In the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, black Christian thought helped to undermine the white supremacist racial system that had governed America for centuries. The civil rights revolution in American history was, to a considerable degree, a religious revolution, one whose social and spiritual impact inspired numerous other movements around the world. Key to the work was a transformation of American religious thought and practice in ways that deftly combined the social gospel and black church traditions, infused with Gandhian notions of active resistance and “soul force,” as well as secular ideas of hardheaded political organizing and the kinds of legal maneuverings that led to the seminal court case of Brown v. Board of Education.
The civil rights movement had legislative aims; it was, to that extent, a political movement. But it was also a religious movement, sustained by the religious power unlocked within southern black churches. The historically racist grounding of whiteness as dominant and blackness as inferior was radically overturned in part through a reimagination of the same Christian thought that was part of creating it in the first place. In similar ways, the Mexican-American farmworkers’ movement drew on the mystic Catholic spirituality of Cesar Chavez and brought to national consciousness the lives and aspirations of an oppressed agricultural proletariat that lacked the most elementary rights of American citizens.
American civil rights movements drew from, and were in part inspired by, the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian independence movement. Gandhi’s movement deeply influenced black Americans who visited India from the 1930s to the 1950s and who brought home with them a mixture of ideas and practices deriving from sources as diverse as Gandhi and the 19th-century American progenitor of nonviolent civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau. American civil rights movements subsequently became a model for any number of freedom movements internationally, notably including the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. There, religious figures such as Desmond Tutu became international symbols. Also, the black American freedom struggle based in the American South moved protestors in places as diverse as Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination and Chinese students staring down tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
In the post–civil rights era, some suggested that America had moved into a “post-racial” era, despite the overwhelming statistics documenting racial inequality in American society. Thus, activists who have mined the connection between religion, civil rights, and social justice will have plenty of work to do in the future. The struggle continues through such contemporary venues as the #blacklivesmatter movement.
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Civil Rights Movements and Religion in America
Paul Harvey
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Class and Religion in America
William A. Mirola
Scholars pursuing questions on the links between religion and social class typically examine several distinct sets of dynamics. A main research focus has addressed how religious beliefs, behaviors, and experiences vary across different social class contexts. Studies in this tradition draw on quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate such differences. Statistical studies have demonstrated economic and educational differences in patterns of an array of religious beliefs, religious service participation, and other religious behaviors, and especially social and political attitudes on everything from gay rights to gun control to political party preference. Qualitative work typically delves into the lived religious experiences of individuals from different classes as well as examining the ways in which religious expression is itself shaped by class cultures.
A significant portion of this type of research examines how religion impacts the life and work experiences of those at the bottom of the class hierarchy, the working and nonworking poor. Here the way that faith shapes how poor people view the challenges of their lives and their views of the larger society are particularly central concerns. Addressing a second related set of questions, researchers also examine how participation in religious communities contributes to forms of social mobility in terms of socioeconomic status indicators. Statistical analyses dominate in this area, illustrating how denominational affiliation and measures of religious belief and practice predict views regarding income and wealth accumulation, educational attainment, and occupational choice. Another distinct area of scholarship examines the role religion has played in shaping the history of capitalism and the dynamics of the traditionally understood industrial working classes and the organized labor movement. Here, too, scholars examine how working-class individuals use religion as a way to understand their work and the evolution of global capitalism. Labor historians in particular have examined historical and contemporary instances in which religious leaders and organizations play active roles in industrial conflicts.
Whichever route one takes to explore religion and social class, studying their intersections has been of longstanding interest to social scientists, historians, religious studies scholars, and theologians for more than a century. This article bridges these approaches and provides an overview of their complex intersections in contemporary social contexts.
