Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Breskaya et al., “A Sociology of Religious Freedom”

Here is an interesting looking book from Oxford that explores religious freedom from the perspective of sociology: “A Sociology of Religious Freedom,” by Professors Olga Breskaya and Giuseppe Giordan of the University of Padua and James Richardson of the University of Nevada. I’m looking forward to reading the sections on defining religious freedom, in particular. Here’s the description of the book from the Oxford website:

In recent years, the relevance of religious freedom has spread well beyond academia, becoming a reference point for international relations, multi-level policy development, as well as interfaith negotiations. Meanwhile, scholarship on religious freedom has flourished on the boundaries of sociology, law, comparative politics, history, and theology. This book presents a systematic sociological analysis of religious freedom, bringing together classical sociological theories and empirical perspectives developed during the last three decades. It addresses three major questions involved in any sociology of religious freedom. First: considering its complex and controversial nature, how can religious freedom be defined? Second: what are the recurrent sociological conditions and relevant social perceptions that will foster an understanding of religious freedom in varying political, legal, and socioreligious contexts? And third, what are the mechanisms of social implementation of religious freedom that contribute to making it a fundamental value in a society? Olga Breskaya, Giuseppe Giordan, and James T. Richardson suggest that a sociological definition of religious freedom requires us to take into account historical, philosophical, legal, religious, and political considerations of a given society-and that the social dimensions of religious freedom are as important as the legal ones.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Burge on the American Religious Landscape

For many years, I have profited from the work of political scientist Ryan Burge (Eastern Illinois University). His monographs on the composition of religious groups in the US have been quite valuable, especially when it comes to chronicling the rise of the Nones. He’s always thorough, readable, and insightful. So I’m looking forward to his latest monograph from Oxford University Press, The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future. Oxford will release the book next month. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

At its founding, the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant country. However, over the last 250 years, it has become increasingly diverse with tens of millions of Catholics, millions of Latter-day Saints, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews, alongside a rapidly increasing share of Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all. 

The American Religious Landscape uses an in-depth statistical analysis of large datasets to answer foundational questions about this diversity, such as: How many Hindus are there in the US? Which state has the highest concentration of Muslims? Are atheists more highly educated than the general population? How many Roman Catholics attend Mass weekly? It focuses on the overall size, geographic distribution, and demographic composition of twelve different religious groups in short and accessible chapters that, taken together, serve as a basic introduction to the state of religion in America. Through dozens of charts, graphs, and maps–designed for readability and clarity–readers will be left with a solid understanding of the contours of contemporary American religion and what it could look like in the future.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

On Wokism and Cultural Contradictions

For about 10 years now, US institutions have aggressively advocated for social justice. As many have observed, the “wokism” behind these efforts is itself a new civil religion, one that promises to succeed in promoting equality where the old civil religion of Americanism failed. A new book from Princeton University Press argues, though, that wokism has actually worked against the socially disadvantaged and marginalized and, ironically, has aided in the rise of a new elite of symbolic capitalists. The book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi (Stony Brook). Looks interesting. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.

A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

On Tocqueville and “Double Secularization”

Regular readers of the Forum know of our interest in Tocqueville, the French visitor whose nineteenth-century observations about religion the United States in the nineteenth century remain relevant today. So we were very interested to see a forthcoming collection of essays to be released by Routledge this summer, and edited by two friends of the Center, Dutch scholars Sophie van Bijsterveld (Radboud University) and Hans-Martien ten Napel (Leiden University): Culture, Secularization and Democracy: Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville. The book explores the “double secularization” that the West has experienced since Tocqueville–the decline in organized Christianity and the abandonment of classical political philosophy–and the effect ithas had on our democracy. Looks very interesting indeed. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Following the approach developed by Alexis de Tocqueville, this volume views democracy as a cultural phenomenon. It starts from the assumption that if we are to adequately address concerns about the current state and future of modern Western democracies, we need first to tackle the cultural preconditions necessary for the functioning of a democracy.

Since Tocqueville’s time, the book takes the most crucial change in the West to be ‘double secularization’. Here, this concerns, first, the diminished influence of organized Christianity. Even though secularity was partly a product of Christianity, secularization is highly significant in terms of the cultural underpinnings of Western democracy. Second, it involves a decreased interest in and knowledge of classical philosophy. Chapters on secularity, family life, civic life, and public spirit focus on central elements of the changed cultural foundation of democracy exploring issues such as identity politics, the public space, and the role of human rights and natural law in a pluralistic and resilient democracy. The volume concludes with a closer look at the implications of current presentism, that is, the view that only the present counts for the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic systems. Finally, it asks if double secularization can also offer fresh opportunities for promoting the conditions of a viable democracy.

