The first part of this article deals with religion in the United States in the context of American exceptionalism. At least since Tocqueville, observers have noted that a distinctive national characteristic of the United States is its religious vitality. In addition to commonly cited aspects of religious activism, it is also argued here that this exceptional vitality is reflected in the periodical mass or public renewals of the religious life and, stemming from Puritanism, in the diffusion of religious elements to other social contexts. A second theme presented in this article is that the three major religious orientations—Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—not only fill an important niche as providers of social identity but also have found in the United States an exceptional historical setting.
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References
1.
1. Zaki Laïdi, “Sens et puissance dans le système international,” in L'ordre mondial relâché: Sens et puissance après la guerre froide, ed. Zaki Laïdi (Paris: Presses de la Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques & Berg, 1992).
2.
For a broad overview of utopian and fundamentalist movements as alternate visions of “Axial-Age civilizations” such as ours, see S. N. Eisenstadt, “Fundamentalism, Phenomenology and Comparative Dimensions,” in Fundamentalisms Compared (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), vol. 5.
3.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1969).
4.
4. Ibid., 1:46-47. Tocqueville may be seen as an early critic of secularization theory, which in the 1960s argued that with the development of modernity and its rational structures, religion would become increasingly vestigial in the public sphere. Based on his observations in America, Tocqueville chided the early formulators of that theory, the Enlightenment “philosophes” who argued that “religious zeal... was bound to die down as enlightenment and freedom spread.” Ibid., 1:295.
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5. “European Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately united with the powers of this world. Now that these powers are falling, it is as if it were buried under their ruins.” Ibid., 1:301.
6.
6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribners, 1958), p. 181.
7.
7. “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1906), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford Galaxy, 1958), p. 302. The “recent Europeanization” Weber mentions refers, of course, to the influx of non-Northern, non-Protestant Europeans who began coming in great numbers in the 1880s. Their impact on American institutions and ultimately on American democracy led to a great anxiety in Protestant religious circles and became a stimulus of the Social Gospel movement, which Weber does not seem to have observed.
8.
8. Ibid., p. 307.
9.
9. “Closer scrutiny revealed the steady progress of the characteristic process of `secularization,' to which in modern times all phenomena that originated in religious conceptions succumb.” Ibid. One must keep in mind that Weber's fin de siècle Europe, at least the urban industrial centers, had for the most part undergone the transformation aptly discussed in Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
10.
10. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1905-6), ed. C. T. Husbands, trans. Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands (White Plains, NY: International Arts & Sciences Press, 1976), p. 14.
11.
11. For a useful critical discussion, see the introductory essay by C. T. Husbands in Why Is There No Socialism? pp. xv-xxxvii. Some of the factors advanced by Sombart, such as the social mobility of American workers and their ability to acquire property, making them feel part of the system, unlike the situation of European workers, had already been advanced by Tocqueville, who is not mentioned by Sombart.
12.
Gary W. Marks , Union in Politics: Britain, Germany and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), chap. 6.
13.
See also his follow-up study, Imperalism and the Rise of Labour, rev. ed. (London: Ernest Benn, 1951).
14.
14. This has been repeatedly documented. See, for example, Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 6-15.
15.
For a lucid overview of the case for American exceptionalism by a leading comparative scholar, see Seymour Martin Lipset, “American Exceptionalism Reaffirmed,” in Is America Different? ed. Byron E. Shafer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 1-45.
16.
Andrew M. Greeley , “American Exceptionalism: The Religious Phenomenon,” in Is America Different? ed. Shafer, pp. 94-115.
17.
Rodney Stark, “Do Catholic Societies Really Exist?” ibid., 4:261-71 (July 1992); Mark Chaves and David E. Cann, “Regulation, Pluralism, and Religious Market Structure: Explaining Religion's Vitality,” ibid., pp. 272-90; Raymond Boudon, “The Understanding of Religious Vitality Needs Additional Factors,” ibid., 4:467-76 (Oct. 1992).
18.
18. For quantitative and qualitative aspects of denominational switching, which is particularly noteworthy among Protestants, see Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 162-177.
19.
19. Edward A. Tiryakian, “Puritan America in the Modern World: Mission Impossible?”Sociological Analysis, 43(4):351-367 (1982).
20.
For the controversy regarding the reality of cyclical awakenings, see the various pieces in Sociological Analysis, vol. 44 (Summer 1983).
21.
21. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, p. 19.
22.
22. A masterful discussion of this in terms of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century is Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), bk. 1.
23.
Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
24.
24. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1956).
25.
25. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955; new rev. ed., Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1960).
26.
26. Ibid., p. 211.
27.
27. On the debit side, see the criticisms of John Wilson, Religion in American Society: The Effective Presence (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), pp. 310-312. In addition, Herberg made no discussion of Islam in America, but in recent years it has become problematic as to whether in the United States—or in Europe, for that matter—the Islamic community can attain parity as an “equi-legitimate subdivision” of society. Can one, for example, see Islamic holidays publicly recognized or imams asked to give the invocation at commencement ceremonies of Ivy League schools? On the plus side, Herberg's study would suggest as a research topic that various immigrant groups have higher levels of socioreligious participation in the United States than that of their immediate kin in the country of origin. If this were empirically validated, it would cast further doubt on the assumption that modernization and secularization are collinear.
28.
28. For a more detailed discussion of the distinctive condition of each major religious community in the United States, see E. A. Tiryakian, “L'exceptionnelle vitalité religieuse aux Etats-Unis: Une Relecture de Protestant-Catholic-Jew,”Social Compass, 38:224-234 (Sept. 1991).
29.
29. For the purpose of the argument, I include the Anglican Church and its later Episcopalian derivative as part of the Protestant orientation in America.
30.
30. Talcott Parsons, “Introduction,” in The Sociology of Religion, by Max Weber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
31.
31. Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic, 1963).
32.
32. See, for example, Lester R. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
33.
Mission and Context (Glenmary Research Center), 3:2-3 (Summer 1992).
34.
34. Andrew M. Greeley, The American Catholic (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
35.
Karl Schriftgiesser , This Was Normalcy: An Account of Party Politics during Twelve Republican Years, 1920-1932 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).
36.
For a general discussion of Jews and America in the present context, see Seymour Martin Lipset, “A Unique People in an Exceptional Country,” in American Pluralism and the Jewish Community, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990).
37.
37. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:622-623.
38.
38. Indicative is a Masonic statement of 1823 that declares, “ `To the Jewish nation we are indebted for all that is ancient, judicious and distinct in Masonry. From them under the great IAM, we derive all we know of the history of man and the will of Heaven.' ” Cited in Dorothy Anne Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 183.
39.
39. Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture 1880-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 69-70.
40.
40. See, for example, William R. Hutchinson, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
41.
41. Stephen R. Graubard, “Preface,”Political Pharmacology: Thinking about Drugs, vol. 121, Daedalus, p. vi. (Summer 1992).
