorizing about animal protection took its inspiration from movements in human rights and ethics. In particular, the

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civil rights movement of the 1960s unleashed powerful cultural forces leading to greater moral consideration and protection of animals. Some civil rights activists discerned certain parallels between gender- and racebased discrimination on the one hand and unethical treatment of animals on the other. In Animal Liberation (1975) Peter Singer popularized the term ‘‘speciesism’’—alleging a form of discrimination against nonhuman animals simply because they are members of another group, when that membership is irrelevant to the values at stake, such as animal pain and suffering.5 Henry Spira’s work exemplifies the close connection often forged between civil rights and concern for animals. After taking a course from Peter Singer at New York University, Spira, a civil rights worker, became sensitized to what he took to be clear and indefensible forms of discrimination against animals, especially laboratory animals. Spira founded Animal Rights International and launched a very successful campaign against vivisection of cats and other laboratory animals. Singer’s Animal Liberation became a kind of handbook for animal advocates and activists. There Singer defended a utilitarian position rooted in the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Following Bentham, the primary question we need to ask about animals, Singer argues, is whether they can suffer. Singer sees the capacity to suffer as a sufficient condition for moral consideration, regardless of capacities such as reason. Most of our common practices involving animals, including experimentation and meat production, cannot be justified on a utilitarian calculus which weighs the suffering experienced by animals against the enjoyment or benefits for humans. Meat eating, for example, involves considerable suffering for animals, whereas human interests in eating meat (such as the pleasures associated with it) are by comparison rather trivial. Singer further argues that some animals count as persons, particularly those that display rationality and self-awareness; thus designations of personhood occur across species. Other animals (and by extension some ‘‘marginal cases’’ of human beings) are only conscious, not self-conscious, and do not count fully as a person. There is a stronger prohibition against killing persons than killing nonpersons. But demonstrations of rationality are not needed to illustrate the wrongfulness of inflicting pain in many cases involving animals. In contrast to Singer’s utilitarian approach, one of America’s foremost proponents of animal rights, Tom Regan, argued that the central issue for evaluating the moral status of animals lies in recognizing their inherent value as ‘‘subjects of a life.’’6 Animals are not merely alive, Regan argues, but they have lives. They are conscious individuals with desires, beliefs, and preferences. They exhibit goal-oriented behavior and act deliberately, with some sense of their own past and future. Moreover, as subjects of a life, animals have inherent value and cannot be treated as means to our own ends. Singer’s utilitarianism, Regan maintains, is not sufficiently concerned with underlying principles that make our treatment of animals (in agribusiness, hunting, medical and commercial research) wrong to begin with. In other words, if it could be shown that on balance, our current practices actually produce more pleasure than pain for all concerned, then

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Singer has provided no grounds for discontinuing these practices. Unlike Singer, Regan rejects even use of animals that could be demonstrated as vital. Animals, as ends in themselves, are simply not our resources. Of course, it is not clear that all animals can be considered subjects of a life, since animals possess a wide range of capacities and degrees of subjecthood. But rather than draw this line, Regan argues that the burden of proof is on those who would maintain that a given animal is not a subject and therefore can be treated instrumentally. In the absence of such proof, Regan maintains that all beings who have inherent value have it equally. Regan and Singer both oppose speciesism, but on different ethical grounds. Animal advocates may disagree regarding what precisely is valuable about animal lives; it often appears, however, that the traits or capacities that confer value are similar if not identical to certain human capacities such as sentience and self-awareness. Some ethicists argue that a more profound change in moral reasoning is required than merely transposing a human ethical paradigm (rights, liberation, ends-in-themselves) onto nonhuman lives. This leads to what is perhaps a more serious conflict in America between animal rights/liberation movements, on the one hand, and more holistic conservation and ecology movements on the other. These two groups are often at cross-purposes. Animal activists view the individual creature as the important entity and locus of value; more holistically oriented ethicists focus on the preservation of a greater whole, such as species or ecosystems. Preserving this whole may entail sacrificing the interests, and the lives, of individual organisms when conflicts emerge. For example, wildlife management strategies may subordinate the lives of individual members of an overrepresented species to another species that is threatened, particularly if the overrepresented organisms are introduced or invasive. Moreover, in such cases, the holistic perspective need not privilege sentience over nonsentience. For example, environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston notes cases in which sentient animals have been justifiably killed for the sake of preserving an endangered plant species. Here the integrity of the ecosystem and the value of native species are given priority over the welfare of individual animals. While he does not deny that individual organisms have value, Rolston argues for ‘‘systemic’’ value that is continuously generated by ecological and evolutionary processes, even while those processes necessarily entail suffering and death for some individuals.7 To many animal activists, killing large numbers of sentient beings appears cruel and senseless, whereas to holistic environmentalists the focus of rights and liberation arguments on the pain of the individual organism seems misplaced, perhaps even bizarre. Pain, they argue, is not only necessary but even beneficial for the continuing survival and evolution of a species. So while animal ethicists such as Singer and Regan often draw on a biological argument for human kinship with animals—a biological continuum that implies a moral continuum—the claim that animal suffering is an evil to be eradicated remains ‘‘biologically preposterous’’ to some environmentalists.8 An ethic revolving around lessening or even eradicating pain cannot be applied to animals in the wild. On the systemic or holistic

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account, human interventions in natural processes are warranted primarily when past human interventions have disrupted normal functioning of the system, creating an ‘‘artificial’’ scarcity or abundance of organisms or introducing organisms into a system that has not evolved the necessary adaptive responses. In such cases, management efforts often attempt to mimic natural processes and this can mean treating individuals as relatively expendable vis-a`-vis the larger system, just as nature appears to. But to intervene in cases where animals suffer from natural causes is to interfere with the very processes that maintain some degree of fit between species and their environment and give some individuals within a species an edge over others who are not well-equipped to survive. This split between ecological ethicists and animal advocates persists in much of American discourse. As we shall see, many religious environmentalists also tend to view animal lives through the individualist lens of human-like capacities and interests, despite efforts to embrace a model of ecological holism.

RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN AMERICA The problem of suffering is a topic about which religions have historically had much to say, and it is not surprising that religious interpretations of nonhuman suffering tend to draw upon some traditional concepts in theology and theodicy. Much of the scholarship in religious environmentalism has been generated in response to criticisms of religion (particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition) for being anti-environmental, preoccupied with anthropocentric and otherworldly concerns. In his now famous essay of 1967, ‘‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,’’ Lynn White charged Christianity with being the world’s most anthropocentric religion— a religion that draws a sharp line between spirit and matter, human and animal, heaven and earth, and devalues all that pertains to or resides within the earthly, physical realm. The Genesis dogma, White maintained, teaches that humans alone are created in God’s image and that nature has merely instrumental value to humans who are divinely commanded to hold dominion over, and subdue, the natural world. The tradition thus ‘‘established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.’’9 In the wake of White’s critique, many religious scholars have endeavored to locate ethical teachings and practices that can be extended to nature or reinterpreted so as to include the natural world. In attempting to render the tradition more environmentally friendly, some Christian ecotheologians have also developed their tradition along lines that resemble Eastern and/or animistic religions. Because dualisms between spirit and matter are assumed to be largely Western patterns of thought, one often finds ‘‘wistful glancings eastward.’’10 Taking cues from these religions, some Christians promote a more relational, radically interconnected model of humans and the natural world. Some of these reformulations of Christian theology seek to envision God as coterminous with nature, rather than transcendent, thereby reenchanting and resacralizing the earthly

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realm. A prominent example is Sallie McFague’s suggestion that Christians think of the earth as God’s body, a metaphor that highlights nature’s value and recasts God as a deity who suffers along with nature and is potentially put at risk by human actions.11 Christian theologians have offered their own version of ‘‘liberation’’ arguments for animals and nature, aimed at addressing the oppression of nonhuman life. This account has been developed particularly by process theologians such as John Cobb and Charles Birch who follow the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Here God’s commitment to liberation extends to all of nature, not merely to humans. In their collaborative work, The Liberation of Life, Cobb and Birch embrace a kind of panexperientialism or pan-psychism that views all life forms as potentially or actually capable of both discordant and pleasurable experiences. Those organisms capable of great richness—generally signaled by possession of a central nervous system, large brains, complex mental lives—have a greater capacity to suffer as well, and our greatest moral obligations are owed to them. Cobb and Birch attribute ‘‘richness of experience’’ to all life but in varying degrees: Moral consideration is given to animals ‘‘in proportion to their capacity for rich experience.’’12 Lacking a central nervous system and other clearly valuable or value-producing capacities, plants, on the other hand, are more akin to aggregates or ‘‘societies’’ than to true individuals, and as such they have primarily instrumental rather than intrinsic value. Gradations exist within the animal kingdom as well (even among those held to be intrinsically valuable) and thus we find Cobb and Birch asserting that, for example, porpoises have greater value than tuna or sharks and so ‘‘make claims upon us beyond those made by tuna or sharks.’’13 Clearly, this approach to assigning, or discerning, value in individual organisms conflicts with holistic approaches such as Rolston’s that do not give priority to sentience over and above other ecological considerations. It is difficult to translate an ethic that values sentience and experience into one that protects biodiversity even if one accepts the additional, metaphysical claim that all life forms are experiencing subjects; even then one would still have to give priority to those with richest experience, as Birch and Cobb argue. Along with a bias in favor of human-like qualities, one often finds in ecotheology an expectation of a renewed creation, or an eschatological peace, that will ultimately bring an end to animal suffering. In this respect, religious arguments for animal liberation appear at first glance to have little in common with secular approaches such as Singer’s (Singer adamantly eschews any religious grounding for his arguments). Yet both place considerable emphasis on particular capacities, especially the capacity for suffering. As environmental philosopher Clare Palmer has argued, process environmentalism and animal rights/liberation arguments revolve around individual organisms’ capacities for subjective experience, pleasure, and pain. Both too defend (implicitly or explicitly) a hierarchy of value, a ‘‘tiered’’ system, such that those with the greatest capacity for suffering are those toward whom we owe the greatest moral consideration. Though Birch and Cobb urge us to take seriously the notion that all beings are

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‘‘experiencers,’’ not all beings have equal worth. Those ‘‘lower down’’ on the scale of life (organisms lacking a capacity for suffering or enjoyment, such as insects and plants) are deserving of less consideration. In the process view and, one might argue, Singer’s utilitarian account, human experience is taken as the model or paradigm case but as Palmer suggests, humans provide not just a model of experience but the standard against which to judge experience more generally.14 In this respect, it appears that process (as well as animal rights and liberation) accounts have retained anthropocentric biases. These biases, combined in religious environmentalism with an expectation of restored, peaceful creation, render ecotheological ethics largely incompatible with what is known about nature through science.

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN AMERICA As noted above, developments in the science of ecology have spurred normative interpretations and applications of the word ‘‘ecology.’’ Though clearly a scientific discipline, ecology seems quite unlike other sciences in that ‘‘an ecology movement intent on reforms for present society and zealous with the inspiration of a new consciousness has grown up around it,’’ as Frederic Ferre´ notes. Consider for a moment what a ‘‘chemistry movement’’ or an ‘‘astronomy movement’’ might look like, Ferre´ suggests, and it quickly becomes apparent that there is something fundamentally different about the study of ecology.15 Normative—sometimes naively normative—uses of ecological principles are common among religious environmentalists, particularly those who see ecology as representing a move toward postmodern forms of science. That is, Christian environmentalism has been shaped significantly not only by critiques of religion such as Lynn White’s but also by postmodern and green critiques of science. One of the most influential for the discipline of religious environmentalism has been Carolyn Merchant’s book The Death of Nature. There Merchant argued that the dominant strain of scientific inquiry in the West, namely the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century (and its modern-day forms), has been largely responsible for our environmental crisis. The ‘‘mechanistic’’ model, also routinely referred to in environmental literature as ‘‘atomistic,’’ ‘‘Cartesian,’’ ‘‘Baconian,’’ and sometimes ‘‘Newtonian,’’ effectively disenchanted nature and stripped it of a sort of vitalism or animism that in premodern times was understood to be a source of nature’s value. Mechanical thinking, by contrast, conceptualizes nature as dead, inert matter in motion; since nature is not alive in any meaningful sense, humans have free license to manipulate nature, as if it were a machine whose parts can be removed, replaced, or rearranged to suit our own ends. Unlike earlier ‘‘organic’’ interpretations, the machine metaphor, it is alleged, legitimized abuse, domination, and objectification of nature, resulting in fragmented understanding not only of entities within the natural world but also of the disciplines themselves that study nature. The scientific method associated with such conceptions embraces atomism and

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reductionism, the assumption that ‘‘problems can be broken down into parts and information can then be manipulated in accordance with a set of mathematical rules and relations.’’16 In this approach, scientists assume that ‘‘an understanding of the parts provides all that essentially needs to be known about the whole,’’ neglecting knowledge of the linkages between those parts.17 Implicit in such methodology is the goal of mastery and control over nature, Merchant argued; this further implies that scientific method is far from value-free and objective. On the contrary, it appears inherently aggressive and repressive.

SUBVERSIVE SCIENCE? The good news, according to Merchant and many other environmentalists who follow her in condemning mechanistic science, is that the emergence of ecology signals a resurrection of the earlier, organic perspective: ‘‘The ecology movement has reawakened interest in the values and concepts associated historically with the premodern organic world.’’ Merchant goes on to affirm ecology as ‘‘a subversive science in its criticism of the consequences of uncontrolled growth associated with capitalism, technology, and progress.’’18 As a science of interconnectedness, ecology also presents us with the necessary counterpoint to the notion that understanding something involves abstracting it from its complex environmental context. ‘‘Ecology necessarily must consider the complexities and the totality. It cannot isolate the parts into simplified systems that can be studied in a laboratory, because such isolation distorts the whole.’’19 As a science and as a social (and Merchant emphasizes, a feminist) movement, ecology suggests a move toward an ethic of egalitarianism because it recognizes the valuable role played by every member of the ecosystem community and the influence of one member upon all others. The claim that ecology represents science of a different sort—a subversive, even liberatory science—is now decades old, but it continues to play a prominent role in contemporary Christian environmentalism. As we have seen, the worldview of ecology appears to offer a clear counterpoint to what is frequently characterized (and criticized) as reductionistic, mechanistic, atomistic perspectives generated by most other sciences. Alongside, and bound up with, the conviction that ecology offers a new, normative model, is the belief that ecology more than any other discipline has the potential to bridge the gap between science and religion.20 In 1964, a decade and a half before Merchant’s Death of Nature, ecologist Paul Sears argued that ecology is a subversive subject;21 in 1969, Paul Shepard portrayed ecology as a resistance movement, more significant for its holistic perspective than for its actual scientific content.22 The belief that ecology’s normative import is in some ways more significant than the details of ecological and biological science may be problematic. This view has quite possibly contributed to some strange uses, misuses, and outright neglect of the facts of natural science among some environmentalists. What lends ecology its subversive flavor? For the prominent group of Christian environmentalists who champion what they call the ‘‘ecological

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model,’’ ecology presents an alternative to the hegemony of the machine metaphor and the methodological assumptions of domination and control of nature that accompany it. McFague argues, for example, that Western thinking has ‘‘traditionally been nurtured by an atomistic, reductionistic perspective that separates human beings from other beings and reduces all that is not human to objects for human use.’’23 ‘‘If we can liberate the concept of life we might be able to liberate life itself,’’ Charles Birch and John Cobb argue. The ecological model, they claim, is just such a ‘‘liberated and liberating alternative.’’24 As in Merchant’s account, the ecological model is presented as one that reaches backward to premodern sensibilities as well as forward to postmodern theories. McFague argues that the ecological model resembles medieval notions of nature’s subjecthood, relationality, and interconnectedness, though the medieval perspective was somewhat more hierarchical. Overall, the main features of the ecological model, as it is found in much of the literature in Christian environmentalism, are that it recognizes and promotes interdependence and interrelationality, stressing the importance of the links between all living things rather than interpreting them atomistically in isolation from one another. Interdependence and interrelationality, in turn, suggest an ethic of mutuality, care, even love and liberation for all beings. The model embraces community, a common good for all, while celebrating difference and the value of the individual apart from or in addition to communal value. ‘‘Interdependence’’ in this model is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive. Nature’s functioning is seen as inherently and self-evidently good and, it is often argued, if humans would take nature’s lessons to heart, deriving ethical guidance for our societies, all beings could live a more fulfilled and peaceful existence. It might appear that such a view coheres with a perspective such as Rolston’s, where natural functioning is valued and environmental ethics engages us in mimicry of natural processes. But there are important differences. Rolston does not argue that human ethics (culture) and ethics toward nature follow the same imperatives. Most important, for the point I wish to make, the Christian ecological model aims to remove suffering in nature generally, regardless of the cause (natural or anthropogenic); regardless of the status of suffering organisms (wild or domestic); and without consideration of the evolutionary benefits that accrue at the collective level of the species when individuals succumb to natural conditions of disease, predation, and starvation (better fit to the environment, for example). In the Christian ecological model, cooperation, symbiosis, and solidarity are the prominent themes; competition, predation, want, and strife are subordinate or nonexistent themes. Often the latter are trotted out as lamentable but dominant characteristics of human society or as the result of human influence that has disrupted otherwise harmonious natural patterns. Rosemary Radford Ruether, for example, writes that ecology is not only a science of biotic communities but also a suggestion of ‘‘guidelines for how humans must learn to live as a sustaining, rather than destructive, member of biotic communities.’’25 Ecology’s normative import is discernible in the

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fact that ‘‘cooperation and interdependency are the primary principles of ecosystems.’’26 Human communities, operating on opposite principles— ‘‘social hostility and competition for resources’’—are in violation of natural patterns.27 Insofar as competitive and predatory interactions make an appearance in this model of nature, these are often assumed to be the result of human sin, quite frequently understood in terms of a primordial ‘‘Fall’’ that first introduced suffering and strife into both the human and natural realms.

PEACEABLE KINGDOMS Whether or not ecotheologians hold to some literal notion of the Fall, the use of this motif, and the attendant hope for a restoration of a ‘‘peaceable kingdom’’ shapes religious environmental ethics in ways that sometimes make them incompatible with basic natural science—particularly anything remotely resembling a Darwinian account. Though kinship of all life is celebrated in the subversive, postmodern account of ecology, Darwinian theory, which provides an empirical basis for human-animal kinship, is conspicuously absent in much of this literature. The image of a peaceable kingdom in which predator and prey exist in harmony and nature is characterized by abundance of resources and a spirit of cooperation and is very common in contemporary religious environmental ethics. Ecotheologians seek to connect to the good of the individual and the communal good in a way that neutralizes all conflicts between them. The ‘‘problem’’ of predation is the clearest case of conflict between individuals and the system in which they are embedded. In light of this, many prominent ecotheologians turn to biblical stories of a lost paradise as a touchstone for developing Christian environmental ethics. Ruether, for example, hopes for a final restoration of nature that will bring about (or reestablish) ‘‘right relations’’ among all beings and heal ‘‘nature’s enmity’’; she reminds us that the book of Isaiah promises that ‘‘even the carnivorous conflict between animals will be overcome in the Peaceable Kingdom.’’28 McFague notes that Christians may draw inspiration from biblical stories in which ‘‘the lion and the lamb, the child and the snake, lie down together; where there is food for all; where neither people nor animals are destroying one another.’’29 Ju¨rgen Moltmann awaits a time when the spirit of God ‘‘drives out the forces of the negative, and therefore also banishes fear and the struggle for existence from creation.’’30 A ‘‘peaceable kingdom of shalom and ecological harmony’’ in which ‘‘predatorial behavior will no longer characterize human and non-human relations’’ captures Michael Northcott’s vision of God’s will for creation.31 Charles Birch anticipates a paradise regained when ‘‘everyone not only goes back to a nonmeat diet, but the friendliest relations subsist between all species.’’32 Even secular animal rights proponent Tom Regan cannot resist the urge to portray animal rights as a step in the ‘‘journey back (or forward) to Eden [and] God’s original hopes for and plans in creation.’’33 The assumption here is that prior to the Fall, humans and animals alike were vegetarian, and Genesis can be read in ways that support this interpretation.

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A natural community of the sort envisioned by many religious environmentalists could come into existence only if natural selection were somehow to cease. Much of this literature seems aimed at wholesale and fundamental restructuring of nature, not merely restoring it to a healthier condition. Any ethic based upon such restructuring would seem to guide nature toward conditions that are, in fact, biologically impossible. The preoccupation with natural processes as inherently sinful or the result of sinful corruption remains a major obstacle to a more appropriate environmental ethic as well as a more constructive dialogue between science and religion in American environmentalism. As Rolston has argued, the real source of conflict between Christianity and biology is not the Genesis account of six days of creation, as is often assumed. Rather, the problem lies in the idea of a Fall when a ‘‘once-paradisiacal nature becomes recalcitrant as punishment for human sin.’’34 Environmental destruction resulting from human carelessness and short-sightedness might be termed ‘‘sinful.’’ But nature itself is not sinful in the sense that its present structure—trophic relations between predator and prey, for example—emerged as a postlapsarian phenomenon. On the contrary, those trophic interactions are the very means by which nature continually regenerates and transforms itself. Again, interfering with these basic processes would disrupt the very system that allows (some, not all) life forms to adapt to changing environments. Yet we find some ecotheologians arguing that human responsibilities toward nature involve extending Jesus’s preferential ethic of care for the poor, hungry, wounded, and suffering outcasts, to nature’s needy beings, as when McFague argues that Christians focus on ‘‘healing the wounds of nature and feeding its starving creatures’’ just as a Christian community would focus on ‘‘feeding and healing its needy human beings.’’35 The goal apparently is to create the sort of natural community that Christians long for, and toward which certain biblical passages seem to point, regardless of the natural reality that confronts us. Part of the difficulty here stems from ecotheologians’ concern with preserving or promoting not just a communal good—the good of the species or of a natural community—but the good of each individual as well. The ecological model assumes that the ‘‘well-being of the whole is the final goal, but that this is reached through attending to the needs and desires of the many subjects that make up the community.’’36 Yet in nature, the good of the whole and the good of the individual cannot always be met simultaneously. Here we see traces of the holism vs. individualism tension that has persisted for decades within American environmentalism. Despite the fact that religious environmentalists consistently and adamantly argue for holistic, organic, communal, and ‘‘process’’ approaches to environmental ethics in contrast to fragmentation, atomism, and reductionism, the ethics that emerge continue to prioritize individuals and ignore natural processes. This ethical orientation seems, ironically, to treat the individual organism as though it could be isolated and insulated from the natural, systemic processes that threaten as well as sustain its life and livelihood. Even Merchant, whose work is clearly a source of the steady critique of attempts in science and ethics to isolate parts from wholes, gets it wrong

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when she suggests that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) signaled a newfound concern in America with egalitarianism and equal ‘‘rights’’ of ‘‘all living things.’’ Endangered species preservation is not a movement akin to the ‘‘egalitarianism manifested in the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, the extension of citizens’ rights to blacks, and, finally, voting rights to women,’’ as Merchant maintains.37 Nature is not a democracy. Accordingly, the ESA does not grant equal protection to individuals but preferential protection to threatened species. All individuals are not equal in nature in the sense that all beings can expect to flourish simultaneously. Endangered species protection in no way guarantees ‘‘rights’’ along those lines. If it did, it would undermine, rather than seek to preserve and restore, natural patterns of interrelationship (including predatorial relationships) in ecological communities.