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The Cold War and American Religion
Dianne Kirby
American propaganda cast the Cold War as one of history’s great religious wars, between the godless and the God-fearing, between good and evil. It was a simplistic depiction that was supported and promoted in the highest echelons of government and by the leaders of America’s key institutions. During the course of the presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, U.S.-Soviet rivalry was transformed from a traditional great power struggle into a morality play that drew on firmly entrenched notions rooted in the American past, above all American exceptionalism and its sense of mission. Truman made religion America’s ideological justification for abandoning America’s wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower used religion to persuade the world that America was a force for good in the international arena. The resulting anti-communist crusade was to have profound consequences for Christian America, contributing to both religious revival and religious repression in the early Cold War period. Over time it caused irrevocable alterations to America’s religious landscape. The anti-communist dynamic unleashed embraced anti-liberalism and was a factor in the rise of the Christian Right and the decline in America’s mainstream churches. In addition, the image of a godless and evil enemy dictated an irreconcilable conflict that precluded the very modes of diplomacy and discourse that might have helped avoid the worst excesses, costs, and consequences of the Cold War.
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Commerce, Consumerism, and Christianity in America
Dana Logan
American Christianity and commerce are bound together by their mutual history. In colonial America, Puritans excelled at the skills of capitalism, and in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Christian corporations have tied together religious and corporate culture. Even when corporations and churches have maintained a distinct boundary between faith and the market, American religion and capitalism seem to be uniquely compatible. Ministers and gurus use mass media to disseminate their message (via TV, radio, bookstores). Religious folk in the United States tend to act like consumers, choosing their theologies and churches based on their individual needs and desires, rather than relying on tradition to dictate their religious practices. Selling and buying in the American marketplace share many similarities with Christian categories of piety and evangelization. Further, corporations and religious communities have since the early 20th century collaborated in politics and social movements. In much of the scholarship on Christianity and commerce in the United States, this relationship is discussed as a strategic partnership between two distinct spheres of life: religion and the market. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this neat division, arguing that the fluid relationship among commerce, consumption, and Christianity in the United States emerges from the historical co-development of capitalism and religion. If Christianity and the market in the United States look very similar, or are particularly friendly, it is because they were never separate to begin with.
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The Construction of Muslim Families, Interfaith Marriage, and Religious Education in Mexico
Ruth Jatziri García Linares
Fieldwork conducted in the Islamic Center of the North (Centro Islámico del Norte, or CIN) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, between 2015 and 2017, yielded several findings. First, it examined the reasons for women’s conversion to Islam; second, it looked at the ways these women and their husbands raise their children under Islamic religious precepts. Thus, the author seeks to shed light on how this conversion and child-rearing take place within both Muslim and interfaith homes, dividing her discussion into three parts. The first contextualizes the women and men who make up these families and households and also discusses the Muslim community settled in Monterrey, of which they are members. The second provides an outline of interreligious and Islamic marriages, as well as what Islam has to say about marriage between Muslims and people of other religious faiths. The last section consists of a series of examples taken from interviews with Muslim women who are members of the CIN in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. The narratives provide insight into how religious values are transmitted to children and young people, as well as the ways in which marriages initially considered interreligious sometimes become completely Islamic.
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Contextualizing the Proud Boys: Violence, Misogyny, and Religious Nationalism
Margo Kitts
One of the most strident voices in the US alt-right scene in the early 21st century belongs to the Proud Boys. Although born only in 2016, the group shares sentiments with older accelerationist groups who seek to return the United States to what they see as its pristine origins. “Alt-right,” “alt-lite,” and “white” are disputed terms among the group’s various chapters, but xenophobia and misogyny are two pervasive themes. Similarly to other voices on the alt-right, the Proud Boys vary in the degree to which they will accommodate racialist Christianity and/or a romanticized Nordic spiritualism. However, to the extent that religion can be made to serve the establishment of a white ethnostate, even the most atheistic among them have come to see religious tolerance as a pragmatic necessity. What is most religious about them, however, can be understood as resembling European metapolitics, which exploits atavistic dreams, mythic symbols, and eschatological values to foster a cultural awakening to nativist dreams. The Proud Boys version of this nativist dream is their aspiration to return to a purported Judeo-Christian ethical foundation for Western civilization, together with a Greco-Roman model of the Republic.
