Religion%20and%20Society%20in%20America

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Religion and Society in America

• The Transformation of American Religious Life
• Week 9 Lecture 2

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The Transformation of American Religious Life

• Thinking About Americas Religious Past
• Issues Raised in Porterfields Transformation of
  American Religion
• Final Questions

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Thinking About Americas Religious Past

• How would you characterize religious life in
  America?
• Is or can America be understood as a religious
  nation?
• If so, what kind of religious expression?
• What is the relationship between individual
  religious expression and communal commitments?

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• 1950s - 60s Growth of Post-Protestant America
• Internal Critique Tolerance escapes doctrinal
  issues
• Example Evangelical conservative, Carl F. H.
  Henry argued, The New Testament upholds specific
  doctrinal affirmations as indispensable to
  genuine Christian confession. He further
  asserted, The modernist tendency to link
  Christian love, tolerance, and liberty with
  theological inclusivism is therefore
  discredited. In other words, modernists pleas
  for religious tolerance were basically a
  strategic device for evading the question of
  doctrinal fidelity.

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• 1950s - 60s Growth of Post-Protestant America
• Internal Critique Christian realists argue
  that liberal theology is venturing into areas it
  was unintended to frequent (psychotherapy,
  Eastern mysticism, etc.)
• Realists argue the results will be a Christianity
  that is diffuse, plastic, and humanistic in its
  own conceptions of Christianity

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• 1950s - 60s Growth of Post-Protestant America
• Internal Critique Liberal Christianity not
  necessarily sentiment or focused on making
  Christian living easy (example Harry Emerson
  Fosdick)
• Pragmatic, up-by-the-bootstraps emphasis
  concerning lifes ethical questions
• Norman Vincent Peales The Power of Positive
  Thinking (1952) You can Win.
• This attitude often found expression in secular
  and psychological terms

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• External forces Vietnam War and a historically
  parallel disenchantment with western ideas/social
  forces in 1960s leads to the spread of eastern
  religions in U.S.
• Beat Zen of Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Jack
  Kerouac and others helped with the diffusion of
  Buddhists ideas in American culture
• Buddhism leveraged out of traditional monastic
  settings in U.S.

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• Deeper External forces Growing disenchantment
  and disillusionment with traditional western
  religion and its anthropological claims
• 1960s witnessed a deconstruction of notions of
  selfhood associated with American individualism
• Immolations were visible forms of Buddhist
  expression which addressed these profound
  existential sufferings

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• Zen Buddhism at one level is extremely goal
  oriented meditation is satori, or enlightenment
• The emergence of Buddhism in the United States
  developed in relationship to competing forms of
  personalism associated with Christian theology
• Dalai Lama in 1990s publishes The Art of
  Happiness which he asserts The very motion of
  our life is towards happiness.

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• External forces Conceptions of gender and its
  relationship to society breed a form of
  self-consciousness that is detached from
  religious claims
• First generation of feminists in America claimed
  equal rights, suffrage, social equality, and
  right to contribute to society because of
  God-given moral instincts inherent in their nature

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• Later generations of feminists would reject these
  types of naturalist arguments in order to
  attain reforms by arguing womanhood was a
  social construction
• Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystic (1963)
  popularized this assertion
• In light of this new development or perspective,
  religious claims were examined because religion
  deals with the limits of human experience and
  humane behavior and transcending those limits.

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• Rosemary Radford Ruether, for example, led the
  way in focusing this new critique on the
  Christian Church, holding up an egalitarian model
  of Church and arguing the virtue and integrity of
  any religion could be measured by its promotion
  of a womans full humanity

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• External forces Academic study of religion
  promotes idea or understanding of religion as a
  universal phenomenon, which in turn, advances an
  appreciation of non-Protestant and non-Western
  traditions
• Democratic forces at work which call into
  question the structure, not necessarily the
  content, of religious claims
• Tendency to divorce of religious experience from
  moral virtue

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• Traditional Christian theology becomes
  reconfigured in light of these changes
• Example Paul Tillich argues that sin was
  existential estrangement, not violation of
  ones neighbor, disobedience to God, or
  transgression of moral law
• Such tendency toward personal introspection,
  helped traditional western religious claims lead
  to what Christopher Lasch has described a
  culture of narcissism which devalues others
  through its lack of curiosity and impoverishes
  ones personal life

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Porterfields Transformation of American Religion

• Fusion of spiritual idealism and pragmatic
  concern in American religious thought and
  expression more and more became detached from its
  Protestant base in America which has fueled
  individualistic expressions of religious life
  void of metaphysical speculation

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Final Questions ????