MODELS OF NATURE IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION These attempts to compare and contrast natural and human communities raise the question of where exactly the ecological model derives from, and to whom it ought to be extended. Ecotheologians maintain that their model of nature is rooted in up-to-date scientific data. But it is not always clear in ecotheological literature what the difference is between the model and the natural reality or ‘‘facts’’ on which it is presumably based. The frequent invocation of ‘‘postmodern’’ science and methodology further clouds the issue. It is claimed, for example, that the ecological model is ‘‘derived from the workings of natural systems.’’38 Of course, one need not be a postmodernist to acknowledge that scientific accounts are provisional, that they can change over time as better theories are generated. But ecotheologians seem to be suggesting something more than this. McFague, for instance, presents the model itself as the contemporary picture of reality that comes to us from postmodern science. Is there a difference between the model and the reality? Presumably, she means that postmodern perspectives illustrate the untenability of speaking of reality as something that exists completely independently of our constructions of it. Our reality is always a ‘‘picture’’ of reality. How then do we check our model against the scientific facts or ‘‘reality’’ in order to know whether it is a good model? How is it possible to claim, as she and other ecotheologians do, that the ecological model ‘‘fits the data better,’’ that it is more ‘‘accurate’’ than, say, the mechanical model that has held sway for so long?39 It seems fairly clear that the ecological model, and the ethical guidelines derived from it, do not fit the facts of evolutionary science, given ecotheologians’ preoccupation with addressing individual suffering and their view of predation as something like a post-Fall aberration. But ecology as a science—and ecology is first and foremost a science—cannot be divorced from evolutionary theory. So what is the science that undergirds the ecological model? Clues to answering this question can be found in the fondness many religious environmentalists express for sciences other than biology. As Peter Hay points out, ‘‘Most people assume ecology to be the science of the

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environment movement. But increasingly ecological thought is drawing upon developments in other sciences, especially the so-called Ônew physics.Õ’’40 This is especially, though not exclusively, true of Whiteheadian process thinkers such as Charles Birch, John Cobb, and particularly David Ray Griffin. These thinkers draw inferences from postmodern physics, such as quantum theory, which reveals a physical universe of complex, interconnected events (or processes), rather than an atomistic array of objects or ‘‘substances.’’ The effect of the postmodern view is ‘‘to undermine reductionist science, for it can no longer be credibly held that knowledge resides in an understanding of the constituent parts of the biophysical system.’’41 By now, such characterizations of the ‘‘new’’ model should sound familiar, if not entirely repetitive, whether the model in question derives from ecology or postmodern physics. Contemporary physics, it is claimed, underscores radical continuity among all entities and undermines dualistic categories, particularly any absolute distinctions between subject and object or the observer and the observed. Postmodern science transforms ecological thinking because, as Cobb argues, ‘‘instead of focusing initially on the whole’’ the new ecological worldview ‘‘attends primarily to the individuals comprising it. I call this the postmodern ecological worldview.’’42 Presumably, ecologists would be surprised to learn that they need to focus more attention on individuals in order to remain on the cutting edge of science. Postmodernists also celebrate a kind of intimacy (albeit, a perplexing intimacy) between the observer and the universe, because ‘‘alienation from matter being studied is overcome’’ and one experiences ‘‘the sense of being involved, from participating in what is of scientific interest rather than being merely the disinterested observer.’’43 While this may be true when one reflects upon the implications of quantum mechanics, the significance of such insights for ecology is doubtful. Conservation biologists and other environmental scientists do not make management decisions or set their priorities according to the findings of quantum physics. To say that the ecological perspective and, say, quantum science are essentially one because both recognize the importance of ‘‘interdependence’’ is absurdly simplistic; it is like drawing the conclusion from relativity theory that ‘‘everything is relative.’’ Indeed, there is something strangely reductionist in this attempt to base the life sciences, the study of natural systems, upon principles applicable in the subatomic realm. In any case, the ethical import of quantum interdependence is ambiguous if not entirely vacuous. For example, postmodern epistemology (according to its devotees) tells us essentially that what is known is not objective or real but is always conditioned by the perspective of the knower. Moreover, reality, as one postmodernist puts it, consists of ‘‘one unbroken whole’’ implying that ‘‘things could apparently be connected with other things any distance away. . . .’’44 It is difficult to see how these insights, considered so crucial by postmodern environmentalists, provide in themselves much useful guidance for the environmental problems we face. Certainly, for both ethical and scientific reasons, scientists conducting experiments in the field want to be conscious of impacts they may be having on the organisms under study,

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and how those impacts may spread from one area to another. But this is not a new form of consciousness gleaned from postmodern physics. Rather, this awareness underscores the need for attaining greater objectivity in research; it is not grounds for abandoning measures aimed at ensuring that data are not skewed by the method of collection or observation, nor does it constitute an admission that organisms being studied have no objective reality independent of the scientist observing them. Retaining some objectivity is not tantamount to objectifying the organisms that one is studying. In my judgment, the eagerness to jettison objectivity, disinterest, and other features of ‘‘modern’’ (as opposed to postmodern) science can be dangerous. At a time in American history when science is once more under assault, most notably by proponents of ‘‘alternative’’ new theories demanding equal time for their views in science curricula, religious environmentalists who are not creationists (and none of those I have discussed claim to be) need to affirm evolutionary theory. Instead, many seem to be turning away from biology in search of abstract concepts in other sciences that appear to resonate with the ethical principles they find more palatable.

ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF CURRENT SCIENCE-RELIGION CONTROVERSIES As I have suggested, ecology is seen not only as an alternative to a certain type of repressive science, but also as a challenge to ‘‘scientism’’— inordinate, positivistic faith in science—more generally. This is in part what lends ecology its subversive character. Suspicion of scientism, and of the cultural authority of science, has fueled the postmodern movement in a variety of disciplines. As a consequence, this suspicion is also generating some unexpected alliances such as those currently (if at times unwittingly) being forged between ecotheologians and modern critics of Darwinism from the ‘‘intelligent design’’ (ID) camp. Intelligent design advocates, like many ecotheologians, vocally oppose reductionist, materialist, mechanistic science. But for proponents of ID, evolutionary theory is more explicitly identified as the paradigmatic mechanistic (and atheistic) science, for Darwinism seems to claim that all life can be reduced to material foundations. Darwin’s theory, according to ID critics, is rooted in a conception of matter at least as dualistic and reductionist as that promoted by scientists of the mechanical tradition. Like many ecotheologians, particularly processoriented thinkers, ID proponents hold to a much more active view of matter than modern biology typically allows. In fact, part of the agenda of ID is to show that the reductionism inherent in modern biology fails to account for the actual degree of design and complexity exhibited in nature and living beings. A ‘‘principal goal’’ of the intelligent design movement is ‘‘to convince working scientists that information cannot and does not spring from matter, which they understand as brute and inert. This is essentially the same conception of matter that was shared by the founders of the mechanistic science in the seventeenth century such as Rene´ Descartes, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton.’’45

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Intelligent design advocates, unlike previous generations of creationists, do not resort to biblical/literalist interpretations of origins in order to challenge evolutionary theory, nor do they necessarily hold to a ‘‘young earth’’ account. Many accept that natural selection can in fact account for at least some of what it purports to explain. Michael Behe, for example, does not doubt that the universe is billions of years old, nor does he dispute the notion of common descent of life forms. Rather, he argues more specifically that there is ‘‘irreducible complexity’’ in organisms and the natural world, particularly in the cell’s interworkings. These cases of irreducible complexity, he alleges, constitute a ‘‘black box,’’ that Darwinism’s reductionist program cannot unlock. Most ecotheologians tend to critique Darwinism more obliquely than do ID advocates; many simply avoid discussions of it, while some express anxieties about Social Darwinist interpretations of evolutionary theory with which (understandably) they wish to distance themselves. But process thinkers have gone further, directly critiquing what they see as the mechanistic, reductionist core of evolutionary theory, or more specifically ‘‘Darwinism.’’ Process thinkers’ pan-psychism, their insistence on matter as alive and active, their belief that all entities should be understood as ‘‘events,’’ flows from a dissatisfaction with modern biology similar to that of ID proponents. This is in part the reason that ecotheologians, when they do turn to science, turn to physics rather than biology. In presenting grounds for the ‘‘postmodern challenge’’ to contemporary biology, Birch writes that the ‘‘dominant model of life in biology today is strictly mechanistic (substantialist) and reductionist,’’ its methodology ‘‘to investigate the living organism as if it were a machine.’’ Many go so far as to claim that the organism is a machine, Birch contends.46 In Birch’s account, as in ID, modern biology is cast as the mechanistic science: It understands life atomistically, dividing entities into numerous, minute parts and then putting the parts back together in machine-like fashion in order to comprehend the whole, without regard to what process thinkers call ‘‘internal relations’’ that define an entity’s interrelationship with and creative responses to its environment. To ignore internal relations is to treat entities as passive objects at the mercy of external factors. Birch critiques the reductionist program in biology that seeks in vain for explanations of complex development, such as that from a fertilized egg into a complex living organism. Biologists regard such changes as if life were something like an automobile ‘‘built up from individual bits and pieces.’’47 Their explanatory efforts fail because such development ‘‘evidently cannot be reduced to the action of single chemicals.’’ Rather, something that ‘‘organizes’’ this developmental process seems to be needed, Birch claims.48 He goes on to urge biologists to respond to the postmodern challenge, and the challenge of the ecological model, of including a role for purpose in evolutionary processes. For process theologians, it is God who lures or coaxes this creative, purposive response from organisms (and even from what we normally consider inanimate nature). Birch’s complaint against modern biologists echoes charges made by theistic critics of Darwinism such as law professor and creationist Phillip

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Johnson who believes that biologists exhibit a blind commitment to Darwinian dogma and orthodoxy—what Johnson terms ‘‘scientism’’—in their methodological and indeed metaphysical (i.e., atheistic) insistence that ‘‘science does not investigate the purpose of the universe.’’49 Birch’s first claim, that the reductionist program in biology fails to explain complex development, sounds similar to Behe’s argument for irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity holds that some features of living organisms are composed of numerous parts that cannot function on their own without invoking a kind of ‘‘deus ex machina who assembled the parts supernaturally according a preconceived design.’’50 In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe charges that Darwinian evolution falsely claims that one sort of organism can be derived from another in a step-by-step fashion. Irreducible complexity ‘‘cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.’’51 He draws on an analogy of attempting to evolve a motorcycle from a bicycle and concludes that a motorcycle can never be made from ‘‘simply modifying a bicycle in stepwise fashion.’’52 In the same way, the Darwinian account fails because evolution of this sort requires something that the theory itself does not provide, namely physical precursors, something that influences or, as Birch would have it, organizes the parts, driving them to evolve in a particular way or direction. ‘‘Design,’’ Behe argues, ‘‘is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts.’’53 The similarity between ecotheology and intelligent design/creationism is particularly apparent in David Ray Griffin’s work. Griffin is not as actively engaged in developing environmental ethics as are Birch and (sometimes co-author with Griffin) John Cobb, though Griffin has made scholarly contributions to developing a ‘‘green spirituality’’ and a theology of nature.54 Most fundamentally, Griffin has led the way in translating Whitehead’s thought into a postmodern theory that combines science and theism. This combination represents the best, perhaps the only, viable alternative to atheistic Darwinian approaches as far as Griffin is concerned. He is especially interested in questions regarding the appropriate scope of scientific naturalism, that is, methods of inquiry or investigation for gaining knowledge that are limited to natural, physical, and material approaches. In Religion and Scientific Naturalism (2000), Griffin clarifies that his own understanding of theology and natural science is distinct from that of some creationists, such as Phillip Johnson, in that Griffin maintains that scientific explanation appropriately excludes reference to miraculous interruptions, while Johnson disputes this a priori exclusion of the divine from science. Put differently, Griffin believes that science and religion can be harmonized without doing away with naturalistic explanations altogether. Griffin holds to what he calls ‘‘minimal’’ naturalism which rejects supernatural interruptions of basic natural patterns and causal relations. It is the ‘‘maximal’’ form of naturalism—naturalism as an atheistic, ontological worldview, not merely a methodology—with which he takes issue. When we examine what Griffin rejects under the heading of maximal

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naturalism, we find again a negative association of evolutionary science with reductionism, materialism, mechanism, and a general claim that life in the evolutionary account is ‘‘meaningless.’’ What he retains under minimal naturalism barely qualifies, if it qualifies at all, as consistent with evolution as opposed to creationism. In Religion and Scientific Naturalism, Griffin even suggests (albeit, tucked away in a footnote) that no one has undertaken a convincing refutation of Behe’s claim that irreducible complexity undermines Darwinian theory. Or if they have, Griffin remarks, no one has been able to point him to the relevant sources.55 Griffin’s apparent sympathy for ID has not gone unnoticed by ID proponents who are continuously on alert for signs of support from those not officially within their own camp. William Dembksi features Griffin’s comments prominently in his introduction to Uncommon Dissent, a collection of essays by creationists, ID proponents, and other ‘‘intellectuals who find Darwinism unconvincing.’’ Dembski draws on Griffin’s remarks to bolster his own claim that evolutionists routinely ‘‘pass the buck’’ instead of answering the objections of critics such as Behe. Dembski is right to discern certain parallels here, not only between intelligent design’s critique of Darwinism and that of process thinkers, but also in the more substantive account of nature (such as it is) in ID and process thought. For example, Griffin differentiates fourteen different aspects of Darwinian science, which he refers to as Darwinian evolutionism, and most of which he rejects on either empirical or philosophical grounds. Among the few features (or implications) of evolution Griffin accepts are the following: the fact of microevolution (for example, antibiotic resistance, and other small genetic changes within a species, considered uncontroversial even by biblical creationists); the notion that there has been some type of ‘‘descent with modification’’ (this rules out strictly biblical and young earth forms of creationism as well as separate creation of each species ‘‘ex nihilo’’ but, as Griffin readily concedes, connotes ‘‘nothing distinctly Darwinian’’56); a ‘‘minimal’’ form of naturalism, as previously noted (this rules out miraculous, divine interruptions in natural laws); and, related to this, a narrow interpretation of ‘‘uniformitarianism,’’ which similarly holds that supernatural interventions in nature are untenable but that periodic natural catastrophes are not. The reason for raising this last point about uniformitarianism is that Griffin wants to resurrect a form of geologic catastrophism (large-scale periodic extinctions and other rapid changes) that contradicts the standard Darwinian account of steady, gradual evolution. Griffin, like other creationists, holds that the fossil record does not point to Darwinian evolution but rather to a form of what scientists used to call ‘‘saltationism’’—evolution by leaps. These leaps produce an ‘‘implantation of new ideal forms’’ and constitute dramatic instances of divine activity in nature. Griffin is at pains to explain that these implantations are not the same as miraculous, divine interventions, however similar they might sound. ‘‘It might be wondered,’’ he concedes, ‘‘whether this version of naturalistic theism renders superfluous, as does supernatural theism, the very idea of an evolutionary

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process.’’57 He maintains that as his account disallows ‘‘supersaltations’’— major leaps without obvious evolutionary precursors—these leaps do not constitute true supernatural interventionism. In fact, however, most if not all of these dimensions of ‘‘evolutionism’’ that Griffin’s account accepts have been accepted even by creationists.

NATURALISM, ATHEISM, AND NEO-DARWINISM Griffin’s reasons for rejecting evolutionism have to do with a strong distaste for ‘‘neo-Darwinism’’ and a general sense that Darwinian science as normally construed disallows any stance but a staunchly atheistic one. ‘‘In sum,’’ Griffin writes, ‘‘the fact that neo-Darwinism is a materialistic, positivistic, deterministic, nominalistic, atheistic theory of evolution not only gives us no antecedent reason to suppose it, on its more scientific side, to be true, but it also gives us very strong antecedent reasons to suspect it probably to be false.’’58 Debates about the acceptability of (neo-)Darwinism hinge on whether the sort of naturalism that evolutionary science presupposes is in fact merely methodological. The complaint here, and it is a common one among ID proponents as well as process thinkers and ecotheologians, is that neo-Darwinism commits one not only to a particular methodological account of how science is to be conducted but to a robustly atheistic worldview. If so, neo-Darwinists, and indeed scientists generally, are not just saying that references to divine activity are unscientific but that God is not real. Griffin and others who reject neo-Darwinism are concerned with demonstrating that evolution does display purpose, meaning, progress, teleology, contrary to the neo-Darwinist interpretation. Their contention is that Darwinism in its original formulation (that is, in Darwin’s own formulation) did not necessarily undermine belief in such things. It was only with later, twentieth-century accretions to the theory that evolution became offensive to theists. The claim that neo-Darwinism constitutes a novel and threatening strain of evolutionary theory is widely contested by those who see Darwinism even in its nineteenth-century form as clearly exploding concepts of teleology, design, and purpose.59 In fact there is reason to believe that Darwin himself understood his theory in these terms. Darwin remarks that, though he once concurred with William Paley’s ‘‘old argument for design in nature,’’ over time and with careful study he came to believe that there is ‘‘no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection than in the course which the wind blows.’’60 The popular uprising against neo-Darwinism has become so widespread in theological (and postmodern) circles that one has to wonder what generated this antagonism. Condemnation of neo-Darwinism recently reached a wide audience when Roman Catholic Cardinal Christoph Scho¨nborn reformulated the Catholic church’s official position on evolutionary theory in an editorial in the New York Times. There he argued plainly that the church considers evolution false ‘‘in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.’’

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Against the ‘‘ideology’’ of randomness, the church has consistently affirmed the ‘‘overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.’’61 Many who watch the ‘‘culture wars’’ with interest wondered whether the cardinal was thereby officially aligning the Catholic church with intelligent design and what he meant by ‘‘modern’’ science. Such reformulations of ‘‘acceptable’’ modes of Darwinism are particularly puzzling when one considers that strictly speaking, neo-Darwinism refers simply to the ‘‘modern synthesis’’ that in the first half of the twentieth century integrated Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Mendel’s account of genetics, and later with the discovery of DNA. Prior to the rediscovery of Mendel’s work, Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolution (natural selection) had lacked a clear account of the unit of selection (the gene). Darwin, like all his contemporaries, was ignorant of genetics and was searching for a satisfactory explanation of inheritance; at times, lacking a more complete account, he drew on ‘‘Lamarckian’’ explanations of inheritance of acquired characteristics (something Griffin also resurrects, as Lamarckism lends greater ‘‘responsiveness,’’ less determinism, to organisms). In integrating the mechanism of selection with the unit(s), the resulting modern synthesis dispensed with such explanations and helped to unify disparate branches of biology such as botany and systematics. What is so controversial about these developments in biology that they should be widely denounced? This negative reaction to neo-Darwinism appears to be largely the result of Richard Dawkins’s work (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker), particularly his penchant for (oft-cited) hyperbolic prose about the utter meaninglessness of evolution and his deliberate attempts to provoke and ridicule those who express any theological or ethical misgivings about Darwin’s theory. (Two choice quotes from Dawkins, commonly cited by critics of neo-Darwinism’s scientism and atheism, are that ‘‘Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’’ and Dawkins’s infamous comment that those who deny the truth of evolutionary theory are justifiably considered ‘‘ignorant, stupid, or insane.’’62) Dawkins’s name is immediately and almost reflexively invoked whenever critiques of the materialistic, reductionistic, atheistic orthodoxy of biology are issued by postmodern theologians and intelligent design theorists alike. This is due to Dawkins’s unrestrained enthusiasm for portraying evolution as ‘‘red in tooth and claw,’’ a war played out among organisms who are essentially Darwinian robots, little more than survival machines at the mercy of their selfish, competitive genes. As we have seen, some theologians and ID proponents recoil from such accounts of the organism as a passive object buffeted about by forces over which they have no control. On the whole, in fact, this Dawkinsian form of neo-Darwinism appears to contradict basic principles of the new physics and the ecological model. In its apparent conviction ‘‘that it is the gene rather than the larger system that is the key determinant in the unfolding of life,’’ Dawkins’s neoDarwinism ‘‘would also seem to sit uncomfortably with some of the paradigmatic assumptions of ecology.’’63 These paradigmatic ecological assumptions include the holistic assumption that parts, such as the gene,

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cannot be meaningfully abstracted from the whole, nor can they be taken to explain the whole. Dawkins’s view also contradicts a general commitment to the idea that self-interest and competition are not and cannot be the dominant themes in the ecological model. This discussion of current controversies in science and religion in America seems to have taken us some distance from an analysis of religious environmental ethics. But it is important to recall the original claim that ecology, broadly construed, provides not only a better ethic for nature but also a good candidate for locating rapprochement between science and religion. The expectation that ecology, understood normatively, can bridge the gap between science and religion appears unfounded. Rather, reliance on the ecological model and postmodern science at the expense of evolutionary theory threatens to widen the gap between natural scientists and theologians, particularly as the intelligent design debate rages on. The ‘‘new biology’’ (though the modern synthesis is now sixty years old) and the ‘‘new’’ physics/ecology seem to be at odds with one another. But this is true only if one associates modern biology with Dawkinsian evolutionism, and ecology with postmodern, quantum physics. Because critics of evolution have successfully located a form of Darwinism that does subscribe to metaphysical, ontological naturalism, and have found at least one vocal spokesperson for that view—Dawkins, who is a staunch atheist and believes that Darwinism clearly and logically entails atheism—it is easy enough to extrapolate from this that all evolutionary naturalism is of the metaphysical sort, that Darwinism or neo-Darwinism is compatible only with atheism, reductionism, and materialism. But such extrapolations are unwarranted. These critics may well give Dawkins too much credit. Richard Dawkins does not speak for all or even most evolutionists and the content of neo-Darwinism in and of itself does not commit one to a rejection of theism or an acceptance of reductionism. It is doubtful that most biologists even refer to modern biology as ‘‘neoDarwinist’’ or that they would understand the meaning of this term as it is used by critics. A story told by Ursula Goodenough is illuminating: As a self-described ‘‘bench scientist’’ (a molecular geneticist and cell biologist who studies a form of single-celled alga) Goodenough confesses that, when a friend asked her whether neo-Darwinism truly implies reductionism and mechanism, she realized ‘‘I did not know what Neo-Darwinism is.’’64 When she began to look into it, she found that the most common references to the term were disparaging and polemical accounts offered by ‘‘creationists/intelligent-design organizations.’’ As she came to understand, ‘‘Neo-Darwinism serves as code for views of the evolutionary process that a variety of persons and groups are not comfortable with.’’65 Focusing on the term ‘‘neo-Darwinism,’’ I would argue, gives the appearance that critics are merely rejecting some radical interpretation of evolution while still holding to a form of evolution that is the genuine descendent of Darwin’s own account. But in fact the rejection of evolutionary theory is virtually complete among many of these critics— including ecotheologians, as indicated by the incompatibility of the ecological model with anything resembling evolutionary theory. Targeting

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neo-Darwinism is one way of avoiding larger, unresolved tensions between ecotheology and evolutionary theory more generally. Regarding charges of reductionism: Although it is true, Goodenough argues, that a scientist’s experiments may focus on properties of genes rather than a whole organism or its ecological context, awareness of those higher levels is implicit in the scientist’s research. An experimental finding regarding such a property would be interpreted in light of what is known about the organism as a whole, even if the experiment zooms in on a particular ‘‘part.’’ No science is nonreductionist in the sense that critics of neo-Darwinism use this term (all scientists study some facet or level within a whole), nor is it clear that any scientist is a ‘‘holist’’ in a sense that would satisfy these critics. Even ecologists who focus on ecosystems have to limit the scope of their investigation; they do not investigate the whole biosphere of which the ecosystem is, in reality, a very tiny part. ‘‘The ecologists,’’ as Goodenough points out, ‘‘are also reductionists.’’66 This is what it means for reductionism to be methodological. Methodological exclusion of higher (or lower) levels does not imply a denial of the existence or relevance of those levels to the level being studied. The fact that genes exist and play a role in the evolutionary process does not mean that genes and genes alone explain everything about organisms and species evolution. Modern biologists, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, for example, have disagreed vehemently with Dawkins over how much selection pressure is exerted on genes themselves, as opposed to organisms or even species. They propose that selection operates on a variety of levels, not just genes. Dawkins’s view is particularly, and some would say inordinately, gene-centered. Biologists who reject this degree of gene-centeredness do not thereby conclude that Darwinism after the turn of the nineteenth century is suspect. Gould and Lewontin’s critique, for example, focuses in particular on the fallacies of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, not on the modern synthesis per se (for this reason, the label ‘‘ultra-Darwinism’’ rather than neo-Darwinism is sometimes used to describe Dawkinsian views, since neo-Darwinism does not in itself imply genetic determinist accounts such as Dawkins’s67). Nor do all biologists display the allegiance to scientism that is, without a doubt, prominent in Dawkins’s writing. As one scholar puts it, ‘‘Dawkins is a whole-hearted son of the Enlightenment’’ who believes we should accept as ‘‘beautiful and complete’’ the purely scientific account of ourselves and everything in the universe.68 So long as perspectives such as Dawkins’s are taken to represent the whole of modern biology, theologians and ecotheologians will continue to turn away from biology and toward an ‘‘ecological model’’ that has more to do with physics than ecology, and nothing at all to do with evolutionary theory. Excluding evolutionary theory from environmental ethics distorts ethics. It leads to inappropriate, and often uncritical, attention to addressing individual suffering and to naively benign models of the natural world; it threatens to undermine the dialogue between science and religion. And perhaps most fundamentally, if evolution is left out of ethics of

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nature, religious environmentalists will continue to generate ethical imperatives that are inapplicable to the natural world as it really is.

