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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 159-161



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Book Review

The Transformation of American Religion:
The Story of a Late-Twentieth- Century Awakening


The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late-Twentieth- Century Awakening. By Amanda Porterfield. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 262. $27.50.)

Casual observers acknowledge that significant change has come to American religion since World War II. Some stress demographic change; others highlight the religiosity of Baby Boomers. Nose counters lift up the membership decline among mainline Protestant denominations. Most identify the Second Vatican Council as a turning point in American Catholicism. Many recall those who wore saffron robes and chanted Sanskrit mantras on street corners, while preachers and priests marched in civil rights or anti-Vietnam war demonstrations.

As many theories emerge to explain these phenomena as there are persons who study them. Amanda Porterfield here offers her account of a "late twentieth-century [End Page 159] Awakening" on par with the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. Her concern is the world of ideas, of elite theology and philosophy, of worldviews reconfigured to accommodate new realms of meaning.

She scrutinizes six intellectual currents: the abandonment of conversion as the goal of Protestant world missions with the rise of liberation theology and ecumenism, the appeal of Catholic ritual sensibilities to those who question the ultimacy of reason and science, the collapse of traditional religious authority as 1960's social protest spawned a new individualism emphasizing the inner life, the infiltration of Buddhist and other Asian modes of thought into American religious practice, the recovery of a sense of gender and body in spirituality, and the impact (and astonishing growth) of the academic study of religion on how folks think about religion in general.

Porterfield carefully argues that each of these trends has roots in American Protestantism, indeed in American Puritanism, and therefore each represents a natural outgrowth of a Protestant understanding of the world. She points to the eighteenth-century Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards, who assigned religion to the realm of the affections, as planting seeds that flowered in the contemporary tendency to elevate spirituality over religion. In Edwards's emphasis on how a divine and supernatural light stimulates an inner sensibility to the beauty of the divine, she sees the first tenuous links to the practice of meditation that combines Buddhist, New Age, and other features for twenty-first-century practitioners.

Whether it be Protestant or Catholic personalist thought or theologians (Paul Tillich) and phenomenologists (Mircea Eliade) who sensitized generations of students to possibilities of truth in religious traditions other than their own, all that has rattled the religious status quo for the last half-century, in Porterfield's mind, stretches to Protestant emphasis on individual, personal religious experience. Porterfield is at her best when she weaves diverse intellectual strands into an intricate, interconnected pattern.

But how many ordinary women, for example, who practice some Zen meditation, say the Rosary, reach out to pre-Christian fertility religions to celebrate experiences unique to women, defy Church teaching on birth control, and refuse to see their Hindu neighbors as being without hope of salvation are conscious of all the connections Porterfield makes? Does it matter whether they know that Protestant--usually Puritan--notions made their own idiosyncratic spirituality viable? And what of the millions who would reject all that, those identified with the so-called fundamentalist resurgence in American Protestantism, for whom the world that Porterfield celebrates is an alien and evil place? It may be too bold to label the shifts in American religious life as a great and general awakening, given the resistance of some to the trends she demarcates.

Yet we are in debt to Porterfield for providing yet another map through the maze of American religious life; alternate routes do not minimize the importance [End Page 160] of this one, but confirm the richness of American religious culture over the last half-century.

 



Charles H. Lippy
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

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