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Conversions to Islam in Mexico
Camila Pastor
Conversion to Islam in Mexico has accelerated in the early 21st century, thanks to both increased migration from Muslim-majority countries and the expanding global, regional, and local networks among Islamic religious communities. Despite there being no mosques in the country until the 1980s, official figures from Mexican censuses show the number of Muslims doubling between 2000 and 2010 and again in 2020. Though many communities were built in urban centers, outreach and proselytizing activities have extended into rural regions as well and have included Shia and Sufi as well as Sunni groups. Thus, the establishment of Muslim communities in Mexico has become a transnational phenomenon, with implications for the wider diaspora. This is demonstrated through an exploration of the historiography and ethnography of Islam and by drawing from data collected during the Ethnographic Census of Muslims in Mexico (2011–2014) and using interviews with converts, migrants, and diplomatic personnel to identify some of the core characteristics and consequences of Mexican Islam as convert Islam.
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Culture, Entertainment, and Religion in America
Randall J. Stephens
Throughout American history, religion and entertainment have influenced each other and have intersected in fascinating ways. Native American rituals and games entertained and inspired. Early white settlers like the Puritans, though defining their faith over and against profane pastimes, engaged in sport, play, and elaborate storytelling. Still, stark contrasts appeared in the 17th and 18th centuries when it came to how Catholics and Protestants in the New World thought of the theater, music, and performance. The evangelical surge in the 18th century brought with it a lively and riveting preaching style—represented by celebrity ministers like George Whitfield and Gilbert Tennent—that faced the ire of their more traditional foes for using “vulgar” methods to reach the masses. In the 19th century, African Americans, in slavery and freedom, expressed their faith in ways that combined religious systems, dancing, and music traditions from Africa and the Americas. Evangelical churches and prominent figures used entertainment to proselytize, illustrate the drama of salvation and damnation, and to enliven services. Temperance, anti-slavery, and other reformist groups employed music, novels, and theater to spread their earnest message. Pentecostals and other evangelicals took up new forms in the 20th century. They eagerly made use of radio, film, and later, television. The well-known evangelist Billy Graham was a skillful pioneer of new media. In the 20th century, Hollywood films drew on Jewish and Catholic themes, as Jewish and Catholic writers, directors, and actors put their stamp on the silver screen. Late 20th and early 21st century combinations of religion and entertainment included Muslim rap music, Christian rock, Jewish folk music, and much more. A great deal of this innovation coincided with the rise of the performance-driven megachurch and the proliferation of religious organizations that catered to athletes and drew on sports imagery and symbols for the cause. In the long sweep of American history, the devout have found new, elaborate ways to draw on popular culture and to entertain as well as enlighten the faithful.
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Cyberspace and Religion in America
Douglas E. Cowan
Invented in 1989 and popularly accessible since the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web has always hosted a wide variety of religious content, ranging from early text-based discussion forums to live-stream video, and from rudimentary online communities to cross-platform social media activism. Known colloquially as “religion in cyberspace,” these computer-mediated, faith-based environments raise important questions in terms of how religious discourse is enacted and religious ritual performed. More than that, they challenge whether the notion of physical place will remain paramount in religious life, or if it can be displaced as believers and adherents shift aspects of their activity to electronically mediated communication space. Although initial enthusiasm for the Internet and its presumed potential led some scholars to predict large-scale uploading of religious life, there are a number of reasons to conclude that offline religious practice will continue to be important in the lives of believers despite any online activity they may pursue. That said, there are also significant ways in which online religious activity has encouraged adherents to reimagine the nature of sacred space, to envision new ways of understanding religious practice, and to enact new forms of religious community.
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Denomination in American Public Life
Russell E. Richey
A voluntary religious community and ecclesial creation of modernity, the denomination emerged alongside of and along with the political party, the free press, and free enterprise. By 1702 it acquired its modern religious meaning with the establishment of the “body of the Dissenting Ministers of the Three Denominations in and about the City of London.” The 17th-century experiences with religious conflict, revolution, and regicide had led England in its Glorious Revolution to reestablish the Church of England but pass the Act of Toleration. Thus began a century of identifying denominations, of experimentation in Britain and the colonies with (Protestant) religious pluralism, of defining prerogatives and limitations (for the Dissenters or Nonconformists—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers), of political jockeying between Whigs and Tories, and of exchanges of ideas through magazines, newspapers, and coffeehouses. So denominationalism emerged and defined itself in the Age of Enlightenment, John Locke voicing ideals and proposing policies that would be tested in the American colonies and gradually become normative in the new nation. Where existent beyond the United States and Britain, governments and social customs have provided some measure of religious freedom, permitted denominational pluralism, and controlled for conflict and repression.