NOTES 1. I will often use the terms ‘‘religious environmentalism’’ and ‘‘ecological theology’’ somewhat interchangeably, though not all who write about religious environmental ethics are theologians. 2. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (New York: Ballantine, 1964). 3. See for example Jane Goodall, My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1967); and In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). 4. National Research Council, Science and the Endangered Species Act (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995). 5. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon, 1975). 6. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 7. Holmes Rolston, Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 8. J. Baird Callicott, ‘‘Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair,’’ in Environmental Ethics, ed. Robert Elliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 53. 9. Lynn White, ‘‘The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,’’ Science 155 (1967): 1203–7. 10. Lance Nelson, Purifying the Earthly Body of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 62. 11. Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). 12. John Cobb and Charles Birch, The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 153. 13. Ibid., 155. 14. Clare Palmer, Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 48. 15. Frederic Ferre´, ‘‘Religious World Modeling and Postmodern Science,’’ in The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 94. I would argue that there has been a chemistry movement in the United States—precisely the movement Rachel Carson was critiquing in Silent Spring. But Ferre´ is right that such a movement has hardly been conducive to environmentalism. 16. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1983), 231. 17. Peter Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 127. 18. Merchant, xx–xxi. 19. Ibid., 293. 20. See, for example, John Carroll and Keith Warner, eds., Ecology and Religion: Scientists Speak (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1998). 21. Paul Sears, ‘‘Ecology—a Subversive Subject,’’ Bioscience (July 1964). 22. Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, eds., The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). 23. McFague, 8. 24. Cobb and Birch, 68.

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25. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Ethic of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 47. 26. Ibid., 57. 27. Ibid., 54. 28. Ibid., 213. 29. Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994), 158. 30. Ju¨rgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993), 102. 31. Michael Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 192. 32. Charles Birch, ‘‘Christian Obligation for the Liberation of Nature,’’ in Liberating Life, ed. Charles Birch and William Eakin (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 67. 33. Tom Regan, ‘‘Christianity and Animal Rights,’’ in ibid., 87. 34. Holmes Rolston, ‘‘Does Nature Need to be Redeemed?’’ Zygon 29, 2 (1994): 205. 35. McFague, Super, Natural Christians, 169. 36. Ibid., 158. 37. Merchant, 293–94. 38. McFague, Super, Natural Christians, 107. 39. Ibid., 96. 40. Hay, 129. 41. Ibid., 131. 42. John Cobb, ‘‘Ecology, Science, and Religion: Toward a Postmodern Worldview,’’ in Griffin, ed., 107. 43. Ferre´, 94. 44. David Bohm, ‘‘Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World,’’ in Griffin, ed., 65. 45. Edward Davis, ‘‘Of Gods and Gaps: Intelligent Design and Darwinian Evolution,’’ http://home.messiah.edu/tdavis/gaps.htm, accessed November 16, 2005. A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Christian Century 115 (July 15–22, 1998): 678–81. 46. Charles Birch, ‘‘The Postmodern Challenge to Biology,’’ in Griffin, ed., 69. 47. Ibid., 74. 48. Ibid., 75. 49. Phillip Johnson, ‘‘Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism,’’ in Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, ed. William A. Dembski (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 37. 50. Davis, ‘‘Of Gods and Gaps.’’ 51. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996), 39. 52. Ibid., 43. 53. Ibid., 193. 54. See for example David Ray Griffin. ‘‘Green Spirituality: A Postmodern Convergence of Science and Religion.’’ Journal of Theology (1992): 5–21. 55. Some sources Griffin might want to consult include Ken Miller, Finding Darwin’s God (New York: Cliff Street, 1999)—Miller devotes pp. 129–64 to responding to Behe; Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin, ‘‘Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry,’’ Philosophy of Science 66, 2 (June 1999): 268–82; Michael Lynch, ‘‘Simple Evolutionary Pathways to Complex Proteins,’’ Protein Science 14 (2005): 2217–25; Robert Pennock, Intelligent Design: Creationism and Its Critics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); and Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). There are many others as well.

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56. David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 245. 57. Ibid., 307. 58. Ibid., 271. 59. Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Ruse arguing forcefully that Darwinism, since its inception, undermines progress and design in natural processes. 60. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), 87. 61. ‘‘Finding Design in Nature,’’ New York Times, July 7, 2005. 62. Cited for example in Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism, 245, and Dembski, ed., Uncommon Dissent, 28, respectively. 63. Hay, 151. 64. Ursula Goodenough, ‘‘Reductionism and Holism, Chance and Selection, Mechanism and Mind,’’ Zygon 40, 2 (June 2005): 370. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 371. 67. Specifically, the Gould-Lewontin critique focuses on ‘‘adaptationism,’’ the view that all or most traits are adaptations directly selected by natural selection. Interestingly, Lewontin agrees with process thinkers’ account of organisms as active subjects, not mere passive objects, proposing what he calls a ÔdialecticalÕ and reciprocal view of the organism and its environment. However, he does not dispute the whole approach of ‘‘modern biology’’ but the excesses of adaptationism. 68. Kim Sterelny, Dawkins and Gould: Survival of the Fittest (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), 13.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: Norton, 1986. Gross, Paul R., and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Lewontin, Richard. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Miller, Kenneth. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999. Nash, Roderick Frazier. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Pennock, Robert. Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Rolston, Holmes. Conserving Natural Value. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Sideris, Lisa H. Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 11

From Muscular Christianity to Divine Madness: Sports and/as Religion in America Arthur J. Remillard

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ith just over one second on the game clock, an inbounds pass went to Bo Jones of Virginia Commonwealth University, who immediately sent the basketball into the air. ‘‘I just caught it and threw it,’’ proclaimed the jubilant Jones, ‘‘and when I saw the net go up, I couldn’t believe it. God blessed us tonight.’’1 While speaking to a sports reporter, Earl Woods proclaimed he was ‘‘personally selected by God himself’’ to raise his son, golfing great Tiger Woods. Earl believed Tiger—or ‘‘the Chosen One’’— would one day ‘‘transcend this game and bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before.’’2 Before the 2004 Super Bowl between the Carolina Panthers and New England Patriots, a minister in North Carolina told his church, ‘‘God has a lot on his plate right now . . . with the Middle East and all. . . . But I do hope he has time to watch the Super Bowl.’’3 Religious language, allusions, and invocations such as these appear regularly in America’s many sports settings. The early twentieth century saw this relationship develop through movements such as ‘‘muscular Christianity.’’ This largely evangelical Protestant development grew in the nation’s urban centers and used sports to bring men to church and inculcate ‘‘masculine’’ values. Around this time, Mormons, Catholics, Jews, and adherents of utopian movements also found sports a useful tool for advancing their teachings on gender and faith. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the legacy of muscular Christianity continued through groups like the Promise Keepers and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Just as muscular Christianity had its critics during the 1920s, the contemporary era’s detractors sometimes bring church/state debates to the field of play.

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Instead of studying ‘‘sports and religion’’ as represented in discussions of muscular Christianity, some scholars prefer to think of ‘‘sports as religion.’’ While the former treats sports as a means to a religious end, the latter considers sports a religious end in itself. Using this approach, scholars penetrate beneath the surface of sports to find what they believe are the transcendent qualities of games like baseball and football. Endurance sports have also taken a religious flavor in America’s post-1960s era. For a Boulder, Colorado, commune calling themselves ‘‘Divine Madness,’’ running distances of fifty and one hundred miles is a common faith practice. While they represent only a small portion of endurance athletes, many contemporary ‘‘seekers’’ discover a similar spiritual worth in distance running (albeit by running much shorter distances). Whether the focus is sports and or sports as religion, the study of this perhaps unlikely combination shows how faith can extend far beyond institutional boundaries. By examining this relationship, one can begin to understand how sports have become part of the complicated fabric that is the American religious landscape.

RELIGION AND SPORT The phrase ‘‘muscular Christianity’’ first appeared in Englishman T.C. Sandars’s 1857 review of Charles Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago.4 The review called Kingsley’s ideal muscular Christian a man who ‘‘breathes God’s free air on God’s rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers.’’5 Many characters in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days displayed a similar type of manhood. In all his writings, Hughes linked Christianity with what he believed were masculine values such as resilience and aggressiveness. Despite the popularity of both authors in industrial England, their novels made little headway in rural antebellum America. With industrialization and urbanization characterizing the Progressive Era (c. 1880–1920), however, attitudes toward muscular Christianity changed. In the nation’s growing cities, women became increasingly visible in public life. An anxious cast of men like Theodore Roosevelt wondered if this change signaled the ‘‘feminization’’ of America.6 ‘‘Over-sentimentality, over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness,’’ declared then-governor Roosevelt, ‘‘are the great dangers of this age and of this people.’’7 Proposing a solution, G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist and president of Clarke University, advocated sports as a means for cultivating and controlling male aggression. Jettisoning the lingering Puritan belief that sports were frivolous and childish, many evangelical Protestant ministers latched on to the suggestions of Hall and others. The result was American ‘‘muscular Christianity.’’ The ministers of muscular Christianity used sports both as a tool for evangelization and as a means for inculcating their masculine ideals. Resulting in large part from the efforts of revivalist Dwight Moody, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) built many urban facilities during the 1870s. For Moody and others, gymnasiums and swimming

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pools were suitable alternatives to the various attractions of the city, such as saloons and brothels. During the 1910s and 1920s, revivalist Billy Sunday promoted the YMCA through his various ministries. Sunday, a former baseball player for the Chicago White Sox, held revivals that were demonstrations of physicality and aggressiveness. He slid down the center-aisle, threw chairs across the stage, and preached that Jesus was the model of masculine strength. ‘‘Lord save us,’’ Sunday prayed, ‘‘from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.’’ For Sunday, Jesus ‘‘was the greatest scrapper that ever lived,’’ thus leading him to conclude, ‘‘The Manliest man, is the man who will acknowledge Jesus Christ.’’ For Sunday and many of his male followers, Jesus epitomized the Progressive Era’s muscular ideal, and the YMCA was where young men literally exercised this principle.8

BEYOND EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM The gender concerns feeding muscular Christianity influenced many religious groups operating outside America’s evangelical circles. ‘‘Muscular Mormonism,’’ argued historian Richard Ian Kimball, developed in Utah during the early twentieth century. Through recreation activities, Mormons hoped to ‘‘instill masculinity and the religious tenets of Mormonism.’’9 The Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association (YMMIA) was a Mormon organization that served this very function. Preaching on the benefits of the YMMIA in 1912, Lyman R. Martineau said the group ‘‘has a higher purpose than mere recreation.’’ For the Mormon leader, ‘‘Our track meets are not primarily to make records, but are a part of the program to make men.’’ Mormons sometimes made the extraordinary athletic achievements of young men a reason to celebrate their faith practices. For example, the ‘‘Word of Wisdom’’ is a Mormon dietary code prohibiting the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and large quantities of meat. A 1910 newspaper article covering a basketball tournament told how the Mormon team triumphed with only five players. The author complimented the team’s ‘‘grit,’’ and noted how their ‘‘endurance’’ became a topic of conversation for many fans. The nonMormon audience ‘‘attributed it to the exercise which they obtained on the farms.’’ The Mormon parents attending the game, however, knew the team’s success ‘‘was due to their clean lives and the observance of the Word of Wisdom.’’10 Muscular Catholicism also surfaced during this period. Serving as Notre Dame’s religious prefect from 1924 to 1934, John O’Hara made the school the ‘‘home of masculine Catholicism,’’ according to historian Mark S. Massa. O’Hara’s advocacy of ‘‘manly piety’’ blended athletics with the Catholic practices of Communion and Marian devotionalism. Moreover, after Knute Rockne’s appointment as head football coach in 1918, Notre Dame quickly became a pigskin powerhouse. The following decades saw the Catholic team defeating America’s finest Protestant and secular universities. This came at a time when anti-Catholicism had renewed strength in

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America. Notre Dame’s success in football helped diminish this religious intolerance. The Catholic team earned non-Catholic respect by dominating a game that for many defined manhood.11 On the East Coast, Philadelphia’s Monsignor John Bonner formed the Catholic League in 1919, hoping to introduce sports to Catholics attending parochial schools. According to historian Julie Byrne, Bonner believed sports could instill ‘‘Catholic virtues’’ such as ‘‘discipline, courage, perseverance, teamwork, and leadership.’’ One sport Bonner advocated was basketball, a game that became enormously popular for both men and women during the 1920s and 1930s.12 While invented in the late nineteenth century, basketball did not draw from the aggressive values of muscular Christianity. In 1891, James Naismith, a Presbyterian minister and YMCA gym teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts, set out to create an inside sport for the cold winter months of the Northeast. On January 20, 1892, eighteen young men in Naismith’s gym class first played the game of ‘‘basketball.’’ They followed Naismith’s thirteen rules, which levied ‘‘fouls’’ for unnecessary contact and set the goal ten feet high to prohibit blocked shots. Naismith wanted his game to emphasize joy, effort, and grace instead of aggressiveness and force like many other games of the era. He believed basketball was both a helpful tool for bringing men to the YMCA and an expression of Christianity.13 One year after Naismith introduced basketball to men, Senda Berenson Abbott brought the game to the women of Smith College. Other female institutions of higher learning would follow suit. During the 1930s, the Catholic women of Immaculata College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began playing basketball. By 1972, the talented ‘‘Mighty Macs’’ won the first of their three college national championships. According to Julie Byrne, basketball served as a ‘‘parareligious institution’’ for these generations of female athletes.14 On the basketball court, players modified the rituals of Catholicism to match their newly discovered athletic identities. Emphasizing this point, Byrne cited a popular Mighty Mac pre-game prayer. O God of Players, hear our prayer To play this game and play it fair, To conquer, win, but if to lose, Not to revile nor to abuse But with understanding start again, Give us strength, O Lord. Amen.15

The level of autonomy displayed by the Mighty Macs often left many male authorities in the church unsettled. They occasionally tried to limit the players’ efforts in modification but had little success. On the basketball court, the Mighty Macs had a level of freedom that allowed them to give Catholic practice an athletic feel. Both Notre Dame’s football team and the Mighty Macs became positive representatives of Catholicism during a time of religious intolerance. For smaller utopian movements like the House of David, baseball served a

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similar end. This Christian Israelite community in Michigan had its origins in the 1792 visions of England’s Joanna Southcott. These visions directed Southcott to prepare for the messiah, and form a millennial kingdom comprised of the 144,000 members of the twelve tribes of Israel. Her book, The Flying Roll, led to the formation of both the House of David and the ‘‘Holy Rollers.’’16 After listening to a House of David missionary in Richmond, Indiana, Mary and Benjamin Purnell joined the movement. By 1903, they established a community in Benton Harbor, Michigan. At its largest, the commune held five hundred members. The utopian community had a number of distinct practices: Members forfeited all ownership rights, women assumed leadership roles, the diet was vegetarian, modest dress was the norm, many practiced celibacy, and business was conducted on the Sabbath since members believed every day was equally worthy of worship. The House of David attracted suspicion from their Michigan neighbors, and sometimes hostility resulted. In 1908, for example, some community members were victims of a mob attack.17 In an effort to offset suspicion and bring their message to willing ears, the House of David instituted a men’s baseball team in 1914. By the 1920s and 1930s, any given summer saw the team travel approximately 25,000 miles and play over 200 games. The barnstormers18 won roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of their games against minor league, Negro league, and local all-star teams. Another distinguishing faith practice of the House of David was that men neither cut their hair nor shaved their beards. Because of their unshorn appearance and uncommonly good play, the team drew large crowds and eventually gained a national reputation. In an attempt to win more games, the House of David began recruiting ‘‘ringers’’ from outside the community, such as future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander. Initially, contracts required outside players to grow their hair and beards. When these image prescriptions relaxed, however, the team lost its peculiar look and fewer people came to watch them play. Nevertheless, baseball helped the House of David bring their message to those outside their community. According to theologian Joseph Price, seeing the shaggy baseball stars and watching them win, ‘‘legitimized’’ the House of David to the many suspicious onlookers.19 ‘‘Legitimization’’ is a word often associated with the Jewish baseball great ‘‘Hammerin’’’ Hank Greenberg. With a towering 215-pound frame, Greenberg, a New York native and son of Jewish immigrants, wielded a powerful bat for the Detroit Tigers during the 1930s and 1940s, amassing 331 home runs and 1,276 RBIs while maintaining a .313 lifetime batting average. In matters of religious practice, Greenburg struggled to sustain the Judaism of his parents in the largely Christian America of his time. In the midst of a tight pennant race in 1934, Detroit was set to play a chief rival, the Boston Red Sox. The game fell on the Jewish High Holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which meant the Orthodox Greenburg had to decide whether he would play. Controversy immediately erupted when journalists mentioned the ‘‘Hebrew star’s’’ religious conflict. Anglo sportswriters and fans closely inspected the Jewish faith. They even consulted rabbis in an effort to convince Greenburg to make an exception. Offering little relief,

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the chief rabbi of Detroit, Dr. Leo M. Franklin, essentially said the choice was Greenburg’s to make. Some forthright rabbis beseeched Hammerin’ Hank to observe the Jewish New Year properly and skip the game. Torn between his religious and secular duties, Greenburg played the game, reasoning that he owed it to his teammates and fans. With two home runs, Greenburg led Detroit to a two-to-one victory and remarked, ‘‘Some divine influence must have caught hold of me that day.’’20 Historian William M. Simons argued that this game was a microscopic example of Greenburg’s larger contribution toward legitimizing the Jewish presence in America. Greenburg played during a time when the fog of antiSemitism thickened as radio demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin blamed Jews for the Depression.21 Simons called Greenburg’s decision to play a ‘‘transitional’’ moment. The ‘‘‘All American’ example’’ of Greenburg proved to a distrustful Anglo population that the Jewish people were willing and valuable participants in American life and culture.22 From the hyper-masculine sermons of Billy Sunday, to the Mighty Macs’ prayers to the ‘‘God of Players’’ before a basketball game, America’s past has seen numerous meeting places for sports and religion. Urbanization during the early twentieth century led to a paranoid sense that the quality of masculinity had diminished. Reacting, ministers reconsidered their Puritan prohibition against sports, and made athletics an important part of muscular Christianity. Sports also became a way for other faiths to proselytize, inculcate, and legitimize their ideologies of gender and religion.

MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY’S CONTEMPORARY LEGACIES AND THE NEO-FOSDICKS Although muscular Christianity may be an unfamiliar term for many in the contemporary era, the combination of sports and evangelical Protestantism is not. The legacy of muscular Christianity continues through organizations like the Promise Keepers and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. The former started through the efforts of one-time University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney. When conceiving the idea in 1990, McCartney wanted to spark ‘‘a revival among Christian men who were willing to take a stand for God in their marriages, families, churches, and communities.’’ In 1991, he drew 4,200 men to the initial Promise Keepers meeting. His hope for the future was that 50,000 would come to Colorado’s Folsom Field for an event, and this happened in 1993. The Promise Keepers mission statement reads in part, ‘‘In a world of negotiable values, confused identities, and distorted priorities, men are encountering God’s Word, embracing their identities as His sons, and investing in meaningful relationships with God, their families and each other.’’23 To direct the ‘‘confused identities’’ of men toward Christian practice, McCartney made Jesus a Billy Sunday-esque ‘‘scrapper.’’ To do this, he used sports. ‘‘Like those who promoted muscular Christianity,’’ wrote historian Charles H. Lippy, ‘‘Promise Keepers organizers saw athletics as a natural domain of men, just as the home was perceived the natural domain

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of women.’’24 In his rally speeches, McCartney blended athletic metaphors with a message of family commitment and Christian devotion. This formula certainly helped raise the enthusiasm at meetings. At a gathering in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, sportswriter Steve Hubbard said the 40,000-plus crowd ‘‘cheer as loudly as they do for any Steelers touchdown. Only now they scream for Jesus.’’25 By 1994, McCartney resigned as Colorado’s head coach in large part because of the condition of his family. His wife’s clinical depression worsened and his unwed daughter had her second child. The two fathers of the daughter’s children had been players for McCartney. ‘‘My obsession with winning at football,’’ announced McCartney, ‘‘caused me to often neglect the important things in my life—my wife, my kids, and my relationship with God.’’26 With a football career behind him, McCartney remained with Promise Keepers and the movement grew rapidly during the 1990s. By 1996, 1.1 million participants attended Promise Keeper events at twenty-two stadiums across America. Attendance declined in subsequent years, though, and McCartney resigned in 2003, citing family reasons. The following year saw only 179,000 attendees come to the eighteen Promise Keeper events.27 McCartney first thought of the Promise Keepers while traveling to Pueblo, Colorado, for a Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) banquet. Like Promise Keepers, the FCA represents another outgrowth of muscular Christianity. Forming in 1954, the FCA now reaches sports at all levels from junior leagues to the professionals. Their mission: ‘‘To present to athletes and coaches and all whom they influence the challenge and adventure of receiving Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, serving Him in their relationship and in the fellowship of the church.’’28 Just as muscular Christianity faced critics during its time, the FCA’s presence at public educational facilities has become a point of contention. Historians generally contend that muscular Christianity peaked during the years 1880–1920. The supposed end came after World War I in large part thanks to critics such as Harry Emerson Fosdick. A Baptist minister until 1924, Fosdick was a modernist who believed muscular Christianity promoted an unhealthy level of militarism. He advocated instead the gentle Christianity found in the Social Gospel.29 In the contemporary era, the ‘‘neo-Fosdicks’’ can often be heard crying foul on matters pertaining to church and state. During the fall 2005 football season, the Air Force Academy requested that head coach Fischer DeBerry remove a banner from the team locker room that displayed the ‘‘Competitor’s Creed.’’ Produced by the FCA, the creed reads: I am a Christian first and last I am created in the likeness of God Almighty to bring him Glory I am a member of Team Jesus Christ I wear the colors of the cross.

DeBerry took down the banner, but remained unapologetic about his Christian advocacy and alliance with the FCA. Bobby Bowden, head

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football coach at Florida State University, praised DeBerry while speaking before a gathering of the Southern Colorado FCA. ‘‘[DeBerry is] fighting a heck of a battle because he happens to be a Christian, and he wants his boys to be saved. I want my boys to be saved.’’ As a coach, Bowden said his ‘‘responsibility’’ to players is ‘‘to try to influence their spiritual life, their physical life and their academic life.’’ For Bowden, DeBerry’s reprimand was tantamount to religious persecution. The FSU coach told the crowd that Christians needed to assert their religious rights. ‘‘The problem with us Christians is we won’t speak out.’’30 Following Bowden’s remarks, the voices of neo-Fosdicks claimed DeBerry was guilty of violating the First Amendment. One opinion writer said the coach’s use of the Competitor’s Creed would ‘‘fail miserably’’ if put to the ‘‘Lemon Test,’’ a reference to the 1971 Supreme Court Case Lemon vs. Kurtzman. Among its three provisions, the ‘‘Lemon Test’’ says government must not promote or prohibit religion. In this writer’s opinion, DeBerry promoted Christianity, thereby needlessly alienating the team’s non-Christians.31 In response to Bowden’s statement that Christians ‘‘won’t speak out,’’ another journalist wrote: ‘‘C’mon, where have you been? One of the biggest problems in America is militant Christians crusading to make laws, policies and public behavior adhere to their beliefs.’’ The author called religion a ‘‘private matter’’ and concluded the ‘‘separation of church and state is what makes this nation better, safer and more peaceful than all those Iraqs and Bosnias and North Irelands.’’32 Using even less restraint, the author of a political Weblog wrote, ‘‘Are you Jewish? Muslim? None of the above? Then don’t play football at Florida State or Air Force . . . you’re a sinner there.’’ The author suggested, ‘‘How about coaching your boys how to play football, jackass? Last I looked, both FSU and the Air Force academy [sic] are government funded schools. Stick to football, you dopes.’’33 By June 2005, an Air Force investigation found that the Academy as a whole had displayed ‘‘certain insensitivities’’ toward non-Christian students. In response, DeBerry apologized for hanging the banner. While he promised to remain committed to his faith and the FCA, DeBerry remarked, ‘‘I did not appreciate that encouraging some discouraged others. To the extent that my words and actions did that, I offer my sincere apology.’’34 The contradictory interpretations of the First Amendment appear elsewhere in the world of football. In 2000, a policy at a Texas high school permitting an elected student to read a prayer over the intercom prior to football games came before the United States Supreme Court in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe. By a vote of six to three, the court deemed the pre-game prayer unconstitutional. Speaking for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, ‘‘it is beyond dispute that, at a minimum, the Constitution guarantees that government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise, or otherwise act in a way which establishes a [state] religion or religious faith, or tends to do so.’’ For the minority, however, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said the majority decision ‘‘bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life.’’35

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Aside from church/state debates, the voices of neo-Fosdicks can also be heard when issues of morality and hypocrisy are at stake. Professional golfer Loren Roberts admitted, ‘‘Some of the biggest hypocrites in the world are from the Christian community, but that’s the way it is in all walks of life.’’ Roberts, an avowed Christian, said the media unfairly links ‘‘Christian’’ and ‘‘perfect’’ together. Giving a different perspective, the golfer said faith ‘‘[is] like the game of golf. You never perfect it. You’ll never shoot eighteen.’’36 The journalistic cries of hypocrisy rang loud after the 1999 Super Bowl in Miami between the Atlanta Falcons and the Denver Broncos. Prior to the game, safety Eugene ‘‘The Prophet’’ Robinson of the Falcons received the Bart Starr Award from the Christian organization Athletes in Action for his ‘‘outstanding moral character.’’ Hours later, Robinson, who had ostentatiously professed his faith throughout the playoffs, solicited oral sex from a female undercover police officer. Robinson played and the Falcons lost 34–19. After the game, Robinson publicly apologized to his fans, his wife, and his two children.37 Responding, journalist Gary Sheldon wrote that after Robinson turned his ‘‘podium into a pulpit,’’ he proceeded to ‘‘let down’’ people of faith and ‘‘[feed] the skeptics.’’ Sheldon wondered, ‘‘The next time you hear an athlete talk about faith, do you believe him? Or do you roll your eyes and think of Eugene Robinson, hypocrite?’’38 George Vecsey of the New York Times said the ‘‘vindictive’’ responses to the ‘‘self-styled prophet’’ came precisely because Robinson was ‘‘ranting about divine intervention in a stupid football game.’’ Jon Saraceno of USA Today lambasted Robinson and called for ‘‘separation of church and football.’’39 Saraceno has been a regular critic of religious athletes who stray. While in prison on a rape charge, boxer Mike Tyson converted to Islam and continued maintaining his innocence. Before a 1997 bout with Evander Holyfield, a member of Tyson’s training team said Tyson would ‘‘rape’’ his opponent in the ring. Saraceno said that while Tyson calls himself a ‘‘pious Muslim,’’ he ‘‘likes it when his bought-and-paid for cronies do his dirty work. He walks like the champion of heavyweight hypocrisy.’’40 Since the early twentieth century, sports have played an important role in shaping and delivering religious messages to players and fans. Baseball gave Billy Sunday a means for making Jesus a ‘‘scrapper’’ and Hank Greenburg a way to legitimize his All American character. Football was both a stage for Notre Dame players to display their Catholic manhood and a lightning rod for First Amendment debates. There is yet another way to discuss the relationship between sports and religion, where sports is not a means to an end but, rather, a religious means in itself.

