American “Thought”

Diverse Religiously Based Vantages and Visions, 1500-Present

So What?• Many, if not most or all, thematic approaches to

the United States, past and present, have religious overtones: Settlement, the Enlightenment, the relatioship of religion to the U. S. government and vice versa, reform movements, manifest destiny, abolitionism, proslavery, the Civil War, responses to immigration, progressivism, fundamentalism, the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, reaction to the Counter Culture, contemporary conservatism.

• My mother’s church is having a Stop Obamacare in Jesus’ Name rally on Wednesday evening!

So What: Religion has mattered since before the beginning of the

European Encounter with the New World

• Native Americans had a rich and diverse set of religious beliefs and traditions.

• Reformation drove Colonization and Exploration and animated European great power rivalries.

• Religious desire to convert the Indigenous People animated colonization further and competition between and within national groups spurred debate about what type of religion to convert the Native Americans.

So What? Fundamentally religion is intensely personal and shapes what

people think about:

• The ultimate purpose of their lives;

• The origins of the world;

• The relationship (if any) between the natural and the supernatural;

• Their destiny after death;

• The moral meaning of their actions.

So what?

• 78.4% of United Statesians identify themselves as Christian.

• 16.1% say they have no religion.• 1.7% are Jews• Almost 1% are Muslim.• Some polls show over 90% of United Statesians

believe in God, with about 80% believing in a personal god.

• 89% of self-identifying Republicans say they believe in God.

So how do we study this stuff?

• Like the sciences, the natural sciences and history can study natural phenomenon—what people do, say, believe, how they organize, what they do and refrain from doing to others, and why that might be so.

• We cannot determine the eternal veracity of some particularistic claim.

How Have People Studied this stuff?(These folk and more)

Philip Schaff1819-1893)

Helmut RichardNiebuhr (1894-1962) Sydney Eckman

Ahlstrom (1919-1984)

A Few Key Questions

• Why is the United States so religiously diverse?

• Does that promote or hinder the health of religion?

• Is the United States a “Christian” nation?

Historiography/Scholarly Literature

• Protestant beginnings (in lieu of Catholic State Churches) and church-state separation explain vitality and diversity of U. S. religious expression—Philipp Schaff, America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character (1854).

Historiography/Scholarly Literature• Regionalism and differing economic classes

encourage divergent denominational expression. H. Richard Niebuhr, Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929).

• Niebuhrian typology: 1. Christ against Culture.

2. Christ of Culture. 3. Christ above Culture. 4. Christ and Culture in Paradox.. 5. Christ Transforming Culture. Christ and Culture (1951)

Historiography/Scholarly Literature• U. S. religious expressions owe much to European

antecedents and imports refined in the crucible of United States History.

• The Social Gospel was the finest expression of U. S. Protestantism and made possible the eventual mainstream religious consensus of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

• Religious history should be mainstream U. S. history, but it needs to abandon denominational particularism.

Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (1972)

Historiography/Scholarly Literature

• Religious history provides a vital lens on immigration and ethnic history in the United States.

• Religion lies at the root of western concepts of justice, freedom, personal dignity—without this rootedness, a secular society will forfeit these values.

Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955)(1901-1977)

Historiography/Scholarly Literature

• American Religious history has been too much the province of those who focused on mainstream denominations or the evangelical dissenter alternative.

• U. S. religion is the result of the interplay of three strands of religious impulse: evangelical, main-stream, and metaphysical.

Catharine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (2007)

Professor Catherine L. Albanese, University of California,Santa Barbara. Her America: Religions and Religion, nowin its 4th edition is a standard text on U. S. religion.

Historiography/Scholarly Literature

• Church membership, at least to 2000, has continued to increase, and it has increased among the most demanding groups.

• The diversity of religious expression in the United States permits a variety of forms that offer different requirements of its members.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1900: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy (1992)

Conclusion

• Of the number of questions regarding United Statesians and religion, there seems to be no end.

• We have much work to do in order to understand.