The denomination, then, is a voluntary religious community. As voluntary, it needs legally established or de facto toleration and religious freedom. In such an environment and as a voluntary or elective religious community, the denomination creates and sustains its membership. Adherents join, belong, bring in family (children), move to another of the same, or perhaps quit. Thus, the denomination needs “space” to exist (alongside or outside of any religious establishment if such persists). As voluntary, a denomination should and often does recognize the authenticity of other religions/churches even as it claims its own. It often does not concede that authenticity indiscriminately or fully.
As religious, the voluntary community construes itself and claims to be a legitimate and self-sufficient, proper Christian church, Jewish denomination, or other world faith. The denomination functions with a sense of itself as located within time; knows its own boundaries, origins, history, and drama; and acknowledges awareness of its relation to its own longer religious tradition. Claiming its rightful place within the religious realm of the society, the denomination differs from movement, sect, and other “cause” impulses. As a community, the denomination is an organized religious movement. With its own, often distinctive polity, it intends its self-perpetuation, expects supportive efforts from leaders and people, labors to attract and retain members, funds its operations, aligns itself politically and socially with kindred movements, and determines how best to face various American publics. As such, the denomination provides its members self-designation, identity, agenda, calendar, place in American politics, societal locale, historical narrative, internal ordering, and religious affiliation. To some observers, the denomination is taboo or curse.
Their public outreach and self-understandings have led denominations to function in different ways in the American environment (as have political parties, the press, and commerce). Successively, denominations have served as affinity groups, missionary societies, confessional bodies, corporate organizations, campaign causes, and electronic communities. In these several forms and with the above characterization, the denomination differentiates itself from reform impulses that may take similar structural form but construe themselves as belonging within a religion; from an established church, which does not regard itself as voluntary or as sharing societal space with other legitimate religious bodies; and from the sect, which, though also voluntary, does not locate itself easily in time or recognize boundaries or tolerate other bodies or concede their authenticity.
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Ecology and Religious Environmentalism in the United States
Rebecca Kneale Gould and Laurel Kearns
Any discussion of ecology, environment, and religion in America rightly begins with the American landscape itself. It also properly begins with a reflection on the terms and metaphors that have been used to describe it. Although the term ecology was not coined until the mid-19th century, it is a preferred starting term in the sense that it denotes integrated natural systems within which humans are just one species among many. The word environment, however, is a particularly fitting term for any 21st-century discussion of religion and nature in America, for it frequently implies the conceptual separation of humans from the biophysical world, a separation often driven by economic interests and technological hubris whose consequences are strongly reverberating in the environmental injustices and climate change impacts we are facing today.
This inquiry into the relationship between religion, nature, ecology, and environment necessarily includes the use of all three of these terms, all of which are contested—as is religion—and require nuance and attention to context when they are deployed. Throughout this article, all three of these terms are used somewhat interchangeably, but with attention to the shades of meaning that differentiate them, as well as to the religious, cultural, and political contexts that shape who uses what kind of language and to what purpose.
