Where the Energies Go

Abstract

American religious energies neither disappear nor flow through fixed channels. What William James called “the habitual centres of energy” in an individual have cultural counterparts. In recent decades the centers of energy have increasingly sought channels such as these: the personal, private, and autonomous at the expense of the communal, the public, and the derivative; the accent on meaning at the expense of inherited patterns of belonging; concentration on the local and particular more than the cosmopolitan or ecumenical; concern for practical and affective life accompanied by less devotion to the devotional and intellectual expressions; the feminist as opposed to the male dominated; and attention to separate causes more than to overarching civil commitments. These contrasts are themselves neither absolute nor final; the less stressed center of energy in each case survives but is not currently prevailing or coming to prevail.