SPORTS AS RELIGION When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492, he branded the indigenous people atheists because they had no formal church or creed. Columbus’s definition of religion effectively began and ended with his Judeo-Christian worldview.41 According to historian David Chidester, Europeans revised Columbus’s conclusions after comparing the

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‘‘familiar metaphors’’ of Western faiths to ‘‘the strange beliefs’’ of their Indian counterparts. Chidester said scholars now face the ‘‘dilemma of mediating between the familiar and the strange,’’ in an effort to determine what is and is not religion.42 Some have brought this discussion of the ‘‘familiar’’ and ‘‘strange’’ to sports. Theologian Michael Novak called athletics a ‘‘natural religion.’’ While not an institutional religion like Methodism or Catholicism, Novak said, ‘‘sports flow outward into action from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious: an impulse of freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection.’’ Discarding notions that sports are simply ‘‘entertainment,’’ Novak contended they represent ‘‘the necessities and the aspirations of the human spirit.’’43 Historian Catherine Albanese argued along similar lines, calling sports a ‘‘cultural religion.’’ She said the ritual form and distinctly different space found in sports create a set of codes that maintain collective patterns of belief. Albanese called baseball ‘‘a miniature rehearsal for the game of life,’’ pointing to the ‘‘struggle between contesting forces in which there is a winning and losing side.’’ In this rehearsal, players also learn lessons in teamwork, ‘‘selfdenial,’’ and ‘‘hard work,’’ along with values like ‘‘[loyalty], fair play, and being a ‘good sport’ in losing.’’ For Albanese and Novak, American sports are easily comparable to religion because both provide a sense of moral identity, ritual worth, and sacredness.44 These conclusions draw criticism from literary scholar Robert J. Higgs, who flatly denied Novak’s claim that sports is a ‘‘natural religion.’’ According to Higgs, sports and religion are ‘‘entirely different categories of human experience,’’ and when the two combine, ‘‘heresy, we may conclude, is afoot in the land.’’45 Offering a counterargument, theologian Joseph L. Price said defining religion in unfamiliar contexts requires a comparison of ‘‘ideal norms.’’ Myths, creeds, sacraments, and the like are categories constructed to help onlookers identify religion. For Price, these ideal norms of religion are also foundational elements of sports. With this as his starting point, Price proposed that scholars could examine not only ‘‘sports and religion,’’ but also ‘‘sports as religion.’’ Scholastic investigations employing the latter category penetrate the surface of athletics in an attempt to unearth their religious qualities.46 For Price, the mythology of baseball feeds the game’s gripping ritual drama. Calling the pitcher’s mound a ‘‘cosmic mountain,’’ Price compared it to the Greek ‘‘omphalos myth.’’ This myth tells of a ‘‘sacred rock’’ at the ‘‘mythical center’’ of the earth from where all creation begins. Similarly, in baseball the ‘‘creative activity’’ rising from the pitcher’s mound begins with a pitcher who tries to generate enough effort to achieve an ideal end, a strike. The batter, however, is the antithesis to pitcher’s creation, endeavoring to destroy the pitcher’s effort with one swing. The contending forces of creation and destruction, concluded Price, give the game a transcendent mythical ‘‘structure.’’47 Whether or not the mythology is responsible, some baseball fans have a strong attachment to their sport that closely mirrors a believer’s commitment to a particular religion. Consider the following:

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I believe in the church of baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshiped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there’s 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there’s 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. Y’see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring. . . . I’ve tried them all, I really have. And, the only church that feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the church of baseball.48

These words, spoken by the fictional character Annie Savoy in the 1989 baseball film Bull Durham, may cause true devotees of baseball to give a prompt ‘‘Amen!’’ Citing Annie Savoy’s declaration, David Chidester said the ‘‘traces of religion’’ appear often in baseball. For the baseball faithful, said Chidester, the park is a common gathering place (much like a church), where all attention turns to the sacred ground of the baseball diamond (much like the sacraments). These familiar metaphors between church life and baseball, he said, help explain why some form religious-like bonds to their favored game.49 The lure of baseball is also a topic of discussion for theologian and newspaper columnist Leo Sandon. He argued that the dramatic and timeless nature of baseball keeps the game a viable part of American culture. To the debunkers who claim the inevitable decline of baseball is near, Sandon said the game has remained strong precisely because of its ‘‘spiritual dimension.’’ Much like religion, Sandon said, the game of baseball is an ‘‘[affair] with sacred time and sacred space.’’ Rather than the linear time experienced in everyday life, the structure of baseball, he claimed, has ‘‘a temporal and spatial openness’’ unlike that of any other sport. ‘‘Baseball requires an abandonment of clock time; indeed, the game’s basic movement is counterclockwise. Theoretically a game can go on forever: ‘I don’t care if I never get back.’’’50 In baseball, in other words, the viewer may abandon the banality of everyday for a brief glimpse of the timeless sacred. Offering another perspective, theologian Thomas F. Dailey argued that baseball affirms certain ‘‘virtues.’’ In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Dailey said America had a restless heart and anxious mind. They craved ‘‘a more lasting joy that transcends the vicissitudes of everyday life.’’ He pointed specifically to the importance of ‘‘sacrifice’’ in the game and used the ‘‘sacrifice bunt’’ as an example. In this play, the batter gently taps the pitch, allowing the ball to dribble past home plate. While the batter is usually thrown out, he or she selflessly advances a teammate. Explaining why sacrifice is an important virtue, Dailey wrote, ‘‘To believe in sacrifice is to act on behalf of solidarity, to do our part to contribute to the winning score rather than seek personal aggrandizement.’’ Dailey resolved that people wanted to restore a belief in ‘‘goodness’’ during this time, and baseball’s lessons on sacrifice helped fulfill this need.51 Scholars such as James McBride have examined the religious elements of another favored American pastime: football. Religare, the Latin root of the word ‘‘religion,’’ roughly translates as ‘‘binding back.’’ According to

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McBride, this ‘‘implies not only a return to cosmological origins but also a return to that which gives the individual life: the community.’’ American football, McBride reasoned, provides communal identities for many devoted fans. As a result, those who closely follow the game often ‘‘immerse themselves’’ in the symbols of their team by, for example, proudly wearing clothes with team logos. The symbols of football carry an almost transcendent weight that binds people to the common cause of their team.52 For Florida State University (FSU), the ‘‘Seminole’’ mascot is a symbol with a strong binding effect. The team’s pre-game ritual portrays the famed Seminole warrior, Osceola, coming on to the field holding a flaming spear atop a galloping horse.53 Sportswriter Richard Billingsley called the pre-game show ‘‘one of the most recognizable, revered, and respected traditions of all time.’’54 Many FSU fans agree. Systematically explaining the elements of this ritual, one fan proclaimed, ‘‘To us, the ‘war path’ is our journey to make the best possible life we can for ourselves.’’ Osceola’s horse, ‘‘Renegade,’’ announced the FSU follower, ‘‘is not simply a horse, but rather the educational system on which we are attempting to ride, so that we can move with greater speed and stability towards our own personal futures.’’ Finally, the fan called Osceola ‘‘the courage within each of us. He represents our ability to lead, have confidence, and to not settle, but rather to go for our goals, and with hope, attain what we desire.’’55 Such sentiments are common among FSU’s legions of followers. Collectively, they possess a great sense of pride for their mascot. Not everyone finds pride in FSU’s use of the Seminole mascot. Opposition groups often critique the pre-game show, noting that Seminole Indians neither rode horses nor threw spears. The use of tomahawks at games has also been a point of contention. When fans perform the ‘‘tomahawk chop,’’ the university’s marching band, the ‘‘Marching Chiefs,’’ plays an accompaniment drum beat and brass anthem reminiscent of a 1950s Western film. For many Native Americans, the tomahawk is a weapon and tool; but it is also, ‘‘a ceremonial object, a decorative item, and a symbol of leadership.’’56 Commenting on FSU’s tomahawk chop, one protester said it represents ‘‘white man’s Hollywood, not respect for tradition.’’57 Such complaints generally fall upon deaf ears, as leaders from the Florida Seminoles have continually supported FSU’s use of the mascot. The protests of opposition groups have continued, and they often elicit a prompt response from the FSU fan base. In March of 1999, for example, Florida Republican State Senator and FSU graduate Jim King added an amendment to House Bill 1735 that proposed making ‘‘Chief Osceola riding atop an Appaloosa horse named ‘Renegade’’’ the legal mascot of FSU. King argued, ‘‘For those of us who are of the garnet and gold persuasion, it is time, in fact it is long past time, for us to defend the heritage that is Florida State University.’’58 If passed, any attempt to change the mascot would require the Florida legislature’s assent. The Senate voted 38–0 in favor of King’s proposal, and with FSU graduate John Thrasher controlling the House, the bill appeared as if it would pass there also. The House ran short on time, however, and subsequently killed the bill.59 This

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mascot debate is a religious conflict. Members of the Native American opposition believe the mascot diminishes the value of their religious and cultural heritage. The faithful fan base of FSU football considers these claims unjustified, and has gone to great lengths to protect the ‘‘heritage’’ of their mascot. If there is any question as to the importance of the Seminole mascot, one ought to consider the alacrity with which fans like King defend it. Not only did an elected official propose a law to protect it, but the measure passed unanimously. Examining the passionate faith demonstrated by these football fans offers another way to understand the intersection of sports and religion. As David Chidester noted, defining religion often requires one to compare the familiar and strange in an attempt to discover commonalities. No doubt, many scholars claim to have found the traces of religion in the myths, symbols, and rituals of America’s beloved pastimes.

‘‘A PLACE TO COMMUNE WITH GOD’’ Throughout her life, Tizivia Gover has been an exercise enthusiast, participating in a variety of sports that includes jogging, swimming, biking, and martial arts. In religious matters, Gover, a Reform Jew by birth, reached adulthood and experimented with everything from Catholicism to Buddhism. Religion, though, did not have the same attraction as athletics until she turned twenty-seven and lost a job, custodial rights to her daughter, and a relationship all at the same time. Her life in ‘‘shambles,’’ Gover resolved ‘‘to take the same practical approach to becoming spiritually fit as I had to becoming physically fit.’’ To develop a ‘‘closer relationship to a Higher Power,’’ Gover practiced ‘‘positive thinking,’’ ‘‘choosing love over fear,’’ and paying close attention to individual spiritual matters. Explaining her practice of ‘‘prayer walking,’’ she said, ‘‘From Moses’ trek through the desert to Gandhi’s walks for peace, putting one foot in front of the other seems to have a spiritual dimension.’’60 For Gover, there was a close link between this sort of endurance activity and ‘‘spiritual fitness.’’ The acute observer need not penetrate very far to find the traces of religion in Gover’s case. In her reflections, Gover subtly links her athletic and religious lives, implying each draws from the other. Gover could be considered one of the many athletic seekers in America. Sociologist Wade Clark Roof called America’s baby boomers a ‘‘generation of seekers.’’ Wanting to find some religious meaning in their lives, Roof argued that this generation has developed contrasting definitions of ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘institution.’’ ‘‘Spirit is the inner, experiential aspect of religion; institution is the outer, established form of religion.’’ For Roof, the former indicates a sense of ‘‘personal autonomy’’ and has become the favored category of seekers. This nonconformist population, he said, moves ‘‘freely in and out, across religious boundaries’’ in search of a ‘‘tailor-made’’ faith that fits their particular needs. The division between ‘‘sports and religion,’’ and ‘‘sports as religion’’ becomes less distinct in cases like Gover’s. Unlike the worshippers of the ‘‘Church of Baseball,’’ the religious functions represented in Gover’s story are closer to the

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surface. Yet, contrasting with the discussion of muscular Christianity, her athletic faith has no clear tie to any single organized religion. Somewhere between these categories, Gover and many others have created a place where endurance sports are part of their search for the spiritual.61 Many seekers have found an outlet in long distance running. The ‘‘Running Boom’’ of the 1970s brought the sport into the exercise mainstream. Soon many runners drew connections between their sport and Eastern traditions like Zen Buddhism. Released in 1974, Fred Rohe´’s The Zen of Running is a quasi-poetic and illustrated reflection on running. In a typical statement, Rohe´ wrote, ‘‘by running within your breath, you store a surplus of ‘parna,’ a Sanskrit word meaning Absolute Energy, the invisible vital force which supplies the primal motivation for every form of activity.’’62 In Holistic Running, Joel Henning continually referenced Eastern traditions, claiming that running can enact a similar sense of ‘‘awareness.’’ Yoga and running, he asserted, both ‘‘involve the full employment of mind and emotions . . . heightening one’s awareness and clarifying one’s relationship to the world.’’63 The trends of religious eclecticism in running literature continue into the twenty-first century through books such as Roger D. Joslin’s Running the Spiritual Path. Joslin called running ‘‘an act of devotion,’’ and repeatedly extolled the benefits of combining it with prayerful meditation. His tailor-made spirituality drew from the Christian tradition as well as Buddhist, Taoist, Native American, and Islamic faiths.64 Although Westerners often make independent connections between athletics and Eastern traditions, some Buddhists have made distance running part of their faith practices. The ‘‘Marathon Monks’’ of Japan’s Mount Hiei have a seven-year ritual consisting of a 1,000-day pilgrimage, requiring participants to run anywhere from twenty to fifty miles a day. A saying within their lore reads: ‘‘If mind and body are unified, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished. Strive to attain the ultimate, and the universe will someday be yours!’’65 Like these Buddhist trekkers, members of the Boulder, Colorado, commune ‘‘Divine Madness’’ believe running and spirituality represent more than a loose association; it is a way of life. Mark Tizer, the group’s leader, started Divine Madness in the 1970s and incorporated distance running in 1991 after watching a six-day-long race at the University of Colorado. In 2003, Divine Madness consisted of approximately thirty-five members. Most live in a number of rented houses throughout Boulder and some in a gated compound in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In addition to working a variety of subsistence-level jobs, eating an organic diet, and sleeping on the floor, members run extraordinarily long distances of 120–130 miles per week. On Sundays, group members run approximately fifty miles through the trails of Boulder.66 Profoundly influenced by Eastern traditions, Tizer maintains a great deal of control over the lives of his followers—determining when they eat, sleep, work, and run. To monitor their spiritual and physical fitness, Tizer often pulls on their outstretched arms. He believes this indicates not only a person’s muscle strength, but also their emotional state, nutritional needs, and overall bodily condition. Thursday nights represent a break from the normally austere routine, as members participate in all-night dancing parties,

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replete with plenty of alcohol and random sexual couplings. While such activities raise outsider suspicions, the group has its apologists. ‘‘They’re not so nuts. . . . They’re very nice people,’’ said the owner of a local sports store. ‘‘They’re disciplined. They take very good care of themselves. They’re intelligent. But they’re a little out there.’’ Still, many pejoratively refer to Tizer’s group as a ‘‘cult.’’ Disregarding such labels, Tizer has called Divine Madness a ‘‘community,’’ or ‘‘school.’’ ‘‘A cult is where everyone shaves their head and you have to give all your money over.’’ Divine Madness, said Tizer, is simply a place for ‘‘people who are sincerely trying to improve themselves.’’ Referring to himself as a ‘‘teacher who is more or less evolved,’’ Tizer said he only helps followers ‘‘lead a more balanced, harmonious life.’’ One member who claims to have benefited from Divine Madness is Steve Peterson. He called the group ‘‘crazy,’’ but ‘‘not in an insane demented way.’’ For him, Divine Madness gives a means for ‘‘tapping into something greater or deeper beyond yourself from nature or God.’’ Peterson has become the group’s most successful runner. In 2001, Peterson won Colorado’s highly competitive Leadville Trail 100-mile race for the fifth time in six years. This ‘‘ultra-marathon,’’ takes runners over a course that reaches 12,600 feet in altitude. While even the best runners struggle to finish, Peterson’s final twenty miles were so fast that other competitors believed he hitched a ride to the finish. Tizer’s own sexual habits have been a target for some former members who have leveled a lawsuit against him. The charges claim Tizer regularly used his controlling personality to force female followers to have sex with him. ‘‘He’s a manipulative, diabolical person,’’ said one former member. ‘‘He has a system where he tries to seduce any woman that comes across his path without concern for their boundaries and sensitivities.’’ Through such measures, the former member said many of the group’s women ‘‘felt confused and violated by these interactions.’’ Why, though, would anyone join or remain? After denouncing Tizer’s character, another former female member claimed the sense of community was a draw. ‘‘You worked with these people, you partied with them, you ran long distances with them, there was just a terrific camaraderie. . . . It was a good life, a simple life.’’ A former male member had a different perspective. ‘‘People who are charismatic can get people who are pretty rational to believe all kinds of things.’’ Divine Madness sits on the far end of the seeker spectrum. Speaking more from the mainstream, author George Sheehan said running was not his religion, but ‘‘a monastery—a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.’’67 For Sheehan, a run could become a location for a religious experience. Many fellow seekers conclude similarly, and their tailor-made faiths find spiritual meaning with every pounding step and laboring breath.

RELIGION AND/AS SPORTS Religion represents a central part of America’s character, and a close examination of sports reveals this reality even more. Julie Byrne argued that a story of American religion that does not look ‘‘outside the church

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walls’’ is ultimately ‘‘incomplete.’’ Byrne drew from the academic discussion of ‘‘lived religion,’’ which she defined as ‘‘the fluid piety that always overflows official vessels.’’ By looking at the unlikely space of the basketball court, she showed how the Mighty Macs modified their Catholic faith to meet their athletic needs. Such improbable depots for religion, Byrne concluded, are the precise places one should look to understand America’s religious past and present.68 Byrne’s words should ring true with many students of sports and/as religion. In athletics, believers from the FCA play and proselytize; critics cry foul at the perceived infractions of church and state; fans worship at the ‘‘church of baseball;’’ and seekers find ‘‘a place to commune with God’’ while running through the woods. In all these examples, the threads of religion hang without regard for where church walls may begin or end. Examining these threads reveals new shades in the complex fabric of America’s religious landscape. The future of this field will be one of diversity. In large part because of initiatives like Title IX, more women participate in athletics than ever before. Studies of the female athlete’s religious experience will no doubt add new dimensions to the field. So too will a focus on different faith communities, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the various new religious movements. Examinations of different sports may also provide fresh insights. Most scholarship thus far has focused on what Michael Novak called the ‘‘holy trinity’’ of American sports (baseball, football, and basketball).69 Forays into running, golf, NASCAR, and rowing have begun to show that participants and spectators from these sports offer varying perspectives.70 Future work will also need to confront the problems of sports more directly. Examples of excess in professional athletics are many, but such behaviors also appear at the nascent stages. Upset because his nine-yearold son was benched during a hockey game, an irate father in Toronto proceeded to choke his son’s coach.71 Worse yet, in Massachusetts an angry parent beat a peewee league official to death over a contested play call.72 The study of sports and/as religion is, in part, an exercise in identifying values. Most would agree that the value of ‘‘sportsmanship’’ evokes ideals of cooperation, compassion, joy, and selflessness—all of which athletes, fans, and overzealous parents tend to forget. Scholars need to offer clear advice for how to promote and maintain the ideals of sportsmanship for the good of athletics and society.

NOTES 1. Lee Warren, ‘‘Does God Care Who Wins?’’ The Pathway (February 24, 2005), http://www.mbcpathway.com/otherstories/-1999946647/-1999518756. htm, accessed May 25, 2005. 2. Quoted in Steve Hubbard, Faith in Sports: Athletes and Their Religion On and Off the Field (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 70. 3. Don Hudson, ‘‘Does God Really Care Who Wins?’’ The Charlotte Observer (February 7, 2004), http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/ 7897505.htm, accessed May 25, 2005.

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4. This essay’s discussion of ‘‘muscular Christianity’’ draws from: Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Donald D. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999). 5. Merle Mowbray Bevington, The Saturday Review, 1855–1868 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 188. 6. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). 7. Quoted in Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 90. 8. Ibid., 94. 9. Richard Ian Kimball, Sports in Zion: Mormon Recreation, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 4. 10. Quoted in ibid., 97–98, 109. 11. Mark S. Massa, Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 203, 204. 12. Julie Byrne, O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 20. 13. Alexander Wolff, Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure (New York: Warner Books, 2002). 14. Byrne, 115. 15. Quoted in ibid., 120. 16. ‘‘‘House of David’ Faces Extinction with ‘King’ Missing,’’ New York Times, April 8, 1923. 17. Russell Porter, ‘‘The Ingatherer of the House of David,’’ New York Times, April 22, 1923. 18. This was a common nickname given to traveling teams such as the House of David. 19. Joseph L. Price, ‘‘Exercising Faith: Baseball and Faith for the House of David’’ (paper given at the Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, April 2003). After Benjamin Purnell died in 1927, the group split and those remaining with the House of David believing him to be the movement’s true leader. Others believing that Mary Purnell shared this responsibility formed the ‘‘Israelite House of David.’’ They eventually formed a baseball team called ‘‘The City of David.’’ 20. Quoted in William M. Simons, ‘‘Hank Greenberg: The Jewish American Sports Hero,’’ Sports and the American Jew, ed. Steven A. Riess (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 197. 21. Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower (New York: Little, Brown, 1973). 22. William M. Simons, ‘‘Hank Greenberg,’’ 203. During World War II, Greenburg left baseball and served as an officer in the Army Air Corps from 1941 to 1945. When he returned, Greenburg helped the Tigers win the pennant and World Series. Salary disputes the following season, however, brought Greenburg to Pittsburgh where he became the first player to earn over $100,000. By 1948, the retired Greenburg became a director of Cleveland’s farm team, and later assumed the role of general manager. 23. ‘‘The History of Promise Keepers,’’ PromiseKeepers.org, http://www. promisekeepers.org/genr12, accessed July 25, 2005; ‘‘Mission Statement,’’ PromiseKeepers.org, http://www.promisekeepers.org/faqscore21, accessed July 25, 2005.