The book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Law and Religion, Constitutional Law, Political Science, History and Philosophy.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Culture Wars, 30 Years Later

Thirty years ago, scholar James Davison Hunter coined the phrase, “the culture wars,” to describe American social dynamics at the end of the Cold War. The wars have only intensified–so much so, in fact, that people now use a new term, “polarization,” to describe what is going on. More and more, it seems the Enlightenment settlement between rationalism and Christianity that characterized American culture has unraveled. (Stay tuned for my new Legal Spirits interview with Dan McCarthy, in which we discuss this topic). What will come next? Can America hold together?

Hunter, the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory and executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, has a new book on the subject, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. The publisher is Yale University Press. Anything by Hunter on this subject is self-recommending. Here’s Yale’s description:

The long-developing cultural divisions beneath our present political crisis
 
Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.”
 
James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in this new book that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. The destructive logic that has filled the void only makes bridging our differences more challenging. In the end, all political regimes require some level of unity. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed by force.
 
Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will support liberal democracy in the future?

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on Religion in Modern Ireland

Scholars frequently cite Ireland as an example of rapid secularization–how a country can go, in the space of one or two generations, from identifying strongly with a religion to viewing it with indifference and even hostility. In Ireland’s case, the collapse of Catholicism seems to have been particularly sudden and unanticipated, much like the similar “Quiet Revolution” that took place in Quebec, another overwhelmingly Catholic society, after 1968. A forthcoming collection of essays from Oxford, The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland, addresses this transformation, as well as other phenomena, including the rise of the Irish Nones. The editors are sociologist Gladys Ganiel and historian Andrew R. Holmes, both of Queen’s University Belfast. Here is the publisher’s description:

What does religion mean to modern Ireland and what is its recent social and political history? The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland provides in-depth analysis of the relationships between religion, society, politics, and everyday life on the island of Ireland from 1800 to the twenty-first century. Taking a chronological and all-island approach, it explores the complex and changing role of religion both before and after partition.

The handbook’s thirty-two chapters address long-standing historical and political debates about religion, identity, and politics, including religion’s contributions to division and violence. They also offer perspectives on how religion interacts with education, the media, law, gender and sexuality, science, literature, and memory. Whilst providing insight into how everyday religious practices have intersected with the institutional structures of Catholicism and Protestantism, the book also examines the island’s increasing religious diversity, including the rise of those with ‘no religion’.

Written by leading scholars in the field and emerging researchers with new perspectives, this is an authoritative and up-to-date volume that offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the enduring significance of religion on the island.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Biography of Tocqueville

I tell students in my law-and-religion seminar here at St. John’s, if you want to understand the sociology of religion in the United States, you can’t do better than to start with Tocqueville. Some of his observations are familiar, for example, on the role of voluntary religious associations in helping to check tyranny. Some are not, for example, on the tendency of religion in the United States to lead towards pantheism. All are insightful.

This month, Princeton University Press has released a new biography of the French aristocrat who understood American democracy better than anyone else, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville, by historian and Tocqueville scholar Olivier Zunz (University of Virginia). The publisher’s description follows:

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville expert Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas.

Placing Tocqueville’s dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his life and work, Zunz traces Tocqueville’s evolution into a passionate student and practitioner of liberal politics across a trove of correspondence with intellectuals, politicians, constituents, family members, and friends. While taking seriously Tocqueville’s attempts to apply the lessons of Democracy in America to French politics, Zunz shows that the United States, and not only France, remained central to Tocqueville’s thought and actions throughout his life. In his final years, with France gripped by an authoritarian regime and America divided by slavery, Tocqueville feared that the democratic experiment might be failing. Yet his passion for democracy never weakened.

