The Transformation of American Religion

Abstract

Abstract Religious life in the U.S. underwent a profound change in the late twentieth century as divisions between different religious groups softened, exposure to various religions increased, and Americans experienced growing interest in personalized forms of religious experience. The surge of interest in personalized forms of spirituality coincided with the decline in the mainstream Protestant institutions that had once dominated American religion and shaped American culture. It also coincided with the criticism of American arrogance, the debacle in Vietnam, and the defeat of victory culture. Nevertheless, even as patriotic optimism and the authority of Protestant institutions declined, Protestant influence persisted in the celebration of individual religious experience, and in the tendency to place the authority of individual experience above that of established institutions and official hierarchies. Late twentieth‐century American spirituality reflected the Protestant tendency to individualism underlying American religious life, even as it also reflected the mainstreaming of Catholicism in American culture, and an unprecedented interest in, and freedom for, other religions. The book traces some of the antecedents of this recent awakening to the spirituality of American Transcendentalism in the nineteenth century and, before that, to New England Puritanism and its investment in the Holy Spirit's power in individual life. In its examination of these historical precedents, the book argues that the persistent tendency toward individualism in American religious life has often been affirmed and promoted as an effective source of benevolence, social responsibility, and reform.

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