‘I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State’ (Thomas Jefferson, ‘Letter to the Danbury Baptists’, 1 January, 1802). As you look at the United States now, how separate are church and state (or, speaking more broadly, religion and politics)?
‘Christianity is, as Friedrich Nietzsche has taught us and liberation theologians remind us, a religion especially fitted to the oppressed. It looks at the world from the perspective of those below’ (African American thinker Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!, Westminster John Knox Press, 2002 [1982], p. 35). How well has Christianity in America served the interests of ‘the oppressed’, or ‘those below’?
‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers’ (Matthew 21: 12, in the King James version of the Bible). Is contemporary American evangelicalism as dedicated to Mammon as it is to God?
Samuel Goldwyn, a legendary studio head in Hollywood’s golden era, is quoted as saying that ‘Pictures [i.e. films] are for entertainment; messages should be delivered by Western Union [originally a telegraph company].’ Is film an efficient vehicle for carrying religious messaging? Why, or why not? (If you prefer, answer this question with regard to literary fiction rather than cinema.)
Choose one of the following minority religions in the United States – a) Judaism, b) Islam, c) Hinduism, d) Wicca – and assess how it has negotiated the demands of faith on the one hand and everyday American life on the other.
‘To me, sport was a religion with its church, dogmas, service ... but above all a religious feeling’ (founder of the Modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, edited by Norbert Müller, International Olympic Committee, 2000, p. 654). Assess, in the light of de Coubertin’s remark, the proposition that sport, rather than any organised faith, is the true religion of contemporary America.
Study Activities
Our chapter assesses the mix of spiritual, social and commercial activities undertaken by one of America’s megachurches: Prestonwood, in Plano, Texas. Visit the website of another megachurch – Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago, perhaps, or Lakewood Church in Houston, or North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, etc. – and consider how it sees the role of religion in the contemporary US.
The Mormon Church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is a faith indigenous to the United States, originating in the 1820s in the visions of Joseph Smith, a farmer in New York State. Read the brief section of the Book of Mormon (1830) entitled ‘The Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith’, in which Smith describes being charged with a mission by a messenger of God named Moroni. What do you make of this narrative (its blending of references to the ancient and the contemporary, say, or its grounding in American landscape, or its eclectic account of a lost sacred book, ‘written upon gold plates’)?
‘Religion’ is a term applied awkwardly, even inappropriately, to the rich spiritual traditions of Native Americans: it runs the risk of evoking a belief system ancillary or supplementary to everyday experience, as against Indigenous faith in the sacredness of everything in the world around us. Research a number of Native rituals – the Laguna Eagle Dance, for example, or the Seven Sacred Rites of the Lakota Sioux, or the Green Corn Ceremony of the Cherokee Nation, etc. – and evaluate their power as spiritual observances and instruments for building community solidarity.
Consider how religion has been represented in American cinema. As our chapter notes, there is a stream of low-budget works produced specifically for the evangelical market. However, you may prefer to select your case studies from the cinematic mainstream. The many examples to choose from, spanning genres from epic to comedy, include William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry (1960), Tom Shadyac’s Bruce Almighty (2003), Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). Ben-Hur touches in its last sequences on Christ’s trial and crucifixion, and you might theme your set of films around retellings of Christ’s narrative itself: e.g. George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). Or you could make a double bill of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller I Confess (1953) and Tom McCarthy’s investigative drama Spotlight (2015) – two portrayals of Catholicism under stress in America.
Explore the use of religious references (potentially references to other spiritualities as well as Christian) in the work of a contemporary musician of your choice. Kanye West might present as an obvious case study (given his 2019 album, Jesus Is King), but other possibilities allowing for your creative interpretation include Beyoncé, Childish Gambino, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. How does your chosen artist appropriate and utilise items of religious discourse?
Online Resources
Divining America: Religion in American History – administered by the National Humanities Center: very handy repository of short, informative essays on religion in America (from ‘Native American Religion in Early America’ to ‘The Christian Right’)
What is Pluralism? – wonderful resource hosted by Harvard University: includes, among other things, numerous essays on each of seventeen ‘Rivers of Faith’ (from Afro-Caribbean spiritualities and the Baha’i religion to Unitarian Universalism and Zoroastrianism)
God in America – site attached to a PBS TV series of the same name (2010); while the episode links no longer work, the essays here on varied themes, from ‘The Black Church’ to the religious underpinnings of the American Civil War, are valuable
Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Colonial North America – helpful site maintained by Fordham University that includes much religiously themed material from the Puritan era to the time of American independence (e.g. archives relating to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692)
Religion & American Culture – hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture, Indiana University and helpful in bringing together wide-ranging resources on American religious history
Pew Research Center: Religion – rich archive of material on contemporary religious practices in the United States (includes sections on ‘Religion & Politics’, ‘Religion & Race’, ‘Religion & Science’, ‘Interreligious Relations’, etc.)
Hartford Institute for Religious Research – maintained by the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, in Connecticut: includes very useful databases of both megachurches and mosques in the United States
Pew Research Center: Jewish Americans in 2020 – supplementing Pew’s panoramic view of the American religious landscape, listed above, a helpful resource specifically on contemporary Judaism in the US
Religion, Race & Democracy Lab – fascinating mix of written and audio-visual resources (some global, rather than narrowly American in focus), generated by a unit in the University of Virginia which facilitates inquiries in how religion might shape contemporary social policy (e.g. on green questions, or on definitions of ‘sanctuary’)
Christian Coalition of America – as we discuss in this chapter, the Christian Coalition of America, founded by Pat Robertson in 1987, exists to support evangelicals in shaping public policy in the United States
NRB (National Religious Broadcasters) – dedicated to equipping ‘Christian Communicators’ in their mission to spread the Gospel ‘through every electronic medium available’