Reinventing American Religion—Yet Again

Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, Edited by David D. Hall, Princeton University Press, 1997

After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, By Robert Wuthnow, University of California Press, 1998

The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age, By Michael F. Brown, Harvard University Press, 1997

Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, By Joel A. Carpenter, Oxford University Press, 1997

Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America, By Linda Kintz, Duke University Press, 1997

At the end of the twentieth century when many futurologists had expected to record a final victory for secularism, the currents of religious energy seem to be gaining strength. Yet a number of astute observers argue that religion is taking unaccustomed shapes. The respectable denominations of American Protestantism, once referred to as the mainline, have lost ground on one flank to forces of Christian fundamentalism and on another flank to the heralds of a New Age. J. Gordon Melton, our most indefatigable chronicler of American religious inventions, has compiled a fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of American Religions (1993) that runs over 1,000 pages and contains 1,730 entries. The 175 mostly unfamiliar entries in the section devoted to Spiritualist, Psychic, and New Age groups reads more like a directory of psychological counselors than a list of churches or places of worship.

Not everyone is happy. Many question whether everything on the American horizon called religion deserves the name. Staid defenders of Europe's established churches are not surprised. Since the nineteenth century they have suggested that Americans have for too long condoned religious racketeering in the name of religious toleration. The export of American religions is today a major force in moving American culture abroad, and some countries have put up barriers to this sort of free trade. Scientology has been one target, but the aggressive religious proselytizing of other American religions around the world has been resisted because of its corrosive effect on local traditions.

These worries emerge on our homefront as well. John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) is a cautionary tale. When the Reverend Clarence Wilmot felt "the last particles of his faith leave him" just as Mary Pickford fainted on D. W. Griffith's set, a chain of declension begins. Subsequent generations of Wilmot's family turn God into a Hollywood icon, and in the final chapter religion in effect becomes a disaster film.

The assessment made by scholars of American religion appears to waver although we are long out of the age when historical and sociological studies interlaced religion with American paranoia and conspiracy fears. We are in fact in the midst of a major renaissance of American religious studies, a flowering that has broadened the scope of study well beyond the boundaries of religious organizations. David D. Hall, a leading historian of Puritan culture, has assembled an important set of essays that seek to focus inquiries into American religion on experience, on how "religion is lived by the faithful" (22). "Lived religion," these essays argue, is unstable and negotiable, a protean response to secularized modernity that propels people, "in the absence of any code of meaning inherited from tradition," to "produce the systems of meaning that they need" (27).

If in the US the markers of place and kinship have provided uncertain social anchors, we should expect "lived religion" to be unusually free of the hobgoblins of foolish consistencies. In the first essay in Hall's volume, Robert Orsi reflects on the meaning of a locally famous Lourdes shrine recreated in North Bronx. To the skeptic, of course, Lourdes USA is a rip-off of a rip-off. To Orsi, who is one of our very best interpreters of the cultural meaning of religious ritual, it suggests that "lived religion is a fundamental rethinking of what religion is and of what it means to be 'religious.' Religion is not...