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24. Charles H. Lippy, Do Real Men Pray?: Images of the Christian Man and Male Spirituality in White Protestant America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 189, 197–205. 25. Hubbard, Faith in Sports: Athletes and Their Religion On and Off the Field, 110. 26. Quoted in ibid., 101–2. 27. Melissa Trujillo, ‘‘Promise Keepers,’’ Kansas City Star, April 14, 2005. 28. Fellowship of Christian Athletes information page, http://www.fca.org/ aboutfca/, accessed May 20, 2005. 29. Robert Moats Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 30. Associate Press, ‘‘Bowden Says Air Force Coach in Religious Fight,’’ MSNBC.com (May 16, 2005), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7878468/2005, accessed July 28, 2005. 31. Milo F. Bryant, ‘‘Christian Soldier Has to Watch His Steps,’’ Colorado Springs Gazette.com (May 16, 2005), http://afa.gazette.com/fullstory. php?id=4965, accessed May 20, 2005. 32. Gerald Ensley, ‘‘Don’t Inject Athletes with Religious Beliefs,’’ Tallahassee Democrat, May 22, 2005. 33. Tim Russo, Weblog post, ‘‘Southern White Male Coaches Unite!’’ Democracy Guy (May 17, 2005), http://democracyguy.typepad.com/democracy_guy_ grassroots_/2005/05/southern_white_.html, accessed May 20, 2005. 34. Associated Press, ‘‘Religious Insensitivity Found at Academy,’’ ArizonaDailySun.com (June 23, 2005), http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/ story.cfm?storyID=110696, accessed June 23, 2005. 35. Quoted in Edwin S. Gaustad, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 86. See also Mark Silk, ‘‘Disestablishing Football,’’ Religion in the News 3, no. 2 (Summer 2000). 36. Quoted in Hubbard, 100, 103–4. 37. Mike Freeman, ‘‘Robinson Apologizes After the Game,’’ New York Times, February 1, 1999. 38. Gary Shelton, ‘‘Robinson’s Fall Adds More Fuel to Cynics’ Fire,’’ South CoastToday.com (February 2, 1999), http://www.s-t.com/daily/02-99/02-02-99/ d01sp125.htm, accessed June 23, 2005. 39. George Vecsey, ‘‘Our Royals Hear Rumbles in the Streets,’’ New York Times, February 4, 1999. 40. Quoted in Hubbard, 100. 41. Sam D. Gill, Native American Religions: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2005), 1–9. 42. David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 50. 43. Michael Novak, The Joy of Sport: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 19, 338. 44. Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999), 476. 45. Robert J. Higgs, God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 1, 21. 46. Joseph L. Price, ‘‘An American Apotheosis: Sports as Popular Religion,’’ From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion, ed. Joseph L. Price (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 218, 216, 3–9. See also Charles S. Prebish, ed., Religion and Sport: The Meeting of the Sacred and the Profane (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993); Shirl J. Hoffman, ed., Sport and Religion (Champaign, IL:

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Human Kinetics Books, 1992); Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sport (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1973). 47. Joseph L. Price, ‘‘The Pitcher’s Mound as Cosmic Mountain: Religious Reflections on Baseball,’’ From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion, ed. Joseph L. Price (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1991), 66, 67, 74. 48. Quoted in Chidester, Authentic Fakes, 38. 49. Ibid., 36–40. 50. Leo Sandon, ‘‘The Sacred Space of the Baseball Diamond,’’ Tallahassee Democrat, April 2, 2005. 51. Thomas F. Dailey, ‘‘Believing in Baseball: The Religious Power of Our National Pastime,’’ Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6, no. 2 (2003): 78, 79, 80. 52. James McBride, ‘‘Symptomatic Expression of Male Neuroses: Collective Effervescence, Male Gender Performance, and the Ritual of Football,’’ God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 124, 127. 53. Portions of the FSU mascot discussion are from, Arthur J. Remillard, ‘‘Holy War on the Football Field: Religion and the Florida State University Mascot Controversy,’’ Horsehide, Pigskin, Oval Tracts, and Apple Pie: Essays in Sports and American Culture, ed. James Vlasich (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, Forthcoming 2005). 54. Richard Billingsley, ‘‘Bowden’s Dynasty May Never Be Equaled,’’ ESPN.com, http://espn.go.com/ncf/verge/s/fsuhistory.html, accessed July 12, 2002, no longer available. 55. John Donovan, ‘‘Users Strike Back: Leave the ‘Noles Be,’’ CNN/SI The Inside Game (May 17, 1999), http://www.basketballdraft.com/inside_game/ john_donovan/news/1999/05/17/donovan_column/, accessed July 28, 2005. 56. ‘‘Tomahawk,’’ Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 638. 57. ‘‘Senate Acts on Mascot Issue,’’ FSUNews.com (November 2002), http:// www.fsunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2002/11/18/3dd84f7b0ca53, accessed April 6, 2003. 58. ‘‘Senate Votes to Put FSU Nickname into Law,’’ Jacksonville Online (May 1999), http://tampabayonline.net/news/legi100t.htm, accessed July 12, 2002. 59. ‘‘Senate Votes to Put Seminole Nickname into Law, but Bill Dies in House,’’ Naples Daily News, May 1, 1999. 60. Tzivia Grover, ‘‘Spiritual Fitness,’’ Beliefnet, http://www.beliefnet.com/ story/29/story_2996.html, accessed November 4, 2003. 61. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 5, 30. 62. Fred Rohe´, The Zen of Running (New York: Random House, 1974), no page listed. 63. Joel Henning, Holistic Running: Beyond the Threshold of Fitness (New York: Signet, 1978), 48. 64. Roger D. Joslin, Running the Spiritual Path: A Runner’s Guide to Breathing, Meditating, and Exploring the Prayerful Dimension of the Sport (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), 241. 65. John Stevens, Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei (Boston: Shambhala, 1988), viii. 66. Quotes and information in the discussion of Divine Madness section taken from ‘‘Divine Madness,’’ New York Times, August 2, 1997; Bruce Schoenfeld, ‘‘Divine Madness,’’ Sports Illustrated.com (August 4, 2003), http://

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sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/siadventure/30/divine_madness/, accessed October 13, 2003. 67. Sheehan, ‘‘Is Running a Religion,’’ GeorgeSheehan.com, http://www. georgesheehan.com/essays/essay46.html, accessed November 4, 2003. 68. Byrne, 11. 69. Novak, 34. 70. George Sheehan, Running and Being (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978); Michael Murphy, Golf in the Kingdom (New York: Viking, 1972); Dan Pierce, ‘‘Most Southern Sport on Earth: NASCAR and the Unions,’’ Southern Cultures 7, no. 2 (2001); Douglas A. Brown, ‘‘The Sensual and Intellectual Pleasures of Rowing: Pierre de Coubertin’s Ideal for Modern Sport,’’ Sport History Review 30, no. 2 (1999). 71. ‘‘Man Accused in Hockey Choking Released on Bail,’’ CTV.ca, (January 2005), http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1105972403446_ 4?hub=CanadaAM, accessed June 23, 2005. 72. Mary Lord, ‘‘Parents are Dying to Win,’’ US News & World Report, July 24, 2000.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Byrne, Julie. O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Hubbard, Steve. Faith in Sports: Athletes and Their Religion On and Off the Field. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Novak, Michael. The Joy of Sport: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Prebish, Charles S., ed. Religion and Sport: The Meeting of the Sacred and the Profane. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. Price, Joseph L., ed. From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001. Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 12

From Faith to Fear: Religion in a World of Terror Darryl V. Caterine

T

error has forever lurked on the borders of the charted world. In ancient Greek maps, a veritable bestiary of monsters dwelled just beyond the oikoumene: two-headed serpents and headless men below the Sahara, horses with horns and gargantuan ants to the east in India. Grotesque zoomorphic and anthropomorphic gargoyles crouch in the niches of medieval cathedrals, and blood-drinking, bug-eyed ‘‘protectors’’ inhabit the perimeters of Vajrayana Buddhist mandalas. Modern maps of terror psychologize fear, relegating it to the internal recesses of the self. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘‘terror’’ first and foremost as a state of mind: ‘‘the state of being terrified or greatly frightened; intense fear, fright, or dread.’’ In contrast, religious maps locate terror in the public domain. The mariners of ancient Greece, the Christians of the medieval world, and the Buddhists of Tibet personified their collective fears in psychosocial maps of safety and danger. American religious historian Catherine L. Albanese has defined religion as ‘‘a system of symbols (creed, code, cultus [i.e., ritual]) by means of which people (a community) orient themselves in the world with reference to both ordinary and extraordinary powers, meanings and values.’’1 In light of this definition, we can describe religious terror as the intense fear effected by the loss of or threat to a community’s orientation. Albanese explains that orientation ‘‘means taking note of where the boundaries are and placing oneself in relation to them.’’ We can understand, then, why monsters and demons dwell at the thresholds of cosmological maps. First, they warn the voyager or the pilgrim of the terrors implicit in venturing beyond what is socially known. Hence the etymological connection between ‘‘monster’’ and ‘‘admonish,’’ which are both derived from the Latin monere, ‘‘to warn.’’ Second, they signify the intrinsic instability and

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permeability of boundaries. In his own social mapping of human terrors, Landscapes of Fear, geographer Yi-fu Tuan has distinguished the psychological effect of fear as an admixture of alarm and anxiety. ‘‘Alarm is triggered by an obtrusive event in the environment, and an animal’s instinctive response is to combat it or run. Anxiety, on the other hand, is diffuse sense of dread and presupposes an ability to anticipate.’’2 In light of this distinction, we can say that monsters typically signify collective anxieties rather than alarms. Events do obtrude into bounded spaces, which is cause for alarm, but more perniciously, events forever threaten to obtrude into bounded spaces, which is cause for anxiety. Monsters warn of the ever-present possibility of collective disorientation. Religion can assume different relationships to terror. Most commonly, religion seeks to abate terror by maintaining or, if necessary, reimagining social boundaries in the face of alarms and anxieties. In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, anthropologist Mary Douglas has demonstrated that persons, places, things, and actions falling betwixt and between cultural boundaries are perceived as polluted and dangerous. Religions have at their disposal a repertoire of rituals by which to restore purity and expel danger. Rites of purification, exorcism, and catharsis all seek to effect a reconstitution of social boundaries by transferring the pollution/danger to a material substance or sacrificial victim that is subsequently expunged from the community or destroyed in its presence. Alternately, through the rituals of what Albanese calls ‘‘extraordinary religion,’’ some individuals may be actively encouraged to transgress or surpass boundaries in order to encounter more-than-human realities. Douglas notes that ‘‘though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognize that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises [sic] both danger and power.’’3 The heroes, mystics, and healers of various religions are accordingly those individuals who have crossed over the threshold of the known world and returned with special powers to help their societies. The recurrence of war in American history—eleven times since the Revolution—must be taken into account of any discussion of terror and religion in the United States. To paraphrase the biblical book of Job, war has reigned supreme as ‘‘the king of terrors’’ in modern history as a more threatening alarm and more ubiquitous anxiety than other cultural crises or natural disasters. In America particularly, war has shaped national culture, giving rise to fears of demons, witches, and ghosts that threaten to undermine the security of the country. Furthermore, as the United States has raced to keep ahead of its real and potential military foes, the nation itself has become a source of terror for many citizens. This distinctively twentieth- and twenty-first-century fear—expressed in myths of Gothic terror, new conspiracy theories, and nuclear apocalypse—has come to join anxieties stemming from the perceived vulnerability of cultural and political borders dating back to Puritan times. The September 11, 2001, attacks on American soil by Al Qaeda terrorists have plunged the American nation once again into the thick of warfare. ‘‘Terrorism’’ is appropriately named. Its random and sporadic

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violence destabilizes a psychosocial sense of social order, even as it inflicts physical damage and death. In Tuan’s terminology, it is particularly effective in awakening and sustaining pervasive anxieties about the security of borders. As a result of their former training by United States military experts, Al Qaeda terrorists are also knowledgeable and skilled in the use of modern technology, thus able to thwart the elaborate defenses of the American military and therefore further strengthening their associations with terror. Notwithstanding the important differences between terrorism and the ‘‘rationalized violence’’ of conventional warfare inflicted on Americans in the past, the response to terrorism by both American supporters and detractors in the ‘‘war on terror,’’ which is the focus of the following discussion, has reinvigorated the traditional monsters of the proverbial American bestiary. While the new threat of terrorist violence may well indeed necessitate new American responses, both military and nonmilitary, to date the various myths of terrors awakened in a post–September 11 world have repeated older religious narratives familiar to students of American history.

A NATION FIGHTING TERROR William Tecumseh Sherman, Union general in the American Civil War, once declared that ‘‘war is hell.’’ As major television stations aired live broadcasts of Al Qaeda attacks in Washington and New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, American civilians were given a collective glimpse of just a few of the hells usually reserved for military combatants. President George W. Bush announced to a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks that ‘‘freedom and fear are at war,’’ and subsequently proclaimed war against Afghanistan in October 2001 and against Iraq in March 2003, both in the name of fighting against terror itself.4 The manifold terrors surrounding war stem not only from the threat of death or physical injury, but also from the assault against the real and/or imagined boundaries of the body social. The onus of mitigating the terrors of warfare falls primarily to the nation state, which adopts strategies derived from religions, particularly Protestantism, to redress them. In myths of demonized enemies lurking outside and within the country, and through rituals of violent catharsis sanctioned in the name of God, America seeks to reconstitute its national boundaries in the face of their actual or anticipated assault. America’s language of religious nationalism, or civil religion, can ultimately be traced back to New England Puritan theology of the seventeenth century, which understood the events of colonial history as foreshadowed in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. In John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, ‘‘A Model of Christian Charity,’’ English Puritans en route to New England were exhorted to transform the Massachusetts Bay Colony into a ‘‘city on a hill.’’ Massachusetts Bay, as a New Israel modeled on Calvinist principles, was to become an ideal society both pleasing to God and exemplary for Christians in England and Europe. For the Puritans, the New World was typically understood as a ‘‘wilderness,’’ foreshadowed by the deserts of Sinai/Arabia wherein the ancient Israelites had wandered on their way to Zion. The woods of New England were populated in the

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Puritan imagination by Satan and his Native American and French Catholic minions, who tried but ultimately failed to thwart the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In short, the Puritans made no distinctions between divine and secular history. They saw themselves as the ‘‘righteous remnant’’ of European Christianity living in the end times, engaged in both civil and military conflicts that were nothing less than cosmic battles between God and the devil. Despite America’s transformation after the Revolution into a modern liberal state, reflection on the theological meaning of the New World rooted in Puritan understanding continued to shape the imagination of the national community in the early Republic. Scholarship on eighteenth-century civil religion has uncovered the paradoxical admixture of Republican/Enlightenment ideals and Puritan-derived myths during the time of the American Revolution. Political and/or religious patriots likened the new republic to the New Israel and England to Egypt, while ‘‘liberty trees’’ in local public commons were sequestered as axes mundi in spontaneous rituals celebrating the ‘‘sacred ideal’’ of freedom.5 In subsequent wars throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States continued to identify liberty and freedom as sacred ideals, and its political engagements as manifestations of a providential design. George W. Bush’s vision of a war against terror replicates this longstanding American Christian republicanism in response to the new threat of terrorism. Since his 2001 address to the joint session of Congress, Bush has articulated his vision of religious nationalism even more explicitly. In his 2002 State of the Union address, the president argued that the states of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq constituted an ‘‘axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.’’6 A year later, in his 2003 State of the Union address, he characterized liberty as ‘‘God’s gift to humanity,’’ adding that, ‘‘We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know—we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.’’7 Through the language of civil religion, the United States designates its violence against enemies as sacrosanct and condemns violence inflicted upon it as evil. As Rene´ Girard has argued in his study of religion and sacrifice, these distinctions between ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘impure’’ violence are by no means restricted to religious nationalism in America. Rather, in his analysis, social order is effected universally through the religious legitimization of force. Arguing against a psychoanalytic theory of ‘‘innate’’ desire and aggression, Girard suggests that human behavior is mimetic. People come to want what other people want, and the chiastic nature of desire inevitably leads to vicious circles of rivalry, violence, and retaliation. Girard proposes that human societies are founded on an original act of scapegoating through which interminable cycles of violence are abruptly ended. The ensuing social peace effected by the death of the scapegoat is, in Girard’s words, ‘‘misunderstood’’ as a divine intervention.8 Religion is born through the institution of sacrifice, which both reenacts the death of the scapegoat and functions to evoke and diffuse lingering violence in a society.

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While archaeologists have yet to find empirical evidence that supports a theory of violent social origins among early civilizations, Girard’s analysis offers a compelling explanation of how rites of purification work affectively to allay terror in a society. In traditional religious ceremonies, impurity or danger is symbolically expunged from a community through the ritual manipulation of water, fire, and detergents, or else destroyed through sacrifice or auto-sacrifice (purgation). Not only do rites of purification help communities to reconstruct damaged social boundaries imaginatively, pace Douglas, but they work viscerally to evoke and diffuse sentiments of grief and rage in the wake of collective trauma. Similarly, in military conflicts, the terror of social disorder is projected onto a demonized enemy, whose destruction, it is believed, will restore social stability to the nation. Alongside whatever political or economic motivations have given rise to military engagements, religious justifications for violence invariably accompany war, rendering combat a ritual of catharsis. In designating sacrificial logic as a ‘‘misunderstanding,’’ however, Girard criticizes such efforts as futile: Rites of purification function by evoking the very violence they supposedly seek to abolish. If and when a society loses faith in its sacrificial system, it can no longer make distinctions between pure and impure violence. It finds itself once again enmeshed in violence, both its own and the retaliatory ire of the vanquished enemy. Since September 11, American public interest has understandably turned to the topic of religious fundamentalism and violence. The term ‘‘fundamentalism’’ can be applied to any practicing religious community, including Muslims, that assumes what Albanese has called a ‘‘contractive’’ relationship to the state, unwilling to make certain compromises in both belief and action to the cultural, economic, and political demands of modernity.9 Recent best-selling analyses of the topic include Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (2003), Mark Juergensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (2003), and Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2003). Fundamentalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for violence in the name of religion. Fighters and/or martyrs must typically be trained to kill other human beings or themselves through specific conditioning that heightens, channels, and sanctions kinds and levels of aggression prohibited by virtually every religion. The central role of apocalypticism—a set of myths that recount a violent, Manichean battle at the end of history—in legitimizing religious violence will be discussed below. Here it is sufficient to note that, since September 11, U.S. government officials have been put in the unprecedented situation of distinguishing ‘‘good Islam’’ from ‘‘bad’’—even when they are not Muslim and even though Islam itself lacks a central institution authorized to make such general distinctions. Notwithstanding these contradictions, ‘‘bad Islam’’ in the West ultimately refers to those dictates of Shari’ah, or Islamic Law, which contradict the hegemony of modern nations, both Muslim and Western. Retaliatory violence by the modern nation state against religious violence raises questions about the very foundations of modern liberalism, the raison d’etre for its particular orientation—its political arrangements,

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its values, and its relation to ultimacy. Explicitly or implicitly, such questions return to the classic arguments for modern liberalism that emerged in Western political science following Europe’s Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants (1618–1648) and the English Civil War between Anglicans and Puritans (1642–1651). In short, the argument for liberalism derives from the observation that religions can not settle irreconcilable differences except through warfare, necessitating a modern state based on laws and principles that do not depend on revelation. While the liberal state ultimately reserves the right to exercise violence in its own defense, it can more peacefully accommodate pluralism of all kinds better than a political system based on religious or even secular ideologies that demand consensus in metaphysical matters. Such arguments for the political desirability of Western liberalism have mixed with more traditional themes in American civil religion in sanctioning violence against the Taliban of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Pan-Arabist regime. These arguments are challenged, however, when liberal states themselves turn to religious justifications for violence during times of war. During these times of violent conflict, nations use religious rationales to distinguish pure from impure violence, and typically discourage internal dissent as ‘‘unpatriotic’’ or even treasonous. In spite of early presidential pronouncements that the war against terror was to be as much of an ideological engagement as a military one, to date the primary defense of liberalism has been theological, the reiteration of Puritan-derived civil religion, but this is insufficient for the cause. Not only does it fail politically to evoke consensus in a religiously pluralistic nation, but more importantly, it also fails logically because liberalism has defined itself historically in opposition to religion. If the nation does sanction killing in the name of religion, then liberalism can not distinguish itself from its alleged enemy. But if it does not sanction killing in the name of religion, then liberalism must provide a nontheological basis for its ultimacy. In the past, America could and did evoke the universality of its Enlightenment ideals during times of war, but in a postmodern era, the argument falls on many deaf ears. Amidst a war against religion, a postmodern America must ask itself on what nontheological grounds the liberal state can justify violence. From a Girardian perspective, the failure to answer this question satisfactorily represents a ‘‘sacrificial crisis,’’ the inability of a society to distinguish between pure and impure violence. As will be discussed more extensively below, allegations of impure violence leveled against the state give rise to various mythologies in which America itself figures as the source of terror.

WITCH HUNTS: THE TERROR OF INTERNAL HERETICS America’s periodic involvement in wars has given rise to a persistent culture of fear based on perceived threats by the ‘‘enemy within.’’ This paranoia of internal dissidence, which dates back to the seventeenthcentury wars between Puritans and Native Americans, further blurs distinctions between politics and religion in America. Mary Beth Norton’s 2003

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study of the New England witch craze, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, develops an analysis of what might be called the contours of ‘‘American demonology.’’ Attentive to the intersecting issues of religion, war, race, and gender, Norton’s research is worth reconstructing here, as it sheds much light on perennial themes in the culture of religiopolitical terror in America. Norton’s study centers on a simple fact that has eluded many previous analyses of the witch trials: The devil who allegedly tormented the victims of Salem was consistently described as a ‘‘black man.’’ In late-seventeenthcentury New England, this was a designation typically reserved for the Wabanaki Indians, with whom the Puritans had recently fought in both the King Philip’s War in the 1670s and the King William’s War of the 1680s. As discussed above, Puritan typology conflated the events of history with cosmological motifs from the Bible. If the Indians were the demonized enemy surrounding New England, witches were the demonic enemy within. Through them, the terrors of war seeped into the internal social fabric of New England. Norton demonstrates how the tortures of witchcraft victims recapitulated the terrors beheld and endured by colonial soldiers in the King Philip’s and King William’s wars. Further, she documents that accused ‘‘witches’’ of Salem, a village on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were invariably individuals who had lived in close proximity to and/or fought against the Wabanakis. Their polluting contact with wild devils and the demonic wilderness had left them susceptible to charges of conspiracy with Satan. Belief in the occult powers of witches, long a part of the European and the colonial American religious landscape, declined sharply among social elites during the eighteenth century in the wake of the Enlightenment. When the founders of the American Republic modified the civil religion of the Puritans for their own uses, however, sedition emerged as a secularized counterpart to witchcraft. No less than the accused members of Salem village, citizens dissenting from America’s ‘‘national security’’ objectives, during times of both war and peace, have frequently been suspected of sympathizing with the demonized enemy. In 1798, amidst fears that the French Revolution would undermine the American Republic, the Congress passed a number of laws aimed at French citizens living in the country. The Alien and Alien Enemies Acts, which were never enforced, allowed for the expulsion and imprisonment, respectively, of aliens deemed threatening to the Republic. The Sedition Act, which was enforced, imposed penalties of both fines and imprisonment on citizens critical of the president, Congress, or government in speech or press. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and during World War I, Woodrow Wilson pushed through Congress the Espionage Act, which resulted in the prosecution of more than two thousand Americans critical of the war effort. Other notorious waves of fear resulting in political and/or legal persecution of suspected dissidents include those directed towards Japanese Americans during World War II, which resulted in their detainment in internment camps, and the ‘‘Red Scare’’ of the 1950s, incited by accusations by Senator Joseph McCarthy against alleged American Communists.

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In the wake of September 11, war-related paranoia of internal dissidents has been on the rise. As The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently summarized: ‘‘There is a pall over our country. In separate but related attempts to squelch dissent, the government has attacked the patriotism of its critics, police have barricaded and jailed protesters, and the New York Stock Exchange has revoked the press credentials of the most widely watched television network in the Arab world. A chilling message has gone out across America: Dissent if you must, but proceed at your own risk.’’10 The ACLU has been gathering multiple reports of fear and discrimination directed against both political dissenters and Arab Americans (or American citizens mistaken for Arabs) in a post–September 11 nation. Compounding the organization’s concerns is the American Patriot Act, passed into legislation in October 2001, which grants to government agencies extended powers of surveillance over communications and financial transactions, as well as President George W. Bush’s suspension of due process for suspected international terrorists and their abettors. On the one hand, such legislation has facilitated government officials’ efforts to avert outbreaks of violence against Americans by self-declared enemies of the state. On the other hand, the same legislation poses both a threat to the constitutional basis of American democracy and also a potential means for the punishment of phantasmic enemies. Norton’s research contributes to a voluminous body of sociological work documenting the Salem ‘‘witch’’ as a figment of the collective imagination. Her specific analysis of the witch as a social introjection of a feared military enemy who is racialized allows for more precise comparisons between the alleged internal enemies of both colonial and modern America. From a Girardian perspective, the white terror of nonwhites, which has loomed in the background of American culture since its inception, is rooted in fears of retaliation for the collective violence inflicted by Europeans against non-European peoples in the Americas and throughout the rest of the world. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the successful uprising and emancipation of black slaves against their French masters, sent waves of panic throughout Europe and the New World, and persists to this day in the popular demonization of Voudou. The Ghost Dance movement of the nineteenth century similarly terrified non–Native Americans, ending in the 1890 Massacre of Wounded Knee, in which the Seventh United States Cavalry opened fire on a religious assembly of Lakota Indians. For some, September 11 reinvigorated the conflation of violence and racism in the name of national security, as the race-based fear, discrimination, and violence directed against American Muslims and Arab Americans, or those mistaken for them, suggests. A final feature of the internal enemy, whether witch or dissident, is his or her perceived sexual grotesqueness. Long before witches appeared as dark skinned in America, they appeared as overly libidinous and sexually dangerous in Europe. The fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum (‘‘The Hammer of Witches’’), a guide for identifying and persecuting witches, included outrageous tales of demonized female sexuality. In one account, a witch watches over a bird’s nest filled with the castrated penises of her

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victims, keeping them alive with oats and corn. Among the allegations leveled against the female witches of New England were charges of breastfeeding house cats. In the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the perverse eroticism of the demonized Other is forcefully staged and photographed. The self-declared enemies of the nation state, like the Native Americans and witches of New England, appear as visages of terror to the American nation, dark-skinned and sexually perverse. The demonic ‘‘black man’’ rises once again to terrify and terrorize the American public, from both outside and within the nation’s borders.