We understand the history of “religion and ecology/environment” in America as having two dominant strands: (1) a broad, spiritual reverence for nature as inherently sacred, and (2) 20th-century forms of religiously based environmental action and concern. The first, the story of spiritual reverence for nature, has its roots in colonial worldviews, garnered broad enthusiasm in the mid-19th century and continues to flourish today in 21st-century nature writing and in environmental organizations and activism at all levels. The second dominant strand in the history of “religion and the environment” in America is that of environmental concern that is explicitly and unapologetically religiously based. It is this second strand that is the focus of this article. Nevertheless, the broader historical context of the varied, contested meanings of nature in America—including the notion of nature itself as the source of the sacred—is ever present in how religious environmentalism is articulated and negotiated. The many forms of religious environmentalism that have developed since the 1960s are as diverse, complex, varied, and nuanced as religious America itself. In its more liberal Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish forms, religious environmentalism is often grounded in the social justice concerns and activism of earlier periods, particularly in the civil rights movements of the late 1960s and 1970s and in various Social Gospel campaigns from the early 20th century through the 1940s. Much religious environmentalist activism whether at the congregational, denominational, or national level is clearly rooted in earlier, religiously grounded social reform movements, but extends the conceptual reach of these reforms to include both the health of nature itself and the many ways in which environmental degradation directly impacts human health and well-being, often disproportionally along race, class, and gender lines.
More conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, however, have also become increasingly engaged with environmental threats, both in terms of their own history of attention to social justice and in terms of seeing the natural world as God’s creation and, as such, requiring the care and respect of humans who are created “in the image of God.” Using the language of stewardship and “creation care” and emphasizing the necessity of humility in relationship to God and God’s creations, many religious conservatives who may resist the term “environmentalist” have become actively involved in environmental advocacy with particular attention to the growing climate crisis. Their work has included collaborating with religiously liberal groups in direct lobbying for policy changes, a development that has surprised those who assume that environmental advocacy is only a concern of political and religious liberals.
As more recent immigrants have established themselves in the United States, new voices of religious environmentalism have emerged. These include the perspectives of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Sikh citizens who have brought their own perspectives on environmental concerns to the fore, often developing ideas of nature and forms of environmental activism that are both grounded in their landscapes and cultures of origin and reimagined in an American context. Meanwhile, environmental activism and organizing has continued to emerge from indigenous tribes for whom the sacredness of nature has always been central to their spiritual identities. In many cases, this activism has been directed toward protecting endangered species (who are understood to be kin), combating climate change and resisting petroleum industries that are ravaging sacred lands.
When viewed in historical perspective, religious environmentalism both reflects and sheds new light on the larger story of religion(s) in America of which it is a part. Religious environmentalism continues to wrestle with the legacies of the assumptions about nature that colonial settlers brought with them, even while trying to overcome those legacies. In addition, while religious environmentalism is most obviously a religious response to threats to the natural world, clearly concern for nature is always deeply intertwined with concern for human flourishing. The task of much religious environmentalism is often to clarify the extent to which human welfare and the welfare of nature are profoundly linked. Religious environmentalism, then, is necessarily shaped by larger questions about what kind of nature is being valued, in what ways, for what reasons, and by whom. Such questions are invariably tied to larger issues of identity and cultural power, especially—but certainly not exclusively—in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion. Finally, to the extent that American religion has been challenged, revitalized, and transformed by the long history of immigration and the ever-shifting effects of religious pluralism, so too has American religious environmentalism been shaped by the worldviews of newly arrived Americans. The tensions and negotiations inherent in the ways that religious environmentalism is expressed, therefore, often echo the broader tensions and negotiations of American religious identity that are familiar to historians of American religion. Attention to these tensions and negotiations is central to the narrative developed here.
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Emotion in American Religions
John Corrigan
Emotion is an important part of religions in America. There is great diversity among emotional styles. Some groups are highly emotional, others relatively low in emotional expression, and some occupy a middle ground. Religious life is characterized by cultivation and expression of many emotions. Four that are of particular importance for Americans are wonder, empathy, anticipation, and the feeling of emptiness. Some emotions are treated as commodities. The study of emotion in religion enables fresh perspectives on the interwovenness of emotion, religion, and culture. The investigation of the emotional lives of religious persons in America can be advanced through study of persons’ reporting of their experiences alongside research bearing on cultural expectations for emotional life.
