Resurgent Christianity

Deciding whether or not the US is a Christian nation has gotten more, not less, difficult to decide. If you wanted to answer the question in the earliest moments of the twenty-first century, you could have done so with relative sociological confidence. You might have consulted the US Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, or you might have turned to the (then newly founded) Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) at Pennsylvania State University, the General Social Survey or the National Congregations Study managed through the University of Chicago, or the Baylor Religion Survey. These data sets show a detailed demographic breakdown of how people in the country describe their religious identity. And you will find that at the turn of the twenty-first century, the majority of subjects used the word Christian to describe themselves.

Quickly, though, you might want to know more. You might want to know with what passion the individuals who were surveyed attached themselves to that category. You might ask if being a Christian meant one had to prove they believed certain things, and if so, how one demonstrates those beliefs. Are they evangelical or are they liberal (or are they liberal evangelicals)? If you are Christian, does that mean you are connected to a specific sect (Southern Baptist, Roman Catholic, Jehovah's Witnesses), or to a particular race, ethnicity, or nationality (Colored Methodist Episcopal, Korean Presbyterian Church, Russian Orthodox)? Are you congregationally identified or more parachurch in your mode of participation? You might try to determine this by asking what practices in their life they thought demonstrated their commitment to this identity. You might ask if the word Christian was an excluding identity, or if it was a word that could be used in combination with others. Could you claim to be a Christian and go to yoga daily? Could you claim to be a Christian and never be a member of any congregation? Could you claim to be a Christian and also be a Buddhist, or a Wiccan, or a Jew? You might even ask if you could be a Christian and an atheist. You might ask: Just how Christian do you have to be to call yourself a Christian?

The surveys have improved to serve such complicating inquiries. As a result, their headlines invite even more questions. Consider this array of summaries from research conducted by Pew since 2014: "One-in-Five U.S. Adults Were Raised in Interfaith Homes," "U.S. Catholics Open to Non-Traditional Families," "Many Americans Hear Politics From the Pulpit," "Most Say Religious Holiday Displays on Public Property Are OK," "Public Sees Religion's Influence Waning," and "U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious." If you are a sociologist of religion, you could summarize these findings. And you would then observe that those Americans who do claim specific religious affiliation are as observant as they have ever been; you would also say that those who are so affiliated are fewer in total numbers than before; you would say those who are so affiliated have a disproportionate effect on the public sphere; you would also say that an expanding group of Americans have familial connections to more than two religious groups; you would say Americans care less about religion but continue to care about their religion. You would say, in other words: Americans are Christian. We also are not.

The past ten years of scholarly discussion about the state of religion have made things even muddier. Studies on the secular sought to map the ways we make ourselves as subjects in an epoch of diminished institutional affiliations and increasing individual claims to identity. Scholarship on the history of claims about "religion" points out how much that very category is incomprehensible outside a particular geopolitical frame (colonialism) and has no resonance without a concept of comparison (pluralism) that invariably produces hierarchies of good religions and bad religions, our religion...