Religion in US

12 Key excerpts on "Religion in US"

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  Sociology

  • Anthony Giddens, Philip W. Sutton(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The sociology of religion places special demands on our sociological imagination as we look to understand the diversity of beliefs and rituals found in human societies. This means we have to be sensitive to the ideals that inspire profound conviction in believers, yet at the same time we must be relatively detached from our personal beliefs. Sociologists confront ideas that seek the eternal, while recognizing that religious groups also pursue very mundane goals, such as acquiring finance or gaining followers. We also need to recognize the diversity of religious beliefs and modes of conduct and to probe into the nature of religion as a general social phenomenon.

  What is religion?

  Defining religion seems to be such a simple task as to merit no deep thought. Religions are commonly defined by a belief in God or gods and perhaps an afterlife, but they also involve worship in religious buildings – temples, churches, synagogues or mosques – and doing ‘religious things’ such as praying and eating or not eating certain foods. For sociologists trying to set limits to their field of study, reaching general agreement on such a basic matter has proved extraordinarily difficult. Indeed, Aldridge (2013: 22) argues that ‘We cannot expect to agree on a definition and then debate matters of substance, since matters of substance are built into any definition. There is not, and never will be, a universally agreed definition of religion.’

  One reason for this is that sociology contains numerous theoretical perspectives, and these differ in how they construe the nature of social reality. As a consequence, they also disagree about how that reality can and should be studied. For example, many macro-level studies adopt a realist view which sees religion as a fundamental social institution that transmits values, a moral code and norms of behaviour across generations. Hence ‘religion’ exists objectively and has real effects on individuals. Alternatively, several other micro-level studies are rooted in a more social constructionist position, which focuses on the ways in which what constitutes ‘religion’ is continually reproduced and changed in everyday interaction processes.

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  Religion and the State in American Law

  • Boris I. Bittker, Scott C. Idleman, Frank S. Ravitch(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, although these categorical objections likely would not be embraced by the Court, they do point to larger issues of potential concern, ones, in fact, that are hardly confined to the First Amendment or the judiciary. Even in disciplines or fields outside of law, which are not directly constrained by the consequentialist considerations that must be part of the legal definitional process, efforts to define “religion” have necessarily “struggled to avoid, on the one hand, the Scylla of hard, sharp, particularistic definition and, on the other hand, the Charybdis of meaningless generalities.” 39 In turn, the defini- tional assertions among philosophers, social scientists, and others are quite varied. Some scholars do offer definitions, although they are rarely fully congruent with one another and often may be of limited utility outside their disciplines of origin. One phi- losopher, for example, proposes that “a religion is a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and life- style in a set of rituals, institutions, and practices.” 40 A pair of historians, by comparison, define religion as “a system of beliefs, rituals, and practices, usually institutionalized in one manner or another, which connects this world with the beyond” and “provides the bridge that allows humans to approach the divine, the universal life force that both encompasses and transcends the world,” 41 whereas a cultural anthropologist posits that religion can be defined “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.” 42 Other scholars are less enthusiastic about the definitional enterprise at the outset.

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  The Promise of Salvation

  A Theory of Religion

  • Martin Riesebrodt, Steven Rendall(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  71 8 c h a p t e r f o u r Religious Practice and the Promise of Salvation: Outline of a Theory of Religion I t is now time to draw conclusions from the preceding discussions and sketch the outlines of my theory of religion. To that end, I will discuss three elements in the construction of the theory: defining religion, under-standing it, and explaining it. I begin by formulating my position in the manner of a thesis, which I then proceed to explain in greater detail in the course of this chapter. First, I note that only a content-oriented definition based on the mean-ing of religious action allows us adequately to delimit religion as a universal social phenomenon. Like other social phenomena, religion cannot be satis-factorily explained without its meaning being understood. Reference to its actual or presumed effects on society does not represent a definition of re-ligion, since such reference infers the origin from the function and thus ar-gues metaphysically, as if everything were arranged by an “invisible hand.” Religion can be grasped theoretically only if its specific meaning clearly distinguishes it from other types of social action. This specific meaning lies in its relation to personal or impersonal superhuman powers, that is, to powers that control or influence what escapes human control. 1 Only an interpretive, that is, a meaning-oriented theory of action, is capable of bridging the gap between religious internal perspectives and sci-entific external perspectives. Explanations that ignore internal perspectives have to justify the outside point of view they adopt. In contrast, interpretive explanations arrive at their external perspective by abstracting and system-atizing internal perspectives, and thus claim no privileged or even objective status for themselves. Instead, they transform internal perspectives into an external perspective, which differs from the internal perspectives but does not contradict them.