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The Eruv as Contested Jewish Space in North America
Myer Siemiatycki
The eruv is perhaps the most creative, confounding, and contested spatial construct in Judaism. Territorially, it demarcates the urban space within which prohibitions otherwise attached to Sabbath observance for Orthodox Jews become permitted. While virtually imperceptible to the human eye, eruvin (pl.) sanctify what would otherwise be sacrilegious. An eruv thus creates permissive religious space for Jews on Sabbath. Hundreds of cities worldwide, including urban areas across North America, are home to an eruv. Notwithstanding their prevalence and undetectable physical imprint on urban landscapes, the establishment of eruvin has unleashed intense hostility and resistance in some locales. Opposition has typically been mounted by a surprisingly mixed array of critics including non-Jews, non-Orthodox Jews, and dissenting Orthodox Jews. The eruv highlights, in compelling fashion, the spatial challenges of navigating faith, ritual, secularism, and pluralism in contemporary American cities. Seemingly ethereal religious beliefs can occasion radically different perceptions of public space.
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Estevanico de Dorantes
Hsain Ilahiane
One of the most fascinating, and least understood, men in the history of the American Southwest was the Moroccan “slave” known as Estevanico de Dorantes in sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of New Spain. Estevanico was one of the four survivors of the Pànfilo de Narváez expedition, which sailed from Spain in 1527 with the objective of conquering Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. The survivors were stranded on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and soon captured by Native Americans. After eight years of slavery, the expedition members escaped and traveled west, across western Texas, through the southwestern borderlands, and arrived in Culiacán, Mexico, in the spring of 1536. Three years later, Estevanico led the first Spanish expedition to Zuni lands and was the first Moroccan and African and non-Native American to set foot in what became Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. In the sixteenth century, Portugal occupied Morocco. Famine drove thousands of Moroccans to Spain and Portugal in various forms of servitude. The inhabitants of Azemmour—Estevanico’s home on the Atlantic coast—received permission from the Portuguese king, Don Manuel, to emigrate to Spain. People left Morocco in search of a better life in the Iberian Peninsula. This suggests that Estevanico might have emigrated as a servant, an indentured laborer, or an employee in search of economic opportunities. He may not have been a slave at all but instead a political or economic refugee since the Azemmouri people sided with the Portuguese invaders. Despite Estevanico’s role in Spain’s age of exploration and imperialism in the Americas, historical accounts are silent about him except to note that he was a slave who accompanied Fray Marcos De Niza on his travels through the American Southwest. Nevertheless, Estevanico remains an important figure in the social history of Pueblo Native Americans.
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Evangelism, Mission, and Crusade in American Religion
Sarah Ruble
Evangelism, mission, and crusade are terms related to spreading a religious message. Although all three words are primarily used in relation to Christianity, evangelism and mission have been applied to activities by traditions other than Christianity and, indeed, to secular actors, including nations. In the context of American religion, evangelism, mission, and crusade are activities through which people have contested and defined national identity and distinguished between the “foreign” and “domestic” and “us” and “them.” These delineations, even when done through activities ostensibly concerned with religious difference, have often been made on the basis of ethnicity and race. Thus, exploring evangelism, mission, and crusade illumines how notions of religious, racial, ethnic, and national difference have been constructed in relationship to each other. Considering these terms in their U.S. context, then, reveals relationships between religious and national identity, the role of religion in nation-building, and how religious beliefs and practices can both reify and challenge notions of what the nation is and who belongs to it.
