Religion and Society

Be Very Afraid examines the human response to existential threats; once a matter for theology, but now looming before us in multiple forms. Nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming; each threatens to destroy the planet, or at least to annihilate our species. Freud, the author notes, famously taught that the standard psychological response to an overwhelming danger is denial. In fact, the author writes, the opposite is true: we seek ways of positively meeting the threat, of doing something — anything — even if it is wasteful and time-consuming. The atomic era that began with the bombing of Hiroshima sparked a flurry of activity, ranging from duck-and-cover drills, basement bomb shelters, and marches for a nuclear freeze. All were arguably ineffectual, yet each sprang from an innate desire to take action. It would be one thing if our responses were merely pointless, the book observes, but they can actually be harmful. Both the public and policymakers tend to model reactions to grave threats on how we met previous ones. The response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, echoed the Cold War: citizens went out to buy duct tape, mimicking 1950s-era civil defense measures, and the administration launched two costly conflicts overseas.

For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. So far no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, this book uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. It explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the 18th-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, the book details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. It also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, it examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. It discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore.

There has been a proliferation of interest in youth issues in recent years, and Muslim youth in particular. Young Muslims have been thrust into the global spotlight in relation to questions about security, employment, migration, multiculturalism, conflict, human rights, and citizenship. This book interrogates the cultures and politics of Muslim youth in the global South and North to understand their trajectories, conditions, and choices. It shows that although the majority of young Muslims share many common social, political, and economic misfortunes, they exhibit remarkably diverse responses to their situations. Although groups of them are drawn into radical Islam, others embrace their religion more as an identity marker. Although some take Islam as a normative frame and subvert it to express and reclaim their youthfulness, their counterparts may exert themselves through a music of rage or via collective action using the tools of new media and communications technologies. Far from being “exceptional,” young Muslims in reality have as much in common with their non-Muslim global generational counterparts as they share among themselves. They permeate the spaces of culture and politics to navigate between being Muslim, modern, and young.

The book draws on empirical research exploring mainstream religious belief and identity in Euro-American countries. Starting from a qualitative study based in northern England, and then broadening the data to include Europe and North America, the book explores how people ‘believe in belonging’, choosing religious identifications to complement other social and emotional experiences of ‘belongings’. The concept of ‘performative belief‘ helps explain how otherwise non-religious people can bring into being a Christian identity related to social belongings. Further, it is argued that what is often dismissed as ‘nominal‘ belief is far from an empty category, but one loaded with cultural ‘stuff‘ and meaning. Day introduces an original typology of natal, ethnic and aspirational nominalism that challenges established disciplinary theory in both the European and North American schools of the sociology of religion that assert that most people are ‘unchurched‘ or ‘believe without belonging‘ while privately maintaining beliefs in God and other ‘spiritual‘ phenomena. Day creates a unique analysis and synthesis of anthropological and sociological understandings of belief and proposes a holistic, organic, multidimensional analytical framework to allow rich cross cultural comparisons. Chapters focus in particular on: methods for researching belief without asking religious questions, the acts of claiming cultural identity, youth, gender, the ‘social‘ supernatural, fate and agency, morality and a distinction between anthropocentric and theocentric orientations that provides a richer understanding of belief than conventional religious/secular distinctions.

For three decades, scientists' warnings of global climate change have resounded in the public sphere, but our collective response has been slow and inadequate. Tackling a challenge of this magnitude demands more than action in fits and starts; it hinges on complementary efforts at an unprecedented scale from individuals, the institutions in which we live, work, and play, and our varied levels of government. Despite environmentalists' best efforts, the necessary political will and public engagement to fuel robust action on climate change remain in short supply. Meanwhile, skepticism lingers and a partisan divide deepens. Contrary to popular expectations, faith-based efforts are emerging and strengthening to address this gap. In the US today, perhaps none is more significant than evangelical climate care. Drawing on interview, focus group, and textual research, this book explores the phenomenon of climate care—its historical roots, theological grounding, visionary leaders, and advocacy initiatives. It tracks the burgeoning movement's reception within the broader evangelical community—from pew to pulpit—at times winning allies but also provoking resistance. Engaging with climate change as a matter of private faith and public life, these leaders challenge traditional boundaries around the evangelical agenda, partisan politics, and established alliances and hostilities. They view sea-level rise as a moral calamity, lobby for legislation written on both sides of the aisle, and partner with atheist scientists. While others countdown the rapture, their hope is for a renewal of God's creation. Through their efforts, evangelical climate advocates are reshaping not only the landscape of American climate action but also the contours of their own religious community. Though the movement faces dynamic and complex challenges—some of which test its own fabric—climate care leaders continue to leverage evangelicalism's size, dominance, cultural position, ethical resources, and mechanisms of communication to further their cause.

