Transcript Document 337799

Religion and Society
in America
The Transformation of American
Religious Life
Week 9 – Lecture 2
The Transformation of
American Religious Life
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Thinking About America’s Religious Past
Issues Raised in Porterfield’s Transformation
of American Religion
Final Questions
Thinking About America’s
Religious Past
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How would you characterize religious life in
America?
Is or can America be understood as a
religious nation?
If so, what kind of religious expression?
What is the relationship between individual
religious expression and communal
commitments?
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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1950s - 60s – Growth of Post-Protestant America
Internal Critique: Tolerance escapes doctrinal issues
Example: Evangelical conservative, Carl F. H. Henry
argued, “The New Testament upholds specific
doctrinal affirmations as indispensable to genuine
Christian confession.” He further asserted, “The
modernist tendency to link Christian love, tolerance,
and liberty with theological inclusivism is therefore
discredited.” In other words, “modernists pleas for
religious tolerance were basically a strategic device
for evading the question of doctrinal fidelity.”
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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1950s - 60s – Growth of Post-Protestant
America
Internal Critique: Christian “realists” argue
that liberal theology is venturing into areas it
was unintended to frequent (psychotherapy,
Eastern mysticism, etc.)
Realists argue the results will be a
Christianity that is diffuse, plastic, and
humanistic in its own conceptions of
Christianity
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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1950s - 60s – Growth of Post-Protestant America
Internal Critique: Liberal Christianity not necessarily
sentiment or focused on making Christian living
easy (example: Harry Emerson Fosdick)
Pragmatic, “up-by-the-bootstraps” emphasis
concerning life’s ethical questions
Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive
Thinking (1952) “You can Win.”
This attitude often found expression in secular and
psychological terms
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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External forces: Vietnam War and a
historically parallel disenchantment with
western ideas/social forces in 1960s leads to
the spread of eastern religions in U.S.
“Beat Zen” of Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac and others helped with the
diffusion of Buddhists ideas in American
culture
Buddhism leveraged out of traditional
monastic settings in U.S.
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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Deeper External forces: Growing
disenchantment and disillusionment with
traditional western religion and its
anthropological claims
1960s witnessed a deconstruction of notions
of selfhood associated with American
individualism
Immolations were visible forms of Buddhist
expression which addressed these profound
existential sufferings
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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Zen Buddhism at one level is extremely goal
oriented – meditation is satori, or
enlightenment
The emergence of Buddhism in the United
States developed in relationship to competing
forms of personalism associated with
Christian theology
Dalai Lama in 1990s publishes The Art of
Happiness which he asserts “The very motion
of our life is towards happiness.”
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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External forces: Conceptions of gender and
its relationship to society breed a form of selfconsciousness that is detached from religious
claims
First generation of feminists in America
claimed equal rights, suffrage, social equality,
and right to contribute to society because of
God-given moral instincts inherent in their
nature
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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Later generations of feminists would reject these
types of “naturalist arguments” in order to attain
reforms by arguing “womanhood” was a social
construction
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystic (1963)
popularized this assertion
In light of this new development or perspective,
religious claims were examined because religion
deals with the limits of human experience and
humane behavior and transcending those limits.
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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Rosemary Radford Ruether, for example, led
the way in focusing this new critique on the
Christian Church, holding up an egalitarian
model of Church and arguing the virtue and
integrity of any religion could be measured by
its promotion of a woman’s full humanity
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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External forces: Academic study of religion
promotes idea or understanding of religion as
a universal phenomenon, which in turn,
advances an appreciation of non-Protestant
and non-Western traditions
Democratic forces at work which call into
question the structure, not necessarily the
content, of religious claims
Tendency to divorce of religious experience
from moral virtue
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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Traditional Christian theology becomes reconfigured
in light of these changes
Example: Paul Tillich – argues that “sin” was
“existential estrangement,” not violation of one’s
neighbor, disobedience to God, or transgression of
moral law
Such tendency toward personal introspection,
helped traditional western religious claims lead to
what Christopher Lasch has described a “culture of
narcissism” which devalues others through its lack
of curiosity and impoverishes one’s personal life
Porterfield’s Transformation of
American Religion
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Fusion of spiritual idealism and pragmatic
concern in American religious thought and
expression more and more became detached
from its Protestant base in America which has
fueled individualistic expressions of religious
life void of metaphysical speculation
Final Questions: ????