GHOSTS: HAUNTED BY VIOLENCE Yi-fu Tuan relegates the terror of ghosts to the backwaters of American culture. ‘‘Drive off the hardtop road in Tennessee, Kentucky, or the Ozark Hills, and in a matter of minutes you enter another world of closely knit communities that retain many of the superstitions and customs of Old Europe,’’ he writes. ‘‘In the isolated hollows, ghosts and witches are as much a part of living tradition as dying in one’s own home and maintaining the family graveyard.’’11 Stories of ghosts do indeed fill the annals of American folklore, but in the nation’s arts and letters, ghosts are an integral part of American identity. In The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, Renee Bergland has argued that the spectralization of Native Americans in antebellum popular culture paralleled their physical removal from U.S. territory. While Native Americans figured as the prominent ghosts of American literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, other groups excluded from full political and cultural participation in the nation state—including women until the suffrage movement and, many would argue, African Americans up until the present day—have often been rendered ghostlike in mainstream culture and popular literature. Some of what Bergland has to say about Indian ghosts parallels Norton’s analysis of witches as the demonic symbol of alterity in American national consciousness. ‘‘I agree with [Homi] Bhabha’s contention that modern nations were constructed in opposition to the particular darkness of a ghostly Other conceived within an imaginary geography of race, class, and gender,’’ she writes.12 The difference between witches and ghosts, however, is that while the former constitute a ‘‘clear and present danger’’ to the nation state, the latter terrify Americans first and foremost as memories of a violent past. The National Uncanny returns to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, ‘‘Das Unheimlich,’’ which has been translated into English, unsatisfactorily, as ‘‘The Uncanny.’’ Freud’s explanation of what might be called ‘‘weird fears’’ parallels his etymological analysis of the German unheimlich as ‘‘that-which-does-not [un] -belong-at-home [heimlich].’’ Uncanniness turns out to be, upon closer psychoanalytic inspection, the repetition of something that has already happened and is intimately known—heimlich—but has been repressed. Accordingly, Bergland argues that Native American ghosts represent a return of the most disturbing, and therefore repressed, event in Anglo-American history: the wholesale

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destruction of an entire people. Freudian psychoanalysis itself turns out to be, in Bergland’s reading, an interiorization of European and Euro-American colonialist narratives of social identity. Just as an allegedly ‘‘rational’’ Europe colonizes the ‘‘primitive’’ cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, so too do the patients in Freudian therapy conquer and subject their ‘‘primitive’’ fears to rationality. Americans are obsessed with the Native American past. On the one hand, they want to forget it; on the other hand, they must perennially exhume it to define who they are. Citing Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Bergland argues, ‘‘The repressed and the conquered—the abject and the subjected—are the foundations of modern subjectivity.’’13 Bergland’s reading of American culture as haunted and obsessed by the Native American past stands as a direct challenge to Tuan’s complicit acceptance of the futurological orientation of American nationalist mythology. ‘‘The United States of America would not seem to be the country in the world least hospitable to ghosts,’’ he writes. ‘‘Ancestor worship pays no role in its religions.’’14 While Tuan relegates ghosts in American culture to isolated pockets of local communities, Bergland sees hauntedness as an inescapable part of American history. The difference in interpretation lies to a large extent in the role accorded to violence in the formation of American nationalism. Tuan implicitly advances what Albanese has called the myth of America’s ‘‘millennial innocence’’—a denial of the violent origins of the American nation.15 In contrast, Bergland problematizes the violence of American origins as the nation’s perennially unsolvable paradox. A nation identified with ‘‘liberty and justice for all’’ is the same nation founded on what she emphasizes as oppressive and criminal acts. ‘‘[O]ne of the most basic reasons that American nationalism must be predicated on haunted grounds . . . [is that] the land is haunted because it is stolen.’’16 Ghosts point to the weakness in the sacrificial logic of war, which manages to distinguish between pure and impure violence with only partial success. The unburied Indian dead, as mirrors of the Anglo-Protestant prophetic tradition, de-authorize a myth of national origins based on military triumphalism.17 In the aftermath of September 11, religious fundamentalists have joined Native Americans as ghosts from a violent past. As we have already noted, U.S. military engagements against religiously inspired terrorism return uncannily to the events of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War. From Bergland’s perspective, America is haunted and obsessed with nonProtestant religions for the same reason it is haunted and obsessed with Native American history: because its social origins are enmeshed in violent conflicts against them. From Puritan times down through the nineteenth century, Anglo-Protestant culture spectralized European Catholic immigrants, against whose ancestors Protestants once waged war, rendering them not only idolatrous but also uncanny.18 Native American and African religions have also been regularly cast as vestiges of a weird and primitive past. In a post–September 11 America, the ghost of religion has returned in the specter of fundamentalist Islam, which took shape in response to colonialist and capitalist excursions into Middle Eastern societies by

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Britain, France, and the United States. As Umberto Eco once observed, the modern age is increasingly shaped by a ghostly ‘‘return of the Middle Ages,’’ as talk of jihads and crusades reappears in international political polity.19 The worldwide resurgence of fundamentalism challenges futurological secularization hypotheses, particularly those that saw the end of the cold war as inaugurating ‘‘the end of history’’ in an era of global democratization.20

APOCALYPTICISM As noted above, fundamentalism is a necessary condition for religious violence. In their five-volume overview of fundamentalism throughout most of the world’s religions, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby included apocalypticism, in its ‘‘premillennialist’’ expression as discussed below, as one of fundamentalism’s defining features.21 The specific content of apocalypticism varies from one religious tradition to the next, but most generally these myths of the end times divide the world into two diametrically opposed groups, allied with the cosmic forces of good and evil, that will wage war against one another at the end of history. The Girardian division between pure and impure violence is a clear feature of such Manichean mythologies, as the violent wrath of God or the gods is eagerly anticipated to descend on the enemy. In the apocalyptic mythology of Al Qaeda, the United States is demonized as the ‘‘Great Shaytan,’’ while terrorist acts of violence are sanctioned as self-defensive acts of jihad by a religious community that sees itself both as righteous and besieged.22 Although a comprehensive discussion of the rise of Islamic fundamentalisms exceeds the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that the demonization of modern Western powers reflects the same terror of social disintegration that underlies the religious nationalism of modern states. Various Islamic fundamentalisms began to take shape in the late nineteenth century in the wake of Western colonialism and capitalist expansion in the Middle East. Efforts to modernize Muslim societies destabilized long-standing economic, political, and cultural traditions, rooted in various interpretations of Shari’ah or Islamic law. Like any other religious tradition, Islam admits to a variety of responses to modernity, ranging from accommodation to outright rejection. In the latter case, Islamic myths of the end times, replete with stories of horrific suffering and death, cast the ‘‘West’’ as a manifestation of evil. As noted above, violence sanctioned in the name of such mythologies functions as much as a religious rite of catharsis as a military and political strategy, here in the context of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism. In light of the foregoing discussion of American civil religion, it might come as some surprise to note that anti-Western/anti-modern religious mythology has long been a feature of American religious history. Islamic apocalypticism ultimately derives from Christian apocalypticism, which dates back to the earliest years of the church. The last book of the New Testament, The Revelation to John or the Apocalypse, is thought to have been written by a Palestinian Jewish Christian during the end of the reign

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of the emperor Domitian (81–96 C.E.). It describes a series of visions depicting a cosmic war between Christ and two beasts, the fall of Babylon, the vindication of faithful Christians, the defeat of Satan, the judgment of the dead, and the establishment of the New Jerusalem. Scholars now believe that the original author of the text, John of Patmos, looked forward to the fall of the Roman Empire. The ambiguous meaning of its central symbols has permitted multiple interpretations, however, throughout the millennia of church history. In times of social unrest and crisis especially, Christians have found foreshadowed in Revelation’s description of end time terrors the events of their own time. The New England Puritans believed with many Protestants in Europe that the papacy was the seat of the Antichrist and that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, replete with their bloody wars, signaled the beginnings of the Apocalypse. As noted above, they also believed they were laying the foundations of the New Israel in the American wilderness. Following God’s destruction of the world, he would establish his earthly rule in New England. This American version of apocalypticism was revitalized during the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century by the Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards. In his 1742 reflections, ‘‘Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England,’’ Edwards declared: ‘‘. . . America was discovered about the time of the reformation, or but little before. . . . So that as soon as this new world is created, and stands forth in view, God presently goes about doing some great thing to make way for the introduction of the church’s latter day glory, that is to have its first seat in, and is to take its rise from that new world.’’23 In the wake of the American Revolution, Americans took an unprecedented step in interpreting the Apocalypse in large part as a product of their own making. According to this ‘‘postmillennialist’’ reading of the book of Revelation, Christ would return to earth only after Americans had succeeded in abating evil and suffering for a one-thousand-year period. Founders of the Republic reinterpreted the apocalypticism of the Puritans as a belief in America’s sacred destiny to spread liberty to the ends of the earth. Increasingly after the Civil War, however, American Christians returned to the more traditional ‘‘premillennialist’’ interpretation of Revelation, which read the travails of the times as forecasting an imminent battle between Christ and the Antichrist. The best recourse for Christians in this scenario was to retreat from the world into the shelter of the church; social efforts were at best ameliorative, as human suffering had its origins in cosmic sources. Only after the battle between Christ and the Antichrist would the peaceful millennium dawn, after which Christ and his angels would cast Satan into hell forevermore and establish the New Jerusalem on earth. In The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America, Daniel Wojcik has documented recent transformations of premillennialism and the rise of what he calls ‘‘secular apocalypticism’’ in response to the threat of nuclear annihilation, introduced with the dropping of the first atomic bomb in 1945. As Wojcik documents, twentieth-century

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American Christianity has responded to the threat of nuclear destruction in the same way it has to previous threats: typologically, by reinterpreting the book of Revelation as ‘‘prophesying’’ first the cold war, and subsequently American military involvement in the Middle East, beginning with the Gulf War. In the premillennialist Christian reading of history, these events signal the beginning of the end times. Concurrently, secular narratives of human destiny based on a faith in reason have been profoundly shaken if not destroyed in a confrontation with nuclear terror. In their wake, various kinds of ‘‘secular apocalypticism’’ arise, including nihilism, fatalism, and survivalism: ‘‘[S]ecular apocalypticism, devoid of optimism about worldly redemption and belief in an underlying moral order, is pervaded by a sense of cruelty and fate. The end of the world is not viewed as the culmination that will reveal the pattern determining history but simply as the termination of human existence that will lay bare its meaninglessness and randomness.’’24 Twentieth-century premillennialism can certainly be included as an American myth of terror. Unlike demons, witches, and ghosts, which lurk or infiltrate from beyond the imagined boundaries of the nation, modern apocalypticism marks the dangers posed to America from within— paradoxically, by the very technological, political, and corporate powers entrusted to protect the nation. Relative to civil religion, which continues to espouse the postmillennial triumphalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it is a dissident religious narrative, casting American expansionism and military engagements in other parts of the world in a sinister light. The rise of premillennialism and secular apocalypticism reflects a sacrificial crisis brought about by a confrontation by Americans with the real violence of their own state, as Wojcik’s discussion of nuclear terrors suggests. Together with modern Gothic horror and twentiethcentury conspiracy theories, apocalypticism constitutes a religious myth in which the American nation itself figures as the central source of terror. At worst, the American nation is in these myths not unlike the Great Shaytan of fundamentalist Islamic apocalypticism; at best, it unwittingly colludes in a divine history hastening the end of the world as we know it.

GOTHIC HORROR In the late afternoon of July 16, 1945, a blinding flash of white light enveloped the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico. So intense was the blaze that it was seen by a blind girl living 120 miles away. The soil of the valley melted into green glass, and an orange-red mushroom cloud billowed up 30,000 feet to the skies. The first atomic bomb had been detonated. Robert J. Oppenheimer, one of the chief physicists of the Manhattan Project watching the explosion, struggled for words that could describe his reaction. He recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita in which Lord Krishna reveals the full extent of his cosmic powers: ‘‘I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.’’25 Rudolph Otto’s pioneering work in the phenomenology of religious experience, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor

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in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, argues that religions are born in a personal experience with ‘‘the numinous.’’ The Oxford English Dictionary defines this latter term as ‘‘giving rise to a sense of the spiritually transcendent; (esp. of things in art or the natural world) evoking a heightened sense of the mystical or sublime; awe-inspiring.’’ Writing in 1924, Otto presupposed the referent of religious experience to be nature, more-than-human beings (including spirits, ancestors, and ghosts), or God. Encounters with these entities elicit a sense of what Otto called mysterium fascinans and mysterium tremendum, the reverence and dread born of a sense of creatureliness and finitude before a more-thanhuman power. As Oppenheimer’s quote suggests, however, the spectacular achievements of modern science increasingly render what David Nye has called the ‘‘American technological sublime,’’ a referent of religious experience.26 The quasi-divine status of technology, particularly in America, can be seen as one extension of what Albanese has called the culture’s long-standing tradition of ‘‘nature religion,’’ the identification of God with the natural world, as abstracted through human reason.27 In the early American Republic, Puritan-derived civil religion summoned God to the side of the nation, while nature religion claimed that divine law undergirded the Republic. Freemasonry played a particularly important role in the early political culture of the United States. Conflating the God of revelation with nature, it disseminated Enlightenment ideals of virtue and citizenship to the general population. Up until the anti-Masonic movement of the early Jacksonian era, membership in its lodges signified patriotism and identification with the principles of the fledgling nation state.28 Antebellum America reveled in the mysterium fascinans of the American Republic, which seemed to usher in a new era of political and scientific ‘‘progress.’’ New American religions, including Mormonism, Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and Phrenology, reworked traditional theological problems through the scientific ethos of observation and reason. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, many Americans had begun to view both their nation and science in a decidedly darker light. The Civil War had unleashed the full military power of the state against the people of the South and catalyzed the growth of large corporations aiding the Union in its war efforts. Advances in science, which by the postbellum era had moved well beyond the comprehension of the nonexpert, had made both widespread war and large-scale profits possible. In the wake of the war, a new conglomerate of political, economic, and technological power—what Dwight D. Eisenhower nearly a century later would call the ‘‘militaryindustrial complex’’—had emerged. Decades before the first atomic bomb made clear the devastating potential of this power, optimism for the state and science had waned. Many Americans now expressed a sense of dread and foreboding before a mysterium tremendum of their own collective making, as evidenced in a variety of religious and cultural pronouncements of national doom. The Enlightenment’s hope of ushering in a Golden Age through human reason was predicated on a rejection of a theocentric universe. If

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enlightened humanity fails in that hope, where is it to turn for consolation? It is in the context of this metaphysical vacuum that Valdine Clemens analyzes the history of European and American Gothic fiction. In The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from the Castle of Otranto to Alien, Clemens argues that Gothic literature and/or film apotheosize terror into what she calls ‘‘daemonic dread.’’ ‘‘When Reason and Science usurped God, Gothic rushed in to fill the resulting vacuum with the daemonic. The feeling most consistently evoked in Gothic tales is the terror of the life-threatening creature, wholly at the mercy of forces that are neither controllable nor understandable; a terror that at its most elemental level makes little distinction between ÔnaturalÕ and ÔsupernaturalÕ causes.’’29 In the texts that Clemens analyzes—The Castle of Otranto, A Sicilian Romance, The Monk, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Shining, and Alien—daemonic beings personify more particularly damages wrought to the environment and/or violations against women. Situating herself in the Western Romantic tradition, Clemens problematizes the dis-ease of modern culture as an imbalance between a feminized nature and a masculinized culture. She argues that daemonic terror shocks modern society back to its senses in a way that rational, social critique cannot. ‘‘Specifically, it is through the evocation of intense creature-terror that Gothic stories achieve their critical ends of admonishing, foretelling, and instructing.’’30 Like the ghosts of Bergland’s analysis, the monsters, ghouls, and extraterrestrials of Clemens’s work unmask the travesties left in the wake of European and American ‘‘progress.’’ Most of the texts that Clemens discusses were penned by British authors in the shadow of England’s Industrial Revolution. With the great exception of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, which met with popular acclaim during the 1800s, Gothic did not become a national obsession in America until the twentieth century, as faith in progress was on the decline. Disseminated predominantly through the movie industry, Gothic has offered moviegoers countless variations on the theme of modernity-gone-awry. Amidst the popular reception of Freud in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood created its now-classic depictions of Frankenstein and Dracula, adding its own contributions in such films as The Mummy and The Wolfman, which rendered topsy-turvy the worlds of science and reason. During the 1950s, horror films took a turn towards exploring the terrors of nuclear war in such classics as The Thing from Another World and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the 1970s, the genre of disaster films, including Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and Jaws depicted a wrathful nature once more putting human hubris in its place. Consistent with Clemens’s analysis, the terror evoked in these films rests on Romantic, rather than Christian, indictments against modern America. Technology itself is rendered as daemonic, if not demonic, in its usurpation of the natural world. In the turbulent decade of the 1960s, Romanticism erupted with a political force unprecedented in American history, in the countercultures of the anti-war and so-called Hippie movements. Joining forces with the prophetic Christianity that shaped the civil rights movement, Romanticism critiqued the imbalances of an overly

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rationalized and allegedly soulless American culture, epitomized by the military-industrial complex that drove the ongoing Vietnam War. In both its Gothic and countercultural guises, Romanticism has sought to shock America back to its senses by pointing to what it sees as the horrific outcome should modernity continue on its current course. Since the widespread protests against the Vietnam War, U.S. military forces have since succeeded in banning live coverage of on-the-ground combat by the American media, rendering invisible the atrocities of warfare that might win civilians to the Romantic cause. As the political fervor of the 1960s has all but faded into memory, the lasting legacy of American Romanticism may be, as Clemens suggests, a product of Gothic horror. This is the extraterrestrial, which has taken on a new life in American conspiracy theories that further point to the American nation as a source of terror.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES When in 1991 President George H.W. Bush heralded to Congress the dawning of a ‘‘new world order,’’ the fears of political extremists on both the right and the left of American religious culture were awakened. Since the end of the cold war, the symbol of the New World Order had emerged as the new organizing motif of American conspiracy theories. Dating back to the earliest years of the Republic, conspiracy theories elaborate upon the terror of witch-like internal enemies by imparting to them a sophisticated infrastructure, expert knowledge, and an elaborate genealogy. In 1963, Richard Hofstadter first brought conspiracy theories to the serious attention of political scientists when he analyzed the Red Scare as exemplifying the ‘‘paranoid style American politics.’’31 The terror of cabals in U.S. history encompasses the Illuminati plot in the eighteenth century, anti-Masonry, and anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century, and the ‘‘international Jewish banker’’ plots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Closely related to nativist fears, these movements all share a conviction that religious and/or ethnic foreigners are intent on destroying the hegemony of Anglo-Protestant culture by stealthily inserting themselves in the highest echelons of religious, economic, and political power. Following the end of the cold war, globalization became the new target of right-wing conspiracy theorists. The familiar suspects—Jewish bankers, Jesuits, and Freemasons—were increasingly linked in international alliances seeking a New World Order of global economic and political domination. As Michael Barkun has discussed in A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, late-twentieth-century conspiracy theories have introduced unprecedented themes in the traditional genre. Blending Gothic terrors of the modern nation with long-standing fears of the ‘‘outsider within,’’ the ‘‘superconspiracy’’ discussed by Barkun posits a secret alliance between treasonous government officials and space aliens. As recounted by the superconspiracy narrative, which figured as the plot of The X-Files movie of 1998, extraterrestrials and members of a secret world government have entered into a pact. In exchange for the aliens’ technology that it will use to advance world domination, a secret

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government has been providing extraterrestrials with human abductees. In some renditions of the superconspiracy, the aliens are said to have betrayed the government, providing it with defunct technology and transforming the abductees into alien-human hybrids that now threaten to colonize the earth. In Barkun’s analysis, the incorporation of ufology into post–cold war conspiracy theories has greatly bolstered their appeal in American popular culture. The so-called Roswell Incident of 1947, reported in the national media at the time and perennially revisited by ufologists ever since, introduced beliefs in UFOs and extraterrestrials to a receptive general public. According to the legend first suggested by journalists, on the morning of July 3, 1947, amid a wave of nationwide UFO sightings, a rancher stumbled across a crashed spaceship in the high deserts of Roswell, New Mexico. UFO believers claim that the remains of the Roswell crash, which allegedly include the bodies of four aliens found near the ship, were taken to Area 51, a secret military base in Groom Lake, Nevada, where they remain today. Despite subsequent military explanations of the UFO as a weather balloon and the anomalous bodies as crash-test dummies, the details of the Roswell incident sealed the link between unidentified flying objects with extraterrestrials in American popular culture that has not altered since. According to a Yankelovich poll conducted for Life magazine in 2000, 43 percent of Americans believed in the reality of UFOs, and 30 percent thought extraterrestrials had visited earth.32 As noted above, American horror films produced during the onset of the cold war explored fears of mutated life forms in the wake of a nuclear war. Since the 1950s, aliens have been portrayed as grotesque deformations of human life, and fugitives from planets destroyed in nuclear holocaust. Aliens are also the daemonic Gothic counterpart to demonized enemies of the Christian nation state, twentieth-century Frankensteins schooled in military technology. In popular cultural narratives, they typically come to earth in fleets of formidably armed spaceships to wage war against humanity. Abduction accounts, which entered into popular ufology during the 1970s, oftentimes repeat the long-standing sexualization of America’s military and internal enemies, as kidnapped victims recount undergoing terrifying surgical procedures onboard spaceships whereby their sperm and ova are removed. Departing from traditional conspiratorial logic, the superconspiracy portrays America not as a righteous nation weakened by internal foes, but rather as a daemonic experiment from its very origins. From the hindsight of the twentieth century, history can be seen as having unfolded towards the extinction of human life, ushered in between an alliance between likeminded federal officials and interplanetary Gothic monsters. As discussed by both Barkun and Wojcik, elements of the superconspiracy are even woven into twentieth-century Christian apocalypticism. In his 1991 The New World Order, national televangelist Pat Robertson embraced conspiracy theories of history in his new interpretation of the book of Revelation, even entitling his book with the term used by conspiracy theorists to refer to globalized society. Christian writer Hal Lindsey, author of the premillennialist tractate The Late Great Planet Earth, includes UFOs in his vision

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of the apocalypse as part of Satan’s armies. Louis Farrakhan, present-day leader of the Nation of Islam, has claimed that the movement’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, now lives aboard a spaceship from which he will unleash the apocalyptic end of a white supremacist world. Apocalypticism, Gothic aliens, and modern conspiracy theories all converge on a shared terror of the nation’s military violence, experienced by Americans first during the Civil War, then at the outset of the nuclear era, and finally during the Vietnam War. Stripped of its theological sanctifications, American violence is rendered demonic or daemonic in Christian and Romantic dissident narratives.