Explores the possibilities for a secular society. Such a society is radically open to its environment, to a wide range of opportunities and dangers, and it is therefore agnostic about the boundaries between the possible and the impossible. Its own beliefs and ethics would also be open, evolutionary, procedural, and open to contestation and revision. There would be opportunities for individuals to give their own accounts of their personal experience without seeking recognition and legitimacy from institutionalized sources of authority. The individual's identity would be able to develop with being shaped by ritual or conformed to a society's pantheon of heroes. The present would be open to the past without being controlled or obligated to it, and the future would be an emergent aspect of the present rather than a reservoir of unfulfilled aspiration. Language would be subject to negotiation and contest, even regarding the meanings of sacred speech. The mysterious and the occult, along with other aspects of the sacred, would be subject to discourse rather than veneration. The political and cultural center would lose its monopoly on the sacred, and the periphery would become more assertive in defining is own forms of the sacred against those of the center. Religious institutions would become less successful in reducing the sacred to particular interpretations, times, and places.

Christianity in the United States has long been organized around congregations and denominations. However, a different type of organization operating outside of these traditional structures is claiming an increasingly important place in the religious market. The growth of Christian nonprofits, popularly called “parachurch” organizations, has been recognized by churchgoers and social scientists alike as an important development that is transforming the composition and dynamics of American Christianity. The size, resources, and activities of this population have made it the public face of American Christianity and altered the relationship between individuals, congregations, and denominations. Beyond the Congregation‖I‖ utilizes data on almost 2,000 of the largest and most influential Christian nonprofits in the United States to answer some of the key questions raised by these organizations. What explains the growth of Christian nonprofits? What activities are they pursuing? How are they funded and how do they use those funds? Beyond the Congregation‖I‖ provides a much needed examination of these issues that is accessible and informative for scholars, nonprofit executives, religious leaders, and the general public.

Drawing on pamphlets and broadsides, newspaper exchanges, document collections, personal diaries, church records, and legislative journals, this book engages the question of how early Americans learned to live amid a great diversity of beliefs and modes of worship. It begins by explaining how the right of private judgment gained the status of an unquestioned assumption, and then recounts how the print trade expanded the meaning of this right, and a series of religious revivals transformed it. Beyond Toleration chronicles the subtle changes in public language and social behavior that occurred as official persecution ceased and social institutions became integrated. It shows how toleration first became law and then became irrelevant as religious establishments crumbled and an ambiguous concept called religious liberty triumphed. It demonstrates how the assumption that dissenting faiths were merely permissible gave way to the conviction that a variety of faiths deserved equal treatment. In the end, Beyond Toleration explains how Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them-and how they found a way to articulate these differences civilly.

This book focuses on the relationship between conservative Protestants and social power in the U.S. The book, which is particularly concerned with which sorts of power relationships seem natural and which do not, is based on fieldwork (conducted in the early 1990s), in three Philadelphia churches: Oak Grove Church, Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, and the Philadelphia Church of Christ. The data drawn from that fieldwork suggests that in the early 1990s, Bible‐carrying Christian churches tended to naturalize (to various degrees) the authority of heterosexuals and men. The data also suggested that under certain (relatively rare) circumstances Bible‐carrying Christian churches denaturalized the authority of ministers, corporations, and nation‐states.

The Bible, the School, and the Constitution traces the origins of one of the more contentious controversies heard by the United States Supreme Court: the intersection of religion and education. The book demonstrates that the legal basis for the modern Court’s decisions regarding Bible reading in the public schools and the public funding of religious schools arose during the nineteenth century, culminating in the decade following the Civil War. This controversy—called the “School Question” —coincided with the evolution of American public education and asked whether the nation should support a religiously based education system. Public education during the century faced competing pressures: a widespread belief that schooling required a moral if not religious basis; a belief among many Protestants that Catholic immigration presented a threat to Protestant culture and to republican values; the need to accommodate an increasing religious pluralism in the schools; and evolving understandings of constitutional principles. The book argues that attitudes about the relationship between religion and education were neither static nor two-dimensional (i.e., pro or con). The book makes two important points that run contrary to popular perceptions. First, the modern Supreme Court’s decisions on school funding and Bible reading did not create new legal doctrines or abolish dominant practices but built on legal concepts and educational trends that had been developing since the early nineteenth century. Second, while public reaction to a growing Catholic presence was a leading factor in this development, it was but one element in the rise of the legal doctrines the high court would embrace in the mid-twentieth century.