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  Supernatural as Natural

  A Biocultural Approach to Religion

  • Michael Winkelman, John R. Baker(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Religion projects a cosmic order that serves as a general model of the Universe, and then socializes human beings to help to ensure that people’s morals, emotions, and judgments conform to these ideals. Symbol System. Religion expands the functions of symbols beyond their ordinary capacities. Symbols normally refer to things that we can see and touch, but in the context of religion, symbols are used to refer to things that we may never see or touch and even to things that we may be unable to experience or conceptualize. The symbols of religion not only depict Gods as social beings, but also draws on an interrelated set of symbols—a model of the Universe—that provides explanations for many aspects of human existence. Religious beliefs embody models for psychological (personal) and social reality. The norms, values, beliefs, and requirements of religion play a fundamental role in shaping individual social and psychological development. Consequently, one fundamental effect of religion is to teach individuals to understand the Universe. Moods and Motivations. Religion is one of the most significant cultural systems involved for socializing a person’s “moods and motivations.” Religion both shapes our innate emotional dispositions and elicits new emotional experiences and concerns. One fundamental function of religion is to channel the wide range of possible human developmental patterns into a particular configuration of dispositions involving habits, preferences, skills, attitudes, and motivations. Motivations are a particularly important aspect of religious socialization because they create a persistent tendency for humans to seek certain kinds of experiences and engage in certain kinds of behaviors. Religious socialization normally creates specific expectations regarding moods in different circumstances

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  Sociology

  The Essentials

  • Margaret Andersen, Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Whereas science ex- plains this as the result of biochemical and physical processes, different religions have other accounts of the origin of life. See for Yourself For one week, keep a daily log, noting every time you see an explicit or implicit reference to religion. At the end of the week, review your notes and ask yourself how religion is connected to other social institutions. Based on your observations, how do you interpret the relationship between the sacred and the secular in this society? In an ancient Indian ritual, devotees of Jainism soak in orange vermillion. Durkheim would have seen this sacred ritual as promoting cohesion and identity. Mario Tama/Getty Images News/Getty Images Copyright 2020 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CHAPTER 13 Families and Religion 350 The Significance of Religion in the United States The United States is one of the most religious societies in the world. Religion has a firm grip on the na- tion’s culture, even while the number of people who identify themselves as religious is on the decline, at least as measured in public opinion surveys. About half (53 percent in 2016) of the public say that reli- gion is very important in their own life; another 22 percent say it is fairly important. Fifty-five percent of Americans think religion can solve all or most of society’s problems, a decline from 82 percent who said so in the late 1950s (Swift 2017; Gallup 2016). Religion is, for millions of people, the strongest component of their individual and group identity.

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  Post-Nationalist American Studies

  • John Carlos Rowe(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  63 Rethinking the Civil Religion Rethinking (and Reteaching) the Civil Religion in Post-Nationalist American Studies Jay Mechling Several years ago I inherited from my good friend and colleague, David S. Wilson, an undergraduate course entitled “Religion in American Lives.” I had been teaching an undergraduate course on “Technology, Science, and Amer-ican Culture,” which examines science as a belief system and compares that belief system with other systems of belief and practices, including religion. Murphey’s essay “On the Relation between Science and Religion,” which ar-gues that the culture critic has no meaningful grounds for making a distinc-tion between the two systems, governs my perspective in teaching the science and technology course, so taking on the religion course meant teaching the same idea, but entering the network of systems through another door. 1 The title of the course, “Religion in American Lives,” wonderfully captures the William Jamesian approach begun by my colleague and continued in my teaching. Just as James was interested in the multiple “varieties of religious ex-perience,” from the ordinary to the extraordinary, I am interested in stu-dents’ understanding the broad range of experiences we should count as “re-ligious.” 2 The sociology of knowledge and belief provides the theoretical base for the course, represented (for example) by the work of sociologist Peter L. Berger, but also by folklorists and others who do the ethnographic, microso-ciological study of the ways people construct and maintain knowledge and practices that the people consider religious. The goals of the course reflect this orientation as well as my view that American Studies should be defined as a way of thinking about American materials rather than as a field defined by the materials. I do not aim to “cover” American religion(s) through some checklist of facts the students must acquire.

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  Invitation to the Sociology of Religion

  • Phil Zuckerman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002 [1904]). In this classic study, Weber explores the ways in which specific Protestant/Calvinist religious beliefs played a decisive role in the development of modern western capitalism.