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Feeling of Emptiness and Religion in America
John Corrigan
As part of a broader turn in humanities scholarship toward emotion since the late 20th century, scholars of religion increasingly have explored how emotion has been a key component in the lives of religious Americans. The relation of emotion to religious ideas has been particularly important in this nascent scholarship. In exploring how emotions and religious ideas are intertwined, scholars have focused on emotions such as love, melancholy, fear, and anger, among others. However, for reasons having to do with the historiography of American religion, as well as with categories that have governed much academic study of religion in America, the feeling of emptiness, which is so crucial to understanding Buddhism, and other Asian religions, has been underestimated for its role in American religions. In America, the feeling of emptiness plays a central role in religious practice, community formation, and identity construction, among Christians (the religious majority) but also in other religious communities. This essay describes some of the ways in which the feeling of emptiness has been expressed in American religions, and in American culture more generally, comments on how it has been joined to certain ideas at various times, and suggests how it has played a central role in shaping relations between religious groups in a society where religion is disestablished. The approach here is eclectic, blending historical narrative with cultural analysis, and the essay proceeds thematically rather than chronologically. Focusing on the feeling of emptiness allows a fresh perspective on religious practice in America, prompts new questions about belief and community, and enables new lines of interpretation for the development of religious ideas in America. Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and other religious communities in America have distinct ways in which they interpret the feeling of emptiness as a spiritual phenomenon. Religious persons often conceptualize it as an emotional experience of great value. Among Christians, it is important as a sign of an emptying of the self of immorality, distractions, and worldly clutter in preparation for being filled with the grace of God. Accordingly, Christians and others in America have developed spiritual disciplines aimed at cultivating the feeling of emptiness and advancing it to a point where deep longing becomes deep fulfillment. Religious practices involving the body include fasting, which is emptying the body of food, and tears, which empty the body of fluids. Bloodletting is also a notable practice, and, for those who do not cut or otherwise make bloody sacrifice (including war and lynching), bloodletting nevertheless is revered as a model discipline of emptying. There are aspects of sexual practices and the performance of work that also are exercises in self-emptying. All such disciplines are expected to prompt and enrich the feeling of emptiness. The severe fast, the deep feeling of emptiness, the desperate longing, the distancing from God becomes, paradoxically, a drawing closer to God. From the earliest settlement of North America, white Europeans and their descendants constructed the emptiness of the land to match the emptiness of their souls. Americans claimed to feel space. They expressed the spiritual feeling of emptiness in ideas about North America as a barren desert, crying to be filled by colonists and their descendants. The Great American Desert, a fiction created in the early 19th century, was one way in which Americans continued to imagine space as empty and themselves, as God’s exceptional nation, as the agents of fullness. American fascination with millennialism was a valorization of the fullness of eternity over the emptiness of history. Millennial movements and communities in America felt time as they did space, and when American Christians felt historical time they felt its emptiness. Americans have constructed elaborate and richly detailed depictions of the end as they look forward to a time when empty time will become eternity, fullness. Christian groups in America, populated by persons who cultivate emptiness, have defined themselves largely by saying what they are not. Both persons and communities, invested in the feeling of emptiness, mark personal and collective boundaries not by projecting into the social world a pristine essence of doctrine so much as by pushing off from other groups. Committed to emptiness, there is little to project, so the construction of identity takes place as an identification of Others. Such a process sometimes leads to the demonization of others and the production of identity through the inventorying of enemies.
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Film and Religion in America
Eric Michael Mazur
Religion intersects with film not only in film content, but also in the production and experience of film. From the earliest period, religious attitudes have shaped how religious individuals and communities have approached filmmaking as way to present temptation or salvation to the masses. Individual religious communities have produced their own films or have sought to monitor those that have been mass produced. To avoid conflict, filmmakers voluntarily agreed to self-monitoring, which had the effect of strongly shaping how religious figures and issues were presented. The demise of this system of self-regulation reintroduced conflict over film content as it expanded the ways in which religious figures and issues were presented, but it also shifted attention away from the religious identity of the filmmakers. Built on a foundation of “reading” symbolism in “art” films, and drawing from various forms of myth—the savior, the end of the world, and others—audiences became more comfortable finding in films religious symbolism that was not specifically associated with a specific religious community. Shifts in American religious demographics due to immigration, combined with the advent of the videocassette and the expansion of global capitalism, broadened (and improved) the representation of non-Christian religious themes and issues, and has resulted in the narrative use of non-Christian myths. Experimentation with sound and image has broadened the religious aspect of the film experience and made it possible for the viewing of film to replicate for some a religious experience. Others have broadened the film-viewing experience into a religious system. While traditional film continues to present traditional religions in traditional ways, technology has radically individualized audio-visual production, delivery, and experience, making film, like religion, and increasingly individualized phenomenon.