FUTURE FEAR In the summer of 2004, American theaters released Fahrenheit 911, the latest film by Michael Moore, which offered viewers a different explanation for the war in Iraq than the one advanced by reigning government officials. Moore stopped just short of advancing his own conspiracy theory that international politics were driven by the motives of an unseen, transnational alliance of oil tycoons, including a long-standing friendship between the Bush and bin Laden families, and expedited by the military sacrifices of America’s underclass. Serious political discussion of Moore’s film was immediately overpowered by both vitriolic condemnation and gullible praise that fell largely along respective Republican and Democratic lines. As the foregoing discussion has attempted to suggest, war-related violence unleashes the mythic terrors of the American nation, whose tight grip on hearts and minds leaves little room for nuanced reflections among the citizenry. Supporters of the ongoing war on terror invoke evils lurking beyond the nation’s borders and condemn Moore’s film as near-treasonous. Detractors of these efforts identify terror largely with the nation itself, and praise Moore’s film as prophetic. Demons and witches compete with monsters and cabals, and postmillennial triumphalism vies with premillennial despair in shaping the political consciousness of Americans. In the aftermath of September 11, most scholarship on religion and terror has been directed toward problematizing religious fundamentalism and violence, as evidenced by popular reception of the studies by Berman, Juergensmeyer, and Stern mentioned above. Notwithstanding the critical importance of this scholarship, undue attention on ‘‘the enemy’’ perpetuates a Girardian ‘‘misunderstanding’’ of terror, religion, and violence in general. As the foregoing discussion argues, in its response to the terrorist attacks of Al Qaeda, the American nation has become in many ways indistinguishable from the religious community it fights. Osama bin Laden has awakened virtually every mythic fear expressed throughout the nation’s history. As a self-declared military enemy of the United States, he is perceived as demonic. Members of his Al Qaeda organization can infiltrate invisibly into the recesses of the nation, recalling the threat of witches. As a member of a non-European nation and culture, dressed in foreign clothing and dark-skinned, he resuscitates fears of the racialized Other. He returns like a ghost from a religious world assumed until recently to be a

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thing of the past. Schooled in the military arts by experts from the United States, he has the ability to make the technological terrors of apocalypticism and Romanticism a reality. Finally, in Moore’s film he is associated with an ‘‘inner government’’ of elite capitalists, resurrecting American conspiracy theories. Terrorist attacks and threats against the United States give citizens genuine cause for alarm, but perhaps more disturbingly, they awaken pervasive anxieties that real violence can and will happen again. In the ensuing efforts to reconstitute national boundaries, both civil religion and dissident narratives of the nation-as-terror emerge as mythic narratives of American identity. Future scholarship on terror and religion in America will benefit by tracing the long-standing and complex relationships between the terrors of warfare and the religious responses of both the nation state and mass media. Terror has persisted in American history as warfare has recurrently threatened the security of the social body. Even as real threats to physical safety have abated at the end of each war, anxieties about the security of the social body have lingered on, only to be reawakened by the outset of the next conflict. Furthermore, as America has grown since the Second World War to become the world’s leading military superpower, these anxieties have been compounded by new myths in which the nation itself figures as the source of terror. Unfortunately, terrorism and the ‘‘war against terror’’ would not seem at this point to have a foreseeable end. New permutations of traditional themes of terror can be expected to dominate American culture, in both its religious nationalism and popular culture, as the twenty-first century unfolds.

NOTES 1. Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999), 11. 2. Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 5. 3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; reprint, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 94. 4. President, Address to the Nation, ‘‘U.S. Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, Address before a Joint Session of the Congress,’’ Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 37, no. 38 (September 24, 2001): 1347, . 5. Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 19–80. 6. President, Address to the Nation, ‘‘State of the Union,’’ Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 38, no. 5 (February 4, 2002): 133, . 7. President, Address to the Nation, ‘‘State of the Union,’’ Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 39, no. 5 (February 3, 2003): 109, . 8. Rene´ Girard, ‘‘Sacrifice’’ and ‘‘The Sacrificial Crisis,’’ in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 1–67.

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9. Albanese has used the metaphors of ‘‘contraction’’ and ‘‘expansion’’ to conceptualize the transformations of denominational religions in their interactions with modern Anglo-Protestant culture. She problematizes American Protestant fundamentalism, the prototype for later fundamentalisms worldwide, as a ‘‘contractive’’ response to certain features of modernity. See Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 369–88. 10. American Civil Liberties Union, ‘‘Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in Post-9/ 11 America’’ (American Civil Liberties Union: May 2003), 1, accessed July 3, 2005 at <www.aclu.org/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=12581&c=207>. 11. Tuan, 127. 12. Rene Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 2000), 7. 13. Ibid., 12. 14. Tuan, 127. 15. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 498. 16. Bergland, 9. 17. The so-called nevi’im or prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament exhorted kings and priests to heed the Torah’s divine mandate of justice and compassion for the marginalized members of ancient Israelite society. Prophetic theology has figured in American religious history from John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, ‘‘A Model of Christian Charity’’ to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s theology of civil rights, as the nation has been exhorted in God’s name to relieve the sufferings of disenfranchised individuals and groups. I read Bergland’s analysis of Native American history as ‘‘prophetic’’ insofar as it problematizes American history from the vantage point of the vanquished and marginalized. 18. For an excellent overview of anti-Catholic terrors in antebellum America, see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 19. Umberto Eco, ‘‘The Return of the Middle Ages,’’ in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983), 61–85. 20. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 21. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Observed, vol. 1 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6–7. 22. The ideology of Al Qaeda derives from the writings of Sayyid Qutb (1906– 1966), a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the founder of Sunni fundamentalism. For an excellent overview of Islamic, as well as Jewish and Christian, fundamentalisms as responses to modernity and colonialism, see Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: The History of Fundamentalism (New York: Random House, 2000). 23. Jonathan Edwards, ‘‘The Latter Day Glory Is Probably to Begin in America,’’ in Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 54. 24. Daniel Wojcik, The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 146. 25. Robert Jungk, Brighter Than A Thousand Suns (New York: Harvest Books, 1970), 201. 26. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 27. See Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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28. Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 137–62. 29. Valdine Clemens, The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 3. 30. Ibid. 31. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 3–40. 32. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 81.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Random House, 2000. Bergland, Renee L. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000. Girard, Rene´. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Ingebretsen, Edward. Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Tuan, Yi-fu. Landscapes of Fear. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Wojcik, Daniel. The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Index Abanes, Richard, 73–74 abstract expressionism, 33 ACLU. See American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Adams, Scott, 159 adaptationism, 214n67 adolescents and youth, 66–76; developmental stages of religion in, 63; Harry Potter and, 72–76; lived religion and, 71–72; and religious life of American, 66–69; rituals and film and, 109–10; spiritual practice of, 47–54, 75–76; study of, 69–71; youth ministry and, 2, 9, 10–11. See also children Adoration of Blessed the Sacrament, 126, 128, 130–35 adult influence on children’s faith, 66 aesthetic standards, secularization theory, 32–35 Afghanistan, war in, 237, 240 African Americans: in film, 115n10; liberation theology and, 33–34; nature-related spiritual attitude of, 185n22; visual arts by, 30, 33–34, 36 African religions, 244

Albanese, Catherine L., 167, 171, 224, 235, 239, 244, 248 Alexander, Grover Cleveland, 219 Allen, Woody, 107 Al Qaeda, 236–37, 245, 252 alternative religions. See nontraditional religions America. See United States; specific topics American Bible Society, 82, 83 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 242 American Indians. See Native Americans American Tract Society (ATS), 82–83 Animal Liberation (Singer), 193 animals: advocacy for, 193–95, 200; blessing of, 175 The Annunciation (Tanner), 30 anthropological view of spirituality, 46–47 anticatholicism, 98n34, 217–18, 250 Antichrist, 87, 94–95, 246 apocalypticism: and conspiracy theories, 251; in fiction, 87–88, 95; and terrorism, 245–47 Appleby, R. Scott, 245 architecture and worship, 8, 10–12, 16, 29–30

258 art-religion relationship, 25–27, 38–40 arts. See music; visual arts l’art sacre, 32–33 l’art Saint Sulpice, 32–33 astrology, 152 atheism and environmental ethics, 208– 12 athletic seekers, 227–29 atomic bomb as apocalyptic, 246–47 ATS. See American Tract Society (ATS) ‘‘axis of evil,’’ Bush on, 238 back-to-the-land movement, 169–70 Barkum, Michael, 250, 251 Barrat i Esteve, Jordi, 136 Barton, Bruce, 144 baseball and faith, 217, 218–19, 223, 224–25 basketball and faith, 215, 217–19 Beaudoin, Tom, 68 behavioral sciences. See psychology Behe, Michael, 205–6 Bellah, Robert, 55 Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, 151 Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts, 65 Benedict XVI (pope), 18 Bentham, Jeremy, 193 Berenson, Senda, 218 Berger, Peter, 129 Bergland, Renee, 243, 244 Berman, Paul, 239, 252 Bertone, Tarcisio, 91 best-selling books. See fiction, bestselling Bible, role in end-time fiction, 87–88 The Big Picture (Epstein), 103–4 Billingsley, Richard, 226 bin Laden, Osama, 252 Birch, Charles, 196, 199, 200, 203, 205 black Americans. See African Americans ‘‘black man,’’ Puritan, 241, 243 Black Theology and Black Power (Cone), 34 Blanchard, Ken, 156

INDEX Blessed Sacrament, online adoration, 130–35 blessings: of animals, and nature religion, 175; on Internet, 120–24 b’nai mitzvahs, film themes for, 107–8, 109 Bonner, John, 218 books and literature: gothic fiction and, 249; on nature and religion, 169–70; and workplace spirituality, 144, 151–52. See also fiction, bestselling Bowden, Bobby, 221–22 boxing and faith, 223 Boy Scouts of America, 170 Bradford, William, 167 Brasher, Brenda, 135–36 Breeskin, Adelyn, 31 Brennan, Chris, 110–11 bricolage, 49, 55 Brooklyn Museum, NY, 36 Brower, David, 172 Brown, Dan, 83–84, 88–90, 91–96 Bryant, Darrol, 103 Bryant, William Cullen, 168 Buddhism, 177 Bull Durham (film), 225 Burke, Edmund, 168 Burroughs, John, 169, 181–82 Burton-Christie, Douglas, 46 Bush, George H.W., 250 Bush, George W., 237, 238, 242 BusinessWeek (magazine), 150 Byrne, Julie, 218, 222–30 ‘‘calling’’ and doctrine of vocation, 142 Calvin, John, 28–29 capitalism, welfare, 145–48 Care of the Soul (Moore), 53 Carrigan, Henry, 83 Carson, Rachel, 172, 173, 192 Casel, Odo, 6 Castells, Manuel, 125 ‘‘cathedral groves,’’ 175–76 Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York, NY), 175

INDEX Catholicism: anticatholicism and, 98n34, 217–18, 250; and Blessed Sacrament online, 126, 128, 130–35; celebration era and, 9; children’s concept of God in, 63–64; child’s experience of, 65; conspiracies about, 250; contemporary worship and, 1–2, 4–5; in fiction, 88–89, 91, 94, 98n34; iconoclastic images and, 27–29; liturgical movement and, 1–2, 5–9, 18; neo-Darwinism and, 208–9; Protestantism Reformation and, 28–29, 142, 248; Second Vatican Council and, 5–6, 7, 8, 18, 32–33; sports and, 217–19, 230; traditionalism of, in twentieth century, 4; visual images and, 32–33; workplace and, 142–43, 151 Catholic missions, 29–30 Catlin, George, 169 The Cauldron Web Site, 121–22 CCLI. See Christian Copyright Licensing, Inc. (CCLI) celebration era, 9–10 The Celestine Prophecy (Redfield), 83, 84–86, 91–94 chanting in celebration era, 10 Chapel of Divine Love (Philadelphia, PA), 130 chaplains, workplace, 152–53 Chappell, Tom, 151 Chicken Soup for the Soul series, 52, 149 Chick-fil-A, 154 Chidester, David, 166, 223–24, 225, 227 children, 61–76; developmental view of, 62–65; Harry Potter and, 72–76; and historical experience of religion, 65–66; lived religion and, 71–72; study of concept of God among, 63–65. See also adolescents and youth Children in New Religions (Palmer and Hardman), 66 The Children’s God (Heller), 63–64

259 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian Businessmen’s Committee, 155 Christian Copyright Licensing, Inc. (CCLI), 14 Christianity: adolescent religious life and, 67–70; Christian businesses and, 153–56; ecological model for, 199–200; as human centered, 195; nature and faith and, 167–68, 175; nature religion and environmentalism and, 165, 173–76; workplace spirituality and, 142–43. See also Catholicism; evangelical Christianity; Protestantism; specific topics Christian Science Monitor (newspaper), 157 church growth, 5, 12 cinema. See film civil religion, 237–38 Civil Rights Act (1964), 157–58 civil rights movement, 60, 157–58, 193, 249 Clark, Lynn Schofield, 69, 70, 109–10, 125–26 Cleage, Albert B., Jr., 34 Clemens, Valdine, 249, 250 coaching, workplace spirituality, 156–57 Cobb, John, 196, 199, 203 Cohen, Ben, 151 Cole, Thomas, 30, 168 Coles, Robert, 64 college students. See adolescents and youth Columbus, Christopher, 223–24 Community Church of Joy (Glendale, AZ), 11–12 company towns, 145, 146, 147–48 ‘‘Competitor’s Creed’’ (FCA), 221–22 computer-mediated religious concept, 129–30. See also Internet Cone, James, 34 Conference of Catholic Bishops, 131 conspiracy theories, 250–52

260 consultants, workplace spirituality, 152– 53 contemporary worship, 1–23; celebration era and, 9–10; cultural styles of, 17–19; emergent worship and, 16–17; liturgical movement and, 1–2, 5–9; movement toward, 1–2; music for, 9–15; nature religion and environmentalism and, 170–82; origins of, in 1960s, 4–5; praise-andworship services and, 12–14; seeker services and, 10–12; sports and, 220–23; and traditions of worship, 2–4; twentieth-century traditionalism and, 4; visual arts and, 35–38 Cooper, James Fenimore, 169 corporations and faith. See workplace spirituality Coughlin, Charles, 220 creationism and intelligent design, viii, 204–8 creativity and workplace spirituality, 150–51 cult films, 111–12 cultural considerations: conspiracy theories and, 250–52; in contemporary worship, 17–19; in fiction, 81, 83–84, 86, 92–96; in film, 102–3, 112; liturgical movement and, 8–9; and science, quasi-divine status of, 248–50; secularization theory and, 32–35; workplace spirituality and, 142, 147, 150. See also visual arts A Culture of Conspiracy (Barkum), 250–51 Dailey, Thomas F., 225 Daly, Mary, 34 Damico, Sam, 132–33 darshan, Hinduism, 39 Darwinism, 170–71, 180–82, 204–12 Darwin’s Black Box (Behe), 206 The Da Vinci Code (Brown), 83–84, 88–90, 91–96

INDEX Dawkins, Richard, 209–10 The Death of Nature (Merchant), 197, 198 DeBerry, Fischer, 221–22 Deconstructing Harry (film), 107 Deeply into the Bone (Grimes), 108–9 deism, 53–54, 168 Delano, Jack, 31 Deloria, Vine, 177–78 Dembski, William, 207 De Menil, Dominique, 33 DeMille, Cecil B., 102, 113–14 Denton, Melinda Lundquist, 53 DePree, Herman, 152 D’Errico, Katja H., 152 developmental approaches to children and religion, 62–65 DigiBless Web site, 120–24, 130, 131 Dilbert cartoons (Adams), 159 Dillenberger, John, 29, 33 discrimination, workplace spirituality, 157–58 Disney and environmentalism, 178 divination online, 128 ‘‘Divine Madness’’ sports, 228–29 doctrine of vocation, 142 Domitian, Emperor of Rome, 246 Doss, Erika, 35 Douglas, Mary, 236, 239 EAP. See employee assistance programs (EAP) Earth Charter, 179 Earth Day (1970), 174, 176, 192 Earth First!, 177 Eastern Orthodox Church, iconoclastic images, 27 Eck, Diana, 39 Eckstrom, Linda, 37 Eco, Umberto, 245 ecology, 191, 197, 198–200. See also environmental ethics economics and faith, 60, 144–45 ecotheology, 195–97, 200–202, 204–5, 208, 210–11

INDEX Edwards, Jonathan, 167–68, 246 EEOC. See Equal Employ-ment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Eiseley, Loren, 182 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 248 Ekta Mandir (Irving, TX), 122–23, 129 Elkins, James, 25, 26, 35 Ellwood, Robert, 55 emergent contemporary worship, 2, 16–17 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 30, 169 emotions in adolescent faith, 70 employee assistance programs (EAP), 152–53 employers and faith. See workplace spirituality Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, 108–9 The End of the World as We Know It (Wojcik), 246–47 end times in fiction, 87–88, 95 enemy within, terrorism, 240–43 English language, liturgical movement, 8 Enlightenment, 168, 240, 248–49 enneagrams, 152 environmental ethics, 191–214; and action, 174, 180–82, 191–92; animal advocacy and, 193–95, 200; atheism and, 208–12; Darwinism and neoDarwinism and, 170–71, 180–82, 204–12; diverse views of, 204–8; historical view of, 191–92, 197; holism and, 192–95; individualism and, 192–95; models of nature and, 202–4; naturalism and, 208–12; peaceable kingdoms and, 200–202; religion and, 195–97; science and, 197–200, 202–8. See also nature religion and environmentalism environmentalism. See nature religion and environmentalism Epstein, Edward Jay, 103–4 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 157

261 ethics and environment, 171–73 Eucharist, liturgical understanding of, 6–7 Europe, sports and religion, 223–24 evangelical Christianity: in fiction, 83, 86–88, 90–96; in sports, 215–17, 220–27; in workplace, 153–56 evil: and Antichrist, 87, 94–95, 246; and ‘‘axis of evil,’’ 238; in fiction, 82, 94–95. See also apocalypticism evolution and Darwinism, 170–71, 180–82, 204–12 Fahrenheit 911 (film), 252–53 faith, developmental stages of, 62–64 Faith Online study (Hoover, Clark, and Rainie), 125–26 family life, 60, 62, 141. See also children Farm Security Administration (FSA), 31 Farrakham, Louis Abdul, 252 FCA. See Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) FCC. See Fellowship of Companies for Christ (FCC) fear. See terrorism A Feeling of Darkness (Finster), 37–38 Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), 221–22 Fellowship of Companies for Christ (FCC), 155 feminism, 8–9, 33–34, 88–90 Feng Shui, 152 Ferre´, Frederic, 197 fiction, best-selling, 82–99; The Celestine Prophecy (Redfield), 83, 84–86, 91–94; Christian retelling of, 88–90; common culture of, 92–96; The Da Vinci Code (Brown), 83–84, 88–90, 91–96; evangelical fundamentalism and, 86–88; gnosticism and, 95–96; Harry Potter series (Rowling), 72–76; historical view of, 82–83; In His Steps (Sheldon), 82–83; Left Behind series

262 fiction, best-selling (continued) (LaHaye and Jenkins), 83, 86–88, 90–96; New Age and, 84–86; popular culture and, 81, 83–84, 86; truth of, 89–92. See also books and literature film, 101–18; creation of new rituals and, 110–14; gothic horror in, 249; horror in, 251; impact of, 101–2; nature and faith in, 178; ritualization of, 106–14; scholarly approaches to, 102–5; sports as religion in, 225; terrorism in, 250–53; UFO conspiracy in, 250 Finney, Charles G., 3 Finster, Howard, 37–38 First Amendment, and sports, 222 fish symbol, Christian, 155, 158 Florida State University (FSU) Seminoles, 226–27 folk music, 9–10 football and faith, 215, 217–18, 220, 221–23, 225–27 Ford Motor Company, 151 Fortune (magazine), 147, 154 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 221 Fowler, James, 62–63 Franklin, Benjamin, 143 Franklin, Leo M., 220 Fraternal Order of Eagles (FOE), 113–14 free-church traditions, 2, 3 freedom and faith, 53, 56, 238 Freemasonry, 248, 250 French Jesuit Catholic missions, 29–30 Freud, Sigmund, 55–56, 243, 249 From Angels to Aliens (Clark), 70, 109 Frontier tradition, 2–4, 11 FSA (Farm Security Administration), 31 Fuller, Robert, 51 fundamentalism: in fiction, 83, 86–88, 90–96; in sports, 215–17, 220–27; and terrorism, 239, 244–45; in workplace, 153–56 Gaia hypothesis, 173 Geertz, Clifford, 112–13, 132

INDEX Geffen Contemporary (Los Angeles, CA), 36–37 gender. See women Generation X religious life, 68–69 genes and Darwinism, 209–10, 211 Genesis dogma, 195, 200–202 Gen X Religion (Miller and Miller), 68–69 Ghost Dance, 242 ghosts and historic violence, 243–45 Gibson, Mel, 112 Girard, Rene´, 238–39, 240, 242, 245, 252 Giuliani, Rudolph, 36 gnosticism in fiction, 95–96 Gober, Robert, 36–37 God: children’s concept of, 63–64; in contemporary worship, 2, 3, 5–6, 8, 11–16; and environmentalism, 168– 70, 173, 195–96, 200, 208; in fiction, 82, 87, 90, 96; on Internet, 121; Native American images of, 34; and spirituality, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56; in sports, 215, 227–30; and terrorism, 237–38, 245, 247–49; views of, among adolescents and youth, 68; visual images of, 26–30, 32–34, 37–38; in workplace, 142–44, 153–55, 158 golf and faith, 215, 223 Goodall, Jane, 192 Goodenough, Ursula, 210, 211 gothic horror, 247–50 Gould, Stephen Jay, 181, 211 Gover, Tizivia, 227 Graham, Billy, 86 Grail in fiction, 88–89, 91, 94 Greenberg, Gail, 109 Greenberg, ‘‘Hammerin’’’ Hank, 219– 20, 223 Greenfield, Jerry, 151 ‘‘green religions,’’ 165–66, 174, 176, 179–81 Griffin, David Ray, 203, 206–7, 208 Griffith, D.W., 102 Grimes, Ronald, 108–9

INDEX guilds, and faith, 145 Gutherie, Rick, 151 Habits of the Heart (Bellah), 55 Haitian slave revolt, 242 Hall, G. Stanley, 216 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 84 Hardman, Charlotte, 66 Harrison, Ruth, 192 Harry Potter series (Rowling), 72–76 Heartney, Eleanor, 35–36 Heller, David, 63–64 Helms, Jesse, 40 Henning, Joel, 228 Herman Miller (company), 152 Herzberg, Frederick, 146 Hewitt Associates, 148 Higgs, Robert J., 224 Hinduism: children’s concept of God in, 63–64; Internet puja and, 122– 23, 128; Oppenheimer’s quote from, 247; visual arts and, 25, 39 historical views: of children’s experience of religion, 65–66; of contemporary worship, 1–10; of environmental ethics, 191–92, 197; in fiction, 82–83; of gothic horror, 249–50; of nature religion and environmentalism, 166–70; of spirituality, 47, 49–52; of sports, 216–20; of terrorism, 237–38, 240–45; of visual arts, 28–31; of workplace spirituality, 142–43 Hitchcock, Alfred, 102 Hobby Lobby, 154 Hoekendijk, Johannes, 5 Hofstader, Richard, 250 holidays, Jewish, and early baseball, 219–20 holism and environmental ethics, 192– 95 Hollywood. See film Holmbo, Dave, 10, 11 Holy Grail in fiction, 88–89, 91, 94 ‘‘Holy Rollers,’’ 219 The Holy Virgin Mary (Ofili), 36

263 homesteading, 179 Hoover, Stewart, 125–26 House of David baseball, 218–19 Howe, Oscar, 34 Hubbard, Steve, 221 Hudson River School, 30, 41n20, 168 Hughes, Thomas, 216 humanity in film, 102 Human Potential movement, 84 Hustad, Donald, 9 Hutchinson, Anne, 57 Hybels, Bill, 10, 11 hymns and hymnals, 4, 9, 17–18 ICEL (International Commission on English in the Liturgy), 18 iconoclastic images, 25, 27 The Idea of the Holy (Otto), 247–48 Immaculata College (Philadelphia), 218 Indian Guides, 170 Indians. See Native Americans individualism, 54–57, 192–95, 201 industrialization, 145, 216, 249 In His Steps (Sheldon), 82–83 institutional religion: as evil, in fiction, 94–95; megachurches and, 10–12, 17; spirituality and, 46–57; sports as natural religion and, 224, 227–29 intelligent design and creationism, 204–8 interconnectedness, and ecology, 195, 198, 199 interdependence model, 199 internal threats, terrorism, 240–43 International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), 18 Internet, 119–40; blessings on, 120– 24; computer-mediated religious concept and, 129–30; and religion online vs. online religion, 127–28, 135–37; time and activity on, 124–25; and viewing of Blessed Sacrament, 130–35 Iraq war, 237, 238, 240, 243, 252 Islam: Al Qaeda and, 236–37, 245, 252; children’s concept of God in,