  4.  Sociologists study social patterns .

  Do women attend religious services more often than men? Are blacks more likely to believe in the existence of Satan than whites? Do Jews tend to vote more liberal than Christians? Do religious people divorce less frequently than the nonreligious? Sociologists of religion have their work cut out for them in exploring the plethora of patterns that emerge concerning religion in society. The most hotly debated topic within the sociology of religion during the past decade has revolved around a basic question of one particular social pattern: whether or not people are more or less religious today than they were in the past—the matter of secularization (Swatos and Olson 2000; Bruce 1992).

  5.  Sociologists understand that an individual can be truly understood only within his or her sociohistorical context .

  To put it simply, an individual can be a member of a particular religion only if that religion exists when he or she does. Furthermore, geography (where a person exists) is key (Park 1994). An individual born in Sri Lanka is much more likely to be Buddhist than an individual born in Honduras, who will most likely be Catholic (O’Brien and Palmer 1993). My friend Kent describes himself as “nothing” in terms of a religious identity. But he isn’t “nothing” in a sociohistorical vacuum. His parents were also “nothing”; they didn’t raise Kent with any particular religious education or involvement. Furthermore, Kent grew up in a largely secular enclave and attended school in west Los Angeles with few overtly religious kids or teachers. Additionally, Kent lives in a time in history and within a culture in which religion isn’t imperative, lack of religion isn’t illegal or suspect, and being “nothing” is considered quite normal. In short, an individual’s personal religious identity (or lack thereof) is greatly influenced by where, when, and among whom that individual lives.

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  British Social Attitudes

  The 26th Report

  • Alison Park, John Curtice, Katarina Thomson, Miranda Phillips, Elizabeth Clery, Sarah Butt, Alison Park, John Curtice, Katarina Thomson, Miranda Phillips, Elizabeth Clery, Sarah Butt(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Evidence on the extent to which religion has come to be a source of social division follows, with particular attention paid to how negative views about particular ethnic groups are related to attitudes towards religion. In our final section we consider the rather limited tolerance that now exists for unpopular speech and displays of religious commitment. Many of our findings derive from a series of questions about religion developed as part of the International Social Survey Programme . In Britain, these questions are asked as part of the British Social Attitudes survey; in the US they are included on the General Social Survey. 1 Religious identity, belief and practice Religious diversity has been a significant feature of British life since the Reformation. Catholicism never disappeared, nor were the established Churches of England and Scotland ever able to prevent dissent and competition. Jews have lived in Britain for centuries, though the rapid growth in the non-Christian Religion in Britain and the United States 67 population is largely the product of immigration since the Second World War. More and more people are ceasing to identify with a religion at all. Indeed, the key distinction in Britain now is between religious involvement and indifference. We are thus concerned about differences in religiosity (the degree of religious commitment) at least as much as diversity of religious identity. Religious belief is a basic sign of commitment, and profession of faith is often taken as an essential element of what it is to be religious. Actual religious behaviour, especially attendance at services, may be an even stronger sign. Of course, some people attend for personal, family or social reasons, but in general, religious practice serves as a good indicator of religiosity.

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  Sociology

  The Essentials

  • Margaret L. Andersen; Howard F. Taylor, Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Two-thirds of Americans think religion can solve all or most of society’s problems. Most (80 per-cent) say they depend on god to make decisions in their daily lives, and a majority (60 percent) think god has set the course of their lives (Shieman 2010). Religion is, for millions of people, the strongest component of their individual and group identity. Much of the world’s most celebrated art, architecture, and music has its origins in religion, whether in the classical art of western Europe, the Buddhist temples of the east, or the gospel rhythms of contemporary rock. Religion is also strongly related to a number of social and political attitudes. Religious identification is a good predictor of how traditional a person’s beliefs will be. People who belong to religious organizations that encourage intolerance of any form are most likely to be racially prejudiced. However, there is not a simple relationship between religious belief and prejudice, because religious principles are also often the basis for lessening racial prejudice. Those with deeper religious involvement tend to have more traditional gender atti-tudes. Homophobia has also been linked to religious belief, although some religious congregations have actively worked to encourage the participation of gays and lesbians. The Dominance of Christianity Despite the U.S. Constitution’s principle of the separa-tion of church and state, Christian religious beliefs and practices dominate U.S. culture. Indeed, Christianity is often treated as if it were the national religion. It is com-monly said that the United States is based on a Judeo-Christian heritage, meaning that our basic cultural beliefs stem from the traditions of the pre-Christian Old Testament of the Bible (the Judaic tradition) and the gospels of the New Testament. The dominance of Chris-tianity is visible everywhere. State-sponsored colleges and universities typically close for Christmas break, not Yom Kippur.

