Some Measures of the Scale of Pretendianism in the United States

The American Historical Review, 1978

THAT RELIGION AND ETHNICITY ARE INTERTWINED in modern urban and industrial societies is obvious, but the nature of this relationship and how it developed is not yet clear.' Recent studies of the religious aspects of cultural and social systems, particularly by anthropologists, have not yet freed historians from traditional notions about religion and ethnicity. Historians continue to believe that ethnicity is a synonym for nationality and that the religious and ethnic sentiments of immigrant minorities are anachronisms that must give way to the processes of modernization and assimilation.2 Although most European languages make it possible to use one word for what in English requires two-"nation" and "people"-ethnicity and nationality are-not the same thing. Nationality is established by citizenship. Such varied modern states as Great Britain, Spain, the United States, Brazil, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, China, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa have brought under one government several peoples. The sense of peoplehood, moreover, which I take to be the essence of ethnicity, and the social structures that sustain it may flourish without reference to political nationhood at all, as until recently was the case for Jews, Gypsies, Sikhs, and American blacks.3 In the late nineteenth century many observers expected the sense of nationhood to replace that of peoplehood, either through the "melting pot" as in the This essay originated as one of six addresses on "Ihe American Experience," delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., December 28-30, 1976 in celebration of the United States bicentennial. Three of these addresses-by Arthur Schlesinger, jr., Robert Kelley, and C. Vann Woodward-were published previously in the bicentennial issue of the American Historical Review in

Sacred Tribes Journal, 2008

Religious Myths and Visions of America: How Minority Faiths Redefined America’s World Role, 2009

Buck, Christopher. Religious Myths and Visions of America: How Minority Faiths Redefined America’s World Role. Santa Barbara, CA/Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2009 (now Bloomsbury Publishing). Hardbound edition. ISBN: 978-0-313-35959-0. e-ISBN: 978-0-313-35960-6. 325 pp. (Release date: April 30, 2009.) Description At the heart of American studies is the idea of America itself. Here, Buck looks at the religious significance of America by examining those religions that have attached some kind of spiritual meaning to America. The author explores how American Protestantism—and nine minority faiths—have projected America into the mainstream of world history by defining—and by redefining—America’s world role. Surveying the religious myths and visions of America of ten religions, Buck shows how minority faiths have redefined America’s sense of national purpose. This book invites serious reflection on what it means to be an American, particularly from a religious perspective. Religious myths of America are thought-orienting narratives that serve as vehicles of spiritual and social truths about the United States itself. Religious visions of America are action-oriented agendas that articulate the goals to which America should aspire and the role it should play in the community of nations. Buck examines the distinctive perspectives held by ten religious traditions that inform and expand on the notion of America, and its place in the world. He covers Native American, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Christian Identity, Black Muslim, Islamic, Buddhist, and Baha’i beliefs and invites serious reflection on what it means to be an American, particularly from a religious perspective. Libraries Worldwide: Total (print & eBook editions): 1,050 Libraries (in 3 editions). [WorldCat, June 17, 2023.] “Held by Big Ten Academic Alliance.” See http://www.amazon.com/Religious-Myths-Visions-America-Redefined/dp/0313359598. (Open Access: “Access free” on Internet Archive.) Reviews • Journal of American History 98.1 (June 2011): 279–280. Review by Richard Kyle (Tabor College): “Religious Myths and Visions of America has many strengths. The author has defended his thesis with solid research. He has also made an original contribution to American studies.” • Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15.3 (February 2012): 139–141. Review by Irén E. Annus (University of Szeged, Hungary): “This volume may be of interest to readers involved not only in Religious Studies, but also in Political Science, History, Intellectual History, American Studies, and Cultural Studies. … In the course of the detailed and well-documented analysis of individual religions, Buck reveals a highly elaborate and in-depth picture of the various beliefs, which is indeed impressive. … He argues that the original myth and vision of America as a nation was captured by the Protestant notion of manifest destiny. This has been challenged by the other faiths … that have transformed the idea of manifest destiny into America’s common destiny. … The book is overall a fresh and stimulating cultural reading of some of America’s religions and the complex ways in which their followers make sense of and act in the world.” [Electronic Database (full text available): ATLA Religion Database; JSTOR.] • Multicultural Review 18.4 (Winter 2009): 66. Review by Vladimir F. Wertsman (New York Public Library): “This interesting, thoroughly researched scholarly study examines how ten minor religions interpreted America’s reality (“nation and notion”) and generated numerous religious myths and visions of America. … [t]his volume is certainly a welcome addition to the topic of racial, cultural, and ethnic studies. … Recommended for comparative ethnic and religion collections.”

Social Forces, 2012

O ur original article espoused a simple way to recode religious groups on the General Social Survey (GSS) into historically meaningful categories and attempted to steer social scientists away from assigning these groups to a "Liberal-Moderate-Conservative" scale (Smith 1990). Among other problems, such scales create arbitrary cutpoints, have little to do with the historical movements that gave rise to particular religious affiliations and tend to conflate religious, economic, social and political ideas into one monolithic measure. In contrast, we assigned Protestants to mainline, evangelical and Black Protestant categories. In 12 short years, our classificatory system (RELTRAD) has become the standard way to code GSS affiliation data and has been utilized in many other survey efforts. Since its publication, no competing classificatory schemes have emerged to replace it. This article extends our earlier work and raises a series of theoretical and methodological issues for consideration by scholars in efforts to classify religious groups for analysis purposes. Theoretical and Measurement Issues The Concept "Evangelical" Although the original article distinguished between Evangelical and Mainline Protestantism, scholars have not universally used the term "evangelical" in their work. The original authors debated the question of what terminology to use for the theologically conservative Protestants not affiliated with Black Protestant denominations: should we follow Green et al. (1996), calling them "evangelicals," or Woodberry and Smith (1998), calling them "conservative Protestants"? The article opted for evangelical. First, this avoids conflating politics with religion by dropping "liberal, moderate and conservative" terms. Focusing on historically identifiable religious traditions still seems optimal a decade later.

2013

Religion Is Raced

Just over fifty years ago, noted sociologist Robert Bellah published a now-classic essay, "Civil Religion in America" (1967). It kicked off a cascade of sociological analysis of religion in American public life and national identity, with the concept making its way into the vocabulary of the political punditry. Thirty years ago, the leading sociologist of religion of his era, Robert Wuthnow, published the enormously influential The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (1988), also an examination of religion in American public life. His analysis, somewhat amended, is generally accepted wisdom in sociology currently, and set the stage for much of the thinking about religious and political "polarization" in contemporary America. These two ideas-"civil religion" and "restructuring"-have been centrally influential concepts for understanding religion in American society over the past half-century. There are ways in which the messages of those two important pieces are antithetical to each other-Bellah's civil religion was understood as reaching across American social and religious divisions to provide a web of religious meanings that could unite Americans in a sense of nationhood. He posited a religion that sacralized the nation and was an expression of, and helped produce, national identity and social cohesion. In contrast, Wuthnow examined the changing nature of divisions within American religion, arguing that they had restructured, especially since the 1960s, from being along confessional lines (e.g., Protestant, Catholic, Jew) to being along a liberal/conservative axis that cut across affiliational categories-such that conservative Protestants have more in common with conservative Catholics than they do with liberal Protestants, for example. Included in Wuthnow's analysis was a chapter on civil religion, in which Wuthnow described

2020

rén E. Annus (University of Szeged, Hungary), Review of Religious Myths and Visions of America: How Minority Faiths Redefined America’s World Role (Santa Barbara, CA/Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2009), Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15.3 (February 2012): 139–141: “This volume may be of interest to readers involved not only in Religious Studies, but also in Political Science, History, Intellectual History, American Studies, and Cultural Studies. . . . In the course of the detailed and well-documented analysis of individual religions, Buck reveals a highly elaborate and in-depth picture of the various beliefs, which is indeed impressive. . . He argues that the original myth and vision of America as a nation was captured by the Protestant notion of manifest destiny. This has been challenged by the other faiths . . . that have transformed the idea of manifest destiny into America’s common destiny. . . The book is overall a fresh and stimulating cultural reading of some of America’s religions and the complex ways in which their followers make sense of and act in the world.” [Electronic Database (full text available): ATLA Religion Database; JSTOR.]

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2013

Religious Studies Review, 2017

Biggar observe, "ample room for reasonable disagreement" (256). But this, too, is a context in which the value of tolerance can safely be accepted, since by definition these are cases where no amount of discussion will determine that one view is superior to another. What should certainly not be assumed is that this collection is thoroughly hostile to religion. As the editors point out, it contains many different voices, some quite welcoming to the role of religion in society and politics. Overall, this is a superb book, full of high-quality contributions that provide both an introduction for newcomers and a state-of-the-art handbook for specialists in these important debates.