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Film Regulation and the Church in America
William D. Romanowski
Since the dawn of the cinema at the turn of the 20th century, the church and its vicissitudes have been an essential part of the Hollywood story. There is a basic affinity between film and religion; both propagate values and offer visions of life that can—and often do—rival one another. For that reason, religious leaders have always been wary of Hollywood’s effect on the moral and religious character of the nation and its influence around the world. The film industry evolved in tandem with the church and other social institutions as it became integrated into society as a legitimate art. Negotiations with Hollywood were complex as church leaders sought to resolve enduring tensions between profits and the public welfare, freedom and control, art and entertainment, morality and marketing.
Approaches to the cinema embody deeply held religious principles held in some tension. The one stresses freedom of expression and individual conscience; the other a concern with protecting the church and the moral and religious character of American society. Various perspectives that are rooted in different theological-cultural traditions exist along a spectrum. At one end is an emphasis on the individual as the genesis of social change; at the other is a concern with transforming institutions that influence and govern people’s lives. These two tendencies, which are not mutually exclusive, find expression both within religious groups and between them.
In the history of Hollywood-church relations, Protestants favored industry reforms to protect individual liberty and the common good based on a shared recognition of the need for self-restraint and public responsibility. While Protestants stressed the individual conscience in movie matters, Catholics emphasized ecclesiastical authority. Proscribed film viewing and production oversight were deemed necessary to develop the individual conscience and protect parishioners from false ideas and immorality. Evangelicals, in turn, utilized film to evangelize and expected to restrain film production with highly publicized protests and a demonstrable consumer demand for family-friendly movies. Though motivated by different goals and perspectives, these strategies are all in some measure attempts to fuse moral and religious principles with democratic values and market realities: persistent dynamics traceable from the origins of the cinema to contemporary debates.
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Freemasonry’s Sacred Space in America
Phillip Gordon Mackintosh
American Freemasonry is as much a spatial as sacred practice. Emerging from arcane Enlightenment origins, Masonic theology and practice brim with a spatiality representative of Masonry’s compulsion to make men moral. Moral masculinity reflects in Freemasonry’s “sacred space,” Masonic geography fixed with symbols vital to the moral, social, and spiritual growth of potential and actual Freemasons.
Masons have routinely embedded sacred geography in architecture from stylish Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian “temples,” to humble lodges occupying multi-use back rooms or above street-level shops. Masonic historical preoccupation with spatiality evokes Victorian faith in moral environmentalism: the impulse to effect virtuous and civil behavior through orderly manipulations of environment. Indeed, the dedicated employment in the lodge of Masonic furniture and furnishings loosely mimics the Victorian middle-class parlor’s preoccupation with order, design, and moral aesthetics. Masons call this ritual and allegorical décor the lodge’s form, support, covering, furniture, ornaments, lights, and jewels. Such furnishings figure in Masonry’s performance of rituals, and, together, they both produce sacred space in the lodge and substantiate the rites’ moral masculine transformation of Masonic candidate and Mason alike.
Masonic spatiality includes a waning penchant for racial and sexual apartheid, originating in early modern American misapprehensions of biology, anthropology, and gender. Accordingly, “black” Masons have attended separate lodges. Prince Hall Freemasonry has existed since the late 18th century and is named for its eponymous founder, although “black” Masons join “white” lodges today. Women Masons or “matrons” are initiated in an appendant Christian rite: the Order of the Eastern Star, which includes a Prince Hall form, was developed for evangelical Protestant women followers of Jesus intentionally to distract them from the deism of the men’s rituals in a milieu of 19th century Christian anti-Masonry.
Recognizing the lodge as sacred space contributes to its existence as sacred “place.” Thus, the lodge-as-place becomes a “sacred retreat” for Masons who dwell outside its precincts.
Article
Gender and Public Religion in America
Stephanie Y. Mitchem
With rapid development, academically and socially, in the past sixty years, gender and public religion in the United States have become a separate field, even as it is integrated into others such as politics, biology, law, philosophy, and cultural studies. As ideas about gender have expanded, potential conflicts with established religions have sometimes occurred even as new theologies, ethical constructs, and even new strains of religion occur.