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  Religion in the National Agenda

  What We Mean by Religious, Spiritual, Secular

  • C. John Sommerville(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Baylor University Press

    (Publisher)

  Particular instances of religion probably vary in their approach to education, law, and the rest. Rather, we will try to see what difference any reli-gious perspective will make to subjects, even when they are assumed to be secular. Different Kinds of Definitions (1) There is an important difference between the kinds of defini-tions usual in science and in the humanities. Science must generally work from real or referential definitions, while the humanities may use nominal or semantic definitions. That is, scientists must be sure there is something “out there” to be studied, because their studies must be open to confirmation or disconfirmation by others. Many things can be defined either way, but referential definitions work best for tangible things that we are not likely to mistake. Religion obviously gives us a problem here. For example, social scientists may measure different kinds of activity—like church membership or church attendance—to quan-tify the incidence of “religion.” But there is a deeper question, namely, what makes church attendance religious. That is a “hermeneutic” 30 || religion in the national agenda question, a question not about the cause of the activity but about its meaning to participants. Scholars in the humanities mostly do stud-ies that investigate how human subjects have seen things. So they may “bracket,” or ignore, the more objective and impersonal reality of things and focus instead on the sense people made of them. Religion seems appropriate to a hermeneutic approach, which is a search for the meaning we find in experience. Church attendance, for instance, is religious because of the understanding of the par-ticipants. This directs our attention to language, which embodies our meanings. We will see in the following chapters that scientists have trouble pinning religion down because its objective reality is so noto-riously problematical.

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  Pews, Prayers, and Participation

  Religion and Civic Responsibility in America

  • Corwin E. Smidt(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  42 Chapter 2 millennium, as few concepts have occupied a more central position in mod-ern social science than secularization. According to secularization theory, religion is largely a vestige of premodern culture, a human expression that is destined to decline in importance and, perhaps, disappear altogether in an age of science and reason (Hadden 1989, 3; Bruce 2002). From this perspective, as societies modernize, they secularize; religion disappears— or, at the very least, its expression becomes highly privatized (Chaves 1994; Yamane 1997). 2 According to secularization theory, any “impact” that re-ligion may have on contemporary American civic and political life is simply a remnant of some outmoded, and disappearing, facet of social life. While countervailing evidence to the secularization theory could be examined in great detail, perhaps it is sufficient to note several prominent features of contemporary American life that undermine the theory’s con-tentions. The most obvious of these is the prevalence of religious beliefs and practices in American life even though the United States may be con-sidered among the most modern of societies. In fact, the American people have long been recognized as being highly religious, a characteristic that is particularly distinctive when the religious beliefs and practices of the American people are placed in cross-national perspective. The distinctly religious character of American life can be seen in table 2.1, which compares the religious beliefs and practices of the American people with those of the residents of Canada and nine largely industrial-ized and economically developed European countries. Included in this study were residents of historically Protestant countries (Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden) and historically Catholic countries (France, Italy, Poland, and Spain).

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  Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas :

  • Irene Taviss Thomson(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Michigan Press

    (Publisher)

  Chaves simi-larly noted that although more than 90 percent of Americans believe in a higher power, “only one-third say they rely more on that power than on themselves in overcoming adversity” (2002, 20). Religiosity in the United States may well be based more on the cultural encouragement that it receives than on deep personal convictions. Thus, there is more religious belief and practice among the nonchurchgoing pub-lic in the United States than in Canada, suggesting the pervasiveness of “American culture-religion,” the sheer social desirability of religiosity in American society (Reimer 1995). This cultural religiosity is also manifest in the greater difference in Canada than in the United States between the be-Respect for Religion but Uncertainty about Its Role 53 liefs and practices of those who attend church regularly and those who do not. And even secular Americans and those with weak religious ties believe that American society would be better off if religion’s in›uence were on the rise (Pew Research Center 2002). The secularization thesis has included the idea that in modern societies religion becomes privatized, con‹ned to the realm of personal individual beliefs. But though the secularization thesis remains accurate insofar as the secular spheres are emancipated from religious institutions, religious de-cline and privatization do not necessarily follow. Indeed, it can be argued that a deprivatization of religion became widespread in the 1980s. Varieties of “public religion” now act as “normative critiques of dominant historical trends,” raising questions about the moral norms or human considerations inherent in institutional activities (Casanova 1994, 43). The belief that religious expression can contribute to American democ-racy has a long history, as does the belief that any religion is a good thing.

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