God Optional Religion In Twentieth Century America

"This book is about the relationship between the American religious left and secularization. It explores how three liberal religions -liberal Quakers, Unitarians, and Reconstructionist Jews- attempted to preserve their traditions in the modern world by redefining what it meant to be religious. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, these groups underwent the most massive theological change imaginable, allowing their members to opt not to believe in a personal God. As the God of traditional theism did not seem to fit into a post-Darwinian framework, these traditions took the dramatic step of redefining that concept to make a "God" that did fit, and eventually they went even further by making belief in God a matter of purely personal preference. This book narrates how, over the course of the twentieth century, believing in God and being religious became increasingly disconnected. It documents the continuance of these religious communities even after the theological rationales that originally brought them together disappeared, their communal identities instead becoming focused on humanitarian service and political commitments, which began to replace a shared adherence to theism. The radical religious views of these small liberal denominations became influential among the wider society, and eventually became accepted in American popular culture and law"--

Covering Protestant, Hindu, Jewish, New Age, Mormon, Buddhist, Roman Catholic, and many other faiths, Religion in Twentieth Century America is a dynamic look at religion in America through two World Wars, vast industrialization, the civil rights movement, and massive immigration. Included are crucial moments, such as: * The appointment of Louis Brandeis, a Jew, to the U.S. Supreme Court * The contentious court trial of John T. Scopes, which dramatized the debate over Darwinism * The extraordinary rise of evangelist Billy Graham at mid-century * The Presbyterian church's decision to ordain women *The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. *The federal government's decision to attack the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. With a chronology, index, and suggestions for further reading following, these momentous events and others are tied together in an absorbing narrative in Religion in Twentieth Century America, providing an illuminating guide to the complex issues of 21st-century religion

As recently as a few decades ago, most people would have described America as a predominantly Protestant nation. Today, we are home to a colorful mix of religious faiths and practices, from a resurgent Catholic Church and a rapidly growing Islam to all forms of Buddhism and many other non-Christian religions. How did this startling transformation take place? A great many factors contributed to this transformation, writes Amanda Porterfield in this engaging look at religion in contemporary America. Religious activism, disillusionment with American culture stemming from the Vietnam war, the influx of Buddhist ideas, a heightened consciousness of gender, and the vastly broadened awareness of non-Christian religions arising from the growth of religious studies programs--all have served to undermine Protestant hegemony in the United States. But the single most important factor, says Porterfield, was the very success of Protestant ways of thinking: emphasis on the individual's relationship with God, tension between spiritual life and religious institutions, egalitarian ideas about spiritual life, and belief in the practical benefits of spirituality. Distrust of religious institutions, for instance, helped fuel a religious counterculture--the tendency to define spiritual truth against the dangers or inadequacies of the surrounding culture--and Protestantism's pragmatic view of spirituality played into the tendency to see the main function of religion as therapeutic. For anyone interested in how and why the American religious landscape has been so dramatically altered in the last forty years, The Transformation of Religion in America offers a coherent and persuasive analysis.

This volume studies the persistence, complexity, and fragility of religious thought in the intellectual environment of the modern period.

Religious pluralism has characterized America almost from its seventeenth-century inception, but the past half century or so has witnessed wholesale changes in the religious landscape. Gods in America brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explain the historical roots of these phenomena and assess their impact on modern American society.

Vol. 1: The Irony of it all, 1893-1919; Vol. 2: The Noise of conflict, 1919-1941.

A panoramic introduction to religion in America, newly revised and updated