Giving equal attention to the French and American sources of Tocqueville’s unique blend of political philosophy and political action, The Man Who Understood Democracy offers the richest, most nuanced portrait yet of a man who, born between the worlds of aristocracy and democracy, fought tirelessly for the only system that he believed could provide both liberty and equality.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Religion of Delight

The rise of the Nones is one of the most discussed features of contemporary American religion. Most Nones are not atheists or agnostics. Rather, they are unaffiliated believers who follow their own spiritual paths. Often, those paths involve a kind of pantheism. Although mass-market pantheism is definitely of our own time, an elite pantheism has been part of American religious culture since at least the Transcendentalists. A new book from the University of Chicago Press, The Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness, by scholar Catherine Albanese (UC-Santa Barbara) explores the phenomenon. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

An ambitious history of desire in Anglo-American religion across three centuries.

The pursuit of happiness weaves disparate strands of Anglo-American religious history together. In The Delight Makers, Catherine L. Albanese unravels a theology of desire tying Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson to the religiously unaffiliated today. As others emphasize redemptive suffering, this tradition stresses the “metaphysical” connection between natural beauty and spiritual fulfillment. In the earth’s abundance, these thinkers see an expansive God intent on fulfilling human desire through prosperity, health, and sexual freedom. Through careful readings of Cotton Mather, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Esther Hicks, and more, Albanese reveals how a theology of delight evolved alongside political overtures to natural law and individual liberty in the United States.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wuthnow on Religion’s Power

The eminent sociologist of religion, Robert Wuthnow, must be one of the most prolific scholars alive. Now emeritus at Princeton, he continues to churn out books that are essential for understanding American religion in the 21st century. His new book, Religion’s Power: What Makes It Work (Oxford) focuses on the communal rituals that give religion its strength. Community is central to a plausible definition of religion (or at least it should be), and Wuthnow’s new book will no doubt help show why that is so. Here’s a description from the Oxford website:

What makes religion so powerful? Why does it attract so many followers? Raise so much money? Influence how people vote? The usual answer is that religion is powerful because it offers divine hope. But there is more to it than that. Why does a worship service seem powerful? Why is it powerful to hear someone testify about their faith? Who sets the rules for who can be a member and who cannot? What does religion do to reinforce gender and racial differences? Or to challenge them?

Religion’s Power takes a fresh look at these questions by examining what happens during religious rituals to signal the leader’s power, the power of the deity being worshipped, and, inadvertently, why some people in the congregation are deemed more powerful than others. Robert Wuthnow explores how religious narratives are constructed to demonstrate sincerity, how religious organizations control time by controlling space, how codified knowledge gives religious organizations power, and the small ways in which religion shapes identities and politics. Building on classical work in the sociology of religion and drawing extensively on historical and ethnographic studies, Religion’s Power foregrounds cases ranging from nineteenth-century church organ and lightning rod controversies to current clashes about border walls and racial justice. This is a book for beginning students of religion as well as for advanced scholars and for practitioners, fellow travelers, and critics who want to understand better what makes religion powerful.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Why Religion is Good for Democracy

We hear a lot these days about how religion threatens American democracy. The view almost amounts to a consensus in some parts of the academy. But that was not always the case. For most of American history, observers have thought that religion, and religious communities especially, help promote democracy. That was Tocqueville’s view, obviously, and he wrote the most insightful description of American society ever.

A new book from Princeton, Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy, by leading sociologist Robert Wuthnow, picks up the theme. Anything from Wuthnow is worth reading, and this new book looks like no exception. Here’s the description from the publishers website:

Does religion benefit democracy? Robert Wuthnow says yes. In Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy, Wuthnow makes his case by moving beyond the focus on unifying values or narratives about culture wars and elections. Rather, he demonstrates that the beneficial contributions of religion are best understood through the lens of religious diversity. The religious composition of the United States comprises many groups, organizations, and individuals that vigorously, and sometimes aggressively, contend for what they believe to be good and true. Unwelcome as this contention can be, it is rarely extremist, violent, or autocratic. Instead, it brings alternative and innovative perspectives to the table, forcing debates about what it means to be a democracy.

Wuthnow shows how American religious diversity works by closely investigating religious advocacy spanning the past century: during the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, the debates about welfare reform, the recent struggles for immigrant rights and economic equality, and responses to the coronavirus pandemic. The engagement of religious groups in advocacy and counteradvocacy has sharpened arguments about authoritarianism, liberty of conscience, freedom of assembly, human dignity, citizens’ rights, equality, and public health. Wuthnow hones in on key principles of democratic governance and provides a hopeful yet realistic appraisal of what religion can and cannot achieve.

At a time when many observers believe American democracy to be in dire need of revitalization, Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy illustrates how religious groups have contributed to this end and how they might continue to do so despite the many challenges faced by the nation.