264 Islam (continued) 64; conspiracy theories and, 252; terrorism and, 239, 245 Jacoby, Stanford, 146 Japanese internment, 241 Jefferson, Thomas, 168 Jenkins, Jerry, 83, 86–88, 90–96 Jesuits, visual arts by, 29–30 Jesus, CEO (Jones), 156 Jesus Christ: and adoration of Blessed Sacrament online, 126, 128, 130–35; apocalyptic return of, 246; in fiction, 83–84, 88–90, 91–96; and sports, 217, 220–21, 223; visual depictions of, 28, 31–34, 36–37, 39; in workplace, 144, 156 Jesus movement, 13 John of Patmos, 246 John Paul II (pope), 18, 142–43 Johnson, Phillip, 205–6 Johnson, William H., 30–31 Jones, Laurie Beth, 156 Joslin, Roger D., 228 Judaism: baseball and, 219–20; children’s concept of God in, 63–64; conspiracies about, 250; and doctrine of vocation, 142; iconoclastic images and, 27; liturgical movement and, 9; sports and, 219–20; tikkun olam and, 33 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 239, 252 Kallestad, Walt, 12 Kant, Immanuel, 168 Karlstadt, Andreas, 28 Katovich, Michael, 111 Kimball, Richard Ian, 217 King, Jim, 226 Kingsley, Charles, 216 Kinkade, Patrick, 111 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 62, 63 Kristeva, Julia, 244 Kubrick, Stanley, 102 Lakota peoples, 34–35 landscape art, 29–30, 33, 168–69

INDEX Landscapes of Fear (Tuan), 236 language: literalism of, in fiction, 92–96; liturgical movement and, 1–2, 5–6, 8–9, 18 Larson, Sheila, 55 Last Supper series (Warhol), 35 The Late Great Planet Earth (Lindsey), 251–52 Latin language, liturgical movement, 1–2, 5–6, 8, 18 Latter Rain movement, 12 leadership of unchurched, 52–54 Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Finney), 3 Left Behind series (LeHaye and Jenkins), 83, 86–88, 90–96 LeHaye, Tim, 83, 86–88, 90–96 Lehrer, David A., 155 Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), 222 Leopold, Aldo, 172–73, 190n77 Leo XIII (pope), 142 Lewontin, Richard, 211 liberalism, 48, 52–53, 240 The Liberation of Life (Cobb and Birch), 196 Lincoln, Abraham, 241 Lindsey, Hal, 251–52 Lippy, Charles H., 220 literalism in fiction, 92–96 literature. See books and literature liturgical movement, 1–3, 5–9 liturgy, 6–7 lived religion, 70, 71–72 Lovelock, James, 173 Lucas, George, 102 Luckmann, Thomas, 129 Luther, Martin, 28, 142 Lutheran church, 17–18 Lyden, John, 105 Malleus Maleficarum (‘‘The Hammer of Witches’’), 242–43 Mamet, David, 104 management theories and faith, 146 manners in church, 66 The Man Nobody Knows (Barton), 144

INDEX Mapplethorpe, Robert, 40 Marantha! Music, 13, 14 Markowitz, Harvey, 34 Martineau, Lyman R., 217 Marty, Martin E., 245 Mary, mother of Jesus, visual depictions of, 28, 30, 36 Mary Magdalene, in fiction, 88–89 mascots, sports, 226–27 Masons, 248 material culture, 68–69, 71 Mather, Cotton, 167–68 Matrix series (film), 106 McBride, James, 225–26 McCarthy, Joseph, 241 McCartney, Bill, 220–21 McDannell, Colleen, 31, 32, 33, 65, 71 McFague, Sallie, 196, 199, 200, 202 McGavran, Donald, 5 McGinn, Bernard, 46 McLaren, Brian, 17 McLuhan, Marshall, 9 Mead, Sidney, 45 megachurches, 10–12, 17 memorialization of rituals, 108 Mendel, Gregor, 209 Merchant, Carolyn, 197–98 metaphysics, 54–55 metatechnological world, 129. See also Internet ‘‘Mighty Macs’’ basketball, 218, 230 Miles, Margaret, 106 military industrial complex, 250 Miller, Arpi Misha, 68 Miller, Donald E., 68 mission of church, contemporary worship, 5 missions, Catholic, 29–30 models of nature, environmental ethics, 202–4 Moltmann, Ju¨rgen, 200 monasticism, 142 Monks of Adoration Web site, 133–35 monster symbolism, terrorism, 235–36 Moody, Dwight, 216

265 Moore, Michael, 252–53 Moore, Thomas, 52–53 moral development, 62–63 Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, 53, 67–68, 70 morality. See specific topics Morgan, David, 26, 27 Morgan, James, 158 Morganthaler, Sally, 16 Mormonism, 217 ‘‘Mother Earth,’’ 177, 178 motivation, work and faith, 146 movies. See film Muhammad, Elijah, 252 Muir, John, 169–70, 171–72 Muscular Christianity, 215–18, 220–21 music: in contemporary worship, 9–15; hymns and hymnals, 4, 9, 17–18 Muslims. See Islam NAAL (North American Academy of Liturgy), 9 Naismith, James, 218 Nash, Roderick, 172, 187n46 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 36, 40 National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains (NIBIC), 153 nationalism, religious, 237–38 national parks, 171–72 National Study on Youth and Religion (NSYR), 67–70, 74, 76 The National Uncanny (Bergland), 243 Native Americans: artistic expression and, 30, 34–35; Ghost Dance and, 242; ghosts and, 243; nature religion and environmentalism and, 167, 170–72, 177–79; Puritan conflict with (late 1600s), 240–43; spiritual interest in, 54, 150; as sports mascots, 226–27 naturalism and environmental ethics, 208–12 Nature (Emerson), 169 nature-as-sacred movement, 176–79

266 nature religion and environmentalism, 165–90; Christianity and, 15, 173– 76; contemporary view of, 170–82; definitions of, 166; environmental action and, 174, 180–82, 191–92; historical view of, 166–70; Native American spirituality and, 167, 177– 79; nature-as-sacred movement and, 165, 176–79; paganism and New Age and, 176–77; and science, quasidivine status of, 248–50; sports as, 224. See also environmental ethics Neal, Judith, 148, 152 neo-Darwinism, 204–12 neo-Fosdicks, 221, 222, 223 Netscape, 119 New Age spirituality, 83–86, 91–94, 95, 176–77 New England witch hunts, 240–43 Newman, Barnett, 33 New World Order, 250 New York Times, 208, 223 Nicea II, 27 NICIC (National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains), 153 Nine Insights, The Celestine Prophecy, 84–86, 91–94 Niren, Lisa, 107 Nolan, Steven, 104–5 nonsupernaturalistic nature religion, 180, 181 nontraditional religions: environmentalism and, 194–96; fear of, 244; on Internet, 121–22; sports and, 228–29. See also spirituality Nord, David Paul, 82 North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL), 9 Northcott, Michael, 200 Norton, Mary Beth, 240–41, 242 Notre Dame University football, 217–18 Novak, Michael, 224, 230 novels. See fiction, best-selling NSYR. See National Study on Youth and Religion (NSYR)

INDEX nuclear weapons as apocalyptic, 246–47 Nye, David, 248 Ofili, Christopher, 36, 40 O’Hara, John, 217 oikos (household), 141, 148 Olympics in Salt Lake City (2002), 178 online. See Internet Oppenheimer, Robert J., 247 Opus Dei, 94 organizational psychologists and faith, 146 organized religion. See institutional religion Orsi, Robert, 65–66, 71 Osceola, as FSU mascot, 226–27 Ostara, Internet celebration of, 121–22, 129 Ostwalt, Conrad E., 103, 105 Otto, Rudolph, 247–48 Ouspensky, Pyotr Demianovich, 173 paganism: on Internet, 121–22, 129–30; nature religion and environmentalism and, 171–72, 176–77 Paley, William, 208 Palmer, Clare, 196–97 Palmer, Susan, 66 ‘‘Paradise Garden’’ (Finster), 37 The Passion of the Christ (Gibson), 112 patchwork approach to spirituality, 51, 55 peaceable kingdom, environmental ethics, 200–202 Peale, Norman Vincent, 143–44 Peck, M. Scott, 52–53 Pentecostalism, 12–13 Perlmutter, Dawn, 40 personal development at work. See workplace spirituality personal spirituality. See spirituality Peterson, Steve, 229 Pew Internet and American Life Project, 125, 126, 136

INDEX phenomenological approach to children and religion, 64 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 101, 115n1 Phipps, Alan, 132 photography, 31 physics, and ecological thought, 203–4 Piaget, Jean, 62, 63 Pinochet, Gifford, 170, 171, 172 Piss Christ (Serrano), 36 Plate, S. Brent, 27, 36 pluralism, 54 Pocahontas (film), 178 Poe, Edgar Allan, 249 popular culture. See cultural considerations popular fiction. See fiction, best-selling population, Internet use by, 124–25 Porterfield, Amanda, 55 portraiture, Puritanism, 29 postmillennialism, 246, 247, 252 postmodernism, 202, 203, 240 The Power of Positive Thinking (Peale), 143–44 praise-and-worship contemporary services, 12–14 ‘‘praise choruses,’’ 15 prayer at school sports events, 222 prejudice, workplace spirituality, 157– 58 Price, Joseph L., 219, 224 Promey, Sally M., 25, 26, 28, 32 Promise Keepers, 220–21 Protestantism: children’s concept of God in, 63–65; contemporary spirituality and, 56–57; contemporary worship and, 1–2, 4–5; and doctrine of vocation, 142, 143; emergent contemporary worship and, 2, 16–17; liturgical movement and, 1–2, 5–9; Reformation and, 28–29, 142, 248; twentieth-century traditionalism and, 4 Prothero, Stephen, 39 psychics, 152

267 psychology: religious development and, 62–63; socialization and, 51–52, 63– 64; spirituality and, 52–54; work and faith and, 145–47 public funding of visual arts, 36, 40 puja online, Hinduism, 122–23, 128 Puritanism: apocalyptic view of, 246; as civil religion, 237–38, 240, 244; contemporary spirituality and, 55–56, 57; in fiction, 82; nature and, 167–68; and science, quasidivine status of, 248; visual arts and, 29; and witch hunts, New England, 240–43 Purity and Danger (Douglas), 236 Purnell, Mary and Benjamin, 219 quantum theory, 203 Radway, Janice, 96 Rainie, Lee, 125–26 Ramakrishna, Guru, 39 rapture in fiction, 86–87, 93, 94 Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI), 18 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 144 Raymond, John, 133 readings, liturgical movement, 7–8 Redfield, James, 83, 84–86, 91–94 Red Scare, 241, 250 reductionism, 198–99, 203, 204–7, 210–11 Reese, Bob, 154 reflexive spirituality, 49 Reformation, 28–29, 142, 248 Regan, Tom, 193–94, 200 Rehnquist, William, 222 relevance and contemporary worship, 1, 5 religion: defined, by Albanese, 235; defined, by Geertz, 112–13; developmental stages of, 62–64; environmental ethics and, 195–97; monsters and terror in, 235–36; nation-state retaliation against, 239– 40; online, 127–28, 135–37; and

268 religion (continued) spirituality, 46–49; sports as, 216, 223–27, 229–30; and visual arts, 26; and workplace discrimination, 157–58 ‘‘religion and ecology’’ academic field, 175–76 Religion and Scientific Naturalism (Griffin), 206–7 religious art v. spiritual art, 26–27 The Return of the Repressed (Clemens), 249 revelation in contemporary worship, 5 Revelations, New Testament, 245–46 revivals, Frontier tradition, 2–4 risky behavior and adolescent religion, 67 rituals: defined, 111; film impact on, 106–14; on Internet, 121–37; liturgical movement and, 1–3, 5–9; memorialization of, 108; religion and terror and, 236; spiritual practice and, 46–53 The Road Less Traveled (Peck), 52–53 Roberts, Loren, 223 Robertson, M.G. ‘‘Pat,’’ 251 Robinson, Eugene, 223 rock-and-roll culture, 2, 13 Rockne, Knute, 217 Rocky (film), 101, 115n1 Rocky Horror Picture Show (film), 111–12 Rohe´, Fred, 228 Rolston, Holmes, 194, 199, 201 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Roof, Wade Clark, 227 Roosevelt, Theodore, 216 Rosenzweig, Bill, 151–52 Roswell Incident (1947), 251 Rothko, Mark, 33 Rothko Chapel (Houston, TX), 33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 168 Rowling, J.K., 72–76 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 34, 199, 200 running and faith, 228 Ruskin, John, 30 Rutte, Martin, 148

INDEX Saddleback Church (Lake Forest, CA), 11 Sagan, Carl, 181 St. Cecelia’s Roman Catholic Church (Detroit, MI), 33–34 Salem, MA, witch hunts, 240–43 saltationism, 207–8 Salt Lake City Olympics (2002), 178 salvation in fiction, 87–88 A Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 172–73, 190n77 Sandon, Leo, 225 Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 222 Saraceno, Jon, 223 Sardello, Robert, 52 Savior.org, 130–33 scapegoating, 238 Schneider, Stephen, 181 Scho¨nborn, Christoph, 208 Schultz, Howard, 151 science and technology: contemporary cultural considerations and, 18; Darwinism and, 170–71, 180–82, 204–12; environmental ethics and, 197–200, 202–8; intelligent design and creationism and, 204–8; quasidivine status of, 248. See also Internet ‘‘scientism,’’ 206 Scorsese, Martin, 102 Sears, Paul, 198 Second Council of Nicea, 27 Second Vatican Council, 5–6, 7, 8, 18, 32–33 secular apocalypticism, 246–47 secularization theory, 32–35, 46 sedition and terrorism, 240–43 seekers: athletic, 227–29; and children’s concept of religion, 64; contemporary worship and, 10–12; emergent worship and, 16; music and, 10–12, 14–15; origins of, 2; spirituality and, 51 self-esteem and adolescent religion, 67 self-taught artists and visual arts, 37–38

INDEX semiliturgical traditions, 2, 3 Senge, Peter, 150 September 11, 2001, attacks, 225, 236–40, 244 Serrano, Andres, 36, 40 ServiceMaster Company, 154 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 170 sexual grotesqueness, internal enemies, 242–43 Sharman, Jim, 111 Sheehan, George, 229 Sheldon, Charles, 82–83, 223 The Shepherd’s Guide (Yellow Pages), 155 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 237 Short Bull, 34 Sierra Club, 171–72 Silent Spring (Carson), 173, 195 Simons, William M., 220 Singer, Peter, 193 Sioux, 34–35 Smith, Christian, 53, 67, 70 Smith, Jonathan Z., 111 The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann), 129 socialization, 51–52, 63–64 Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, 46 Son City youth program, 10–11 Soul Searching (Smith), 67, 70 Southcott, Joanna, 219 South Park Church (Park Ridge, IL), 10–11 Southwest missions, 29, 167 Spira, Henry, 193 spirituality, 45–79; athletic seekers and, 227–29; of children and adolescents, 75–76; definitions of, 46–49; development of, in contemporary U.S., 49–52; historical view of, 47, 49–52; individualism in, 54–57; institutional religion and, 46–57; and leadership of unchurched, 51, 52–54; nature religion and, 181; as personal, 45–57; postmodernism in, 48, 54–57; practices of, 49–52;

269 visual arts and, 26–27; in workplace, 141–63 sports, 215–34; athletic seekers and, 227–29; baseball, 217, 218–19, 223, 224–25; basketball, 215, 217–19; boxing, 223; Catholicism and, 217– 19; contemporary era of, 220–23; football, 215, 217–18, 220, 221–23, 225–27; gender and, 218–19; golf, 215, 223; historical view of, 216–20; Judaism and, 219–20; Mormonism and, 217; Muscular Christianity and, 215–18, 220–21; as religion, 216, 223–27, 230; utopian communities and, 218–19 Stackhouse, Max, 144 Starbucks Coffee, 151 Star Wars series (film), 110–11 Stations of the Cross (Newman), 33 Stern, Jessica, 239, 252 Stevens, John Paul, 222 storytelling in workplace, 149–50 Strong, Maurice, 179 students. See adolescents and youth; children success and work, 143–44 suffering and Christian environmentalism, 195, 196 Sun Dance, 34–35 Sunday, Billy, 217, 220, 223 Supreme Court, U.S., 222 symbolism in fiction, 92–96 Takacs, David, 181 ‘‘talking sticks’’ in workplace, 150 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 30–31 Taylor, Frederick W., 145 Taylorism, 145, 146, 147 technology. See science and technology teenagers. See adolescents and youth television shows and adolescent rituals, 109–10 The Ten Commandments (film), 113 Ten Commandments statue (Austin, TX), 113–14

270 terrorism, 235–55; apocalypticism and, 245–47; conspiracy theories and, 250–52; defined, 236–37; ghosts and historic violence and, 243–45; gothic horror and, 247–50; historical view of, 237–38, 240–45; internal threats and, 240–43; monster symbolism and, 235–36; New England witch hunts and, 240–43; religion relationship to, 236; September 11, 2001, attacks and, 225, 236–40, 244; and U.S. war on terror, 236–40, 252–53 Theosophy, 173 Thoreau, Henry David, 169–70 Thrasher, John, 226–27 Tillich, Paul, 102 Titanic (film), 107–8 Tizer, Mark, 228 tolerance and spiritualism, 48 Tom’s of Maine, 151 traditionalism, 4 traditions of worship, 2–4, 11 Transcendentalism, 169–70 truth in religious fiction, 89–92 Tuan, Yi-fu, 236, 237, 243, 244 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 170 Turner, Victor, 111 Tyson, Mike, 223 UAW (United Auto Workers), 153 UFO conspiracy, 250–51 uncanniness, 243–45 unchurched and spirituality, 51, 52–54 uniformitarianism, 207 United Auto Workers (UAW), 153 United Nations (UN) environmentalism, 179 United States: environmental protection laws in, 192, 202; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 157; Farm Security Administration (FSA), 31; Forest Service, 170; increase of faith in, 45; National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 36, 40; sedition acts in,

INDEX 241; Supreme Court rulings, 222; and war on terror, 236–40, 252–53. See also specific topics U.S. News & World Report (magazine), 154 utopian communities and baseball, 218–19 values in workplace, 149 Vatican II Council, 5–6, 7, 8, 18, 32– 33 Vecsey, George, 223 Vedanta Society, 39 violence. See terrorism ‘‘Virgin’’ (untitled) installation (Gober), 36–37 Virgin Mary, visual depictions of, 28, 30, 36 visual arts, 25–43; as antagonistic, 35–36; art-religion relationship and, 25–27, 38–40; contemporary religion and, 35–38; diverse views of, 36–37; and future of art-religion relationship, 38–40; historical view of, 28–31; iconoclastic images and, 25, 27; religious and spiritual, 26–27; secularization and, 32–35; self-taught artists and, 37–38 visual culture, 26 Vivekananda, Swami, 39 Wagner, C. Peter, 5, 12 Walden (Thoreau), 169 Warhol, Andy, 35 war on terror, U.S., 236–40, 252–53 Warren, Rick, 11, 156 WCC (World Council of Churches), 5, 6, 143 Webber, Robert, 17 webcam. See Internet weddings, film themes for, 106–7 welfare capitalism, 145–48 Western Latin church. See Catholicism White, James F., 2 White, Lynn, 195, 197

INDEX Whitehead, Alfred North, 196 Whitman, Walt, 169 wholeness in workplace, 149 Whyte, David, 150 Wigglesworth, Michael, 82 Willow Creek Community Church (Chicago, IL), 10, 11, 12 Wilson, Woodrow, 241 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City (2002), 178 Winthrop, John, 237 witches: Harry Potter series (Rowling) and, 72–76; on Internet, 121–22; persecution of, in Salem, 240–43 Wojcik, Daniel, 246–47, 251 women: feminist theology and, 8–9, 33–34, 88–90; in liturgical movement, 8–9; in sports, 218–19 workplace spirituality, 141–63; coaching and, 156–57; consultants in, 152– 53; creativity and, 150–51; discrimination and, 157–58; emerging trends in, 156–59; evangelical Christians and, 153–56; explicit forms of, 148–56; historical view of, 142–43; vs. home, 141; reception of,

271 158–59; vs. religion, 148; welfare capitalism and, 145–48 World Council of Churches (WCC), 5, 6, 143 World Wide Web, 119–20, 137n1. See also Internet Worship Evangelism (Morganthaler), 16 Worship Leader (magazine), 14 Wuthnow, Robert, 38, 51 The X-Files (film), 250 Xerox, 150 YMCA, 145, 216–17, 218 YMMIA (Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association), 217 yoga, 228 yogi, Jesus as, 39 The Younger Evangelicals (Webber), 17 Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association (YMMIA), 217 youth ministry, 2, 9, 10–11. See also adolescents and youth Zigler, Mel and Patricia, 151–52 Zwingli, Ulrich, 28

About the Editor and Contributors CHARLES H. LIPPY has been the LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee since 1994. His interests in American religious life range widely. Among his more recent publications are Do Real Men Pray? Images of the Christian Man and Male Spirituality in White Protestant America (2005) and a new edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (2005), co-edited with Samuel. S. Hill. DAVID R. BAINS received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is an associate professor in the department of religion at Samford University. He is working on a history of worship reform movements in twentieth-century Protestantism. KELLY J. BAKER is a doctoral candidate in American religious history at Florida State University, where she is completing a dissertation on religious hate groups and material culture. She has written entries for various encyclopedias, including American Material Culture, the Encyclopedia of Protestantism, and the Encyclopedia of Africa and the Americas. She has previously worked on religion and the visual arts in studies of the religious art of Henry Ossawa Tanner. TODD M. BRENNEMAN is completing his Ph.D. in American religious history at Florida State University. He and his wife, Jennifer, live in Tallahassee. DARRYL V. CATERINE is an assistant professor of religious studies at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY. His research interests focus on the

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intersections of religion, culture, and politics in both North and Latin America. DOUGLAS E. COWAN is assistant professor of religious studies at Renison College, University of Waterloo, Canada. He is author of Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet (2005). He has also edited Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet (2004) with Lorne L. Dawson and Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises (2000) with Jeffrey K. Hadden. AMY JOHNSON FRYKHOLM is the author of Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (2004). She teaches humanities at Colorado Mountain College and is currently researching and writing about international evangelical movements. MERRILL M. HAWKINS, JR., is an associate professor of religion at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, TN, where he has taught since 1995. He received both a B.A. in history and a Ph.D. from Baylor University and an M.Div. from Southwestern Seminary. LAKE LAMBERT is associate professor of religion at Wartburg College in Waverly, IA. He also serves as director of Wartburg’s ‘‘Discovering and Claiming Our Callings’’ initiative, funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment. S. BRENT PLATE is assistant professor of religion and the visual arts at Texas Christian University. Among his recent books are Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts (2004), Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics (2004), and Representing Religion in World Cinema (2003). He is managing editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. ARTHUR J. REMILLARD is a doctoral candidate in American religious history at Florida State University. His academic interests include religion and sport, religion in the American South, and American civil religion. He is managing editor of the Journal of Southern Religion and teaches parttime at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA. LISA SIDERIS is assistant professor of religious studies at Indiana University where she teaches courses on religious ethics and environmental ethics. She is author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (2003) and is currently editing a collection of essays on the life and work of Rachel Carson. BRON R. TAYLOR is the Samuel S. Hill Ethics Professor at the University of Florida, where he teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in religion and nature. He has written widely about religious environmental

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movements and nature religions. His books include Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (1995) and the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005). He is also editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. GAVIN VAN HORN is a Ph.D. candidate in the religion and nature program at the University of Florida. He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature and to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of AnimalHuman Relationships. He also serves as assistant editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. His current research interests focus on the relationships between humans and predator animals and, more specifically, on religious ethics, mythology, and folklore about wolves.

About the Advisory Board PHILIP GOFF is director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and associate professor of religious studies and American studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, as well as co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. His recent books include Themes in American Religion and Culture and the Columbia Documentary History of Religion in American Since 1945, edited with Paul Harvey. R. MARIE GRIFFITH is associate professor of religion at Princeton University. She is author of God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission and Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. She is currently writing a book on links between evangelicalism and sexuality and also co-editing a volume on Women and Religion in the African Diaspora. PAULA KANE is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh where she holds the Marus Chair of Catholic Studies. She teaches courses on American religious history, popular religion, religion and film, immigration, and ethnicity. Her scholarly interests include sacred architecture, mystical phenomena, and gender issues in the study of religion. She is presently completing a history of the stigmata in modern Catholicism. ANTHONY B. PINN is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religious studies at Rice University. His research interests include African American religious thought, liberation theologies, religion and popular culture, the aesthetics of black religion, and African American humanism. He is author or editor of sixteen books related to these areas of research.

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AMANDA PORTERFIELD is the Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion and director of graduate studies in religion at Florida State University. She is the author of a number of books, including Protestant Experience in America (2006), Healing in the History of Christianity (2005), and The Transformation of American Religion (2001). With John Corrigan, she edits the quarterly Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. She is a past president of the American Society of Church History. PETER W. WILLIAMS is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he has taught since 1970. A past president of the American Society of Church History, he is author of Popular Religion in America, America’s Religions, and Houses of God. He is also the editor of several reference sets, including (with Charles